Archived copies of the article:
I suppose what’s needed is to look at data from other countries and see if the data is similar. They’ve found a correlation but, as anybody remotely versed in science should know, correlation does not imply causation
Removed by mod
There are studies that show the tactile nature of books and hand written notes improves retention and encourages more thought, so it would seem likely that going more digital would have negative impacts on education.
Even that grifter Sam Altman was talking about how he takes notes a while back.
Problem is its a balance. kids need to learn without technology but they also have to learn to responsibly use technology. In addition they need to be prepared to learn remotely. I actually think that at least by high school but as early as possible it would be good for every student to learn from home once a week. They will then be prepared for something like another covid as well as the modern work world.
Surely more blame for dumber kids falls on the Republican push to remove actual science from textbooks, than the format in which they are delivered.
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Some one has PAID them to do this. They’re a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they’ve even had the majority of the time… and they took just as much of a part in the “dismantling the public education system”.
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They’ll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
Teachers are a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We’ll all run out of money!
You know, it wasn’t always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside’s out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we’ll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand \~ Bo Burnham
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
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Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it’s actively enraging.
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu’d windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It’s not merely tech that’s to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don’t have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends’ dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - “A hacker put a virus on there”), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
There are even people writing ‘software’ who don’t know that.
I’m so fucking happy I’m not the only one who has noticed that.
jesus christ we’re so fucked.
Wait I don’t get it. How is this possible?
I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.
The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.
I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t a dig at Gen Z. For as long as we’ve been testing, which is like 50 years I think, the new generation has outperformed the previous one and that’s a good thing.
Having this generation underperform means that we have failed them and we need to figure out exactly how we fucked up. The evidence is really strong that technology in the classroom is a significant contributor.
in the classroom specifically though? did they control for screen time outside of the classroom in the study?
It’s closer to 100 years at this point.
See also Goodhart’s law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”, which may not be completely relevant here, but is likely a factor (probably a lesser one than the systematic underfunding and other political meddling in US schools).
-
Correlation
-
Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
But sure, also, they’ve replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
-
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it’s just US thing
Nope this conclusion is general everywhere. Replacing textbooks and pen and paper for tablets and digital technology has damaging effects on the learning process. We as a species are not built to learn by clicking and swiping on screens. We learn by touching, feeling and writing on coarse paper. Learning is an incredibly complex process and attempting to simplify it only leads to superficial gains as opposed to real knowledge.
Now when learning 3d geometry for example, people think that buying a bunch of 3d shapes they can touch and bend and visualize easier is better. But what they don’t realize is the effort to visualize the shape with ones mind’s eye is far better for the learning process even if it takes practice and it is slower.
This race for immediate results in everything created the impression that learning a few things quickly and applying them without actually understanding their depth is better than slowing things down and building knowledge. But the curve must go up up at all costs!
What a silly naturalist falacy. Were not built by anyone and evolutionary speaking pen writing is not any more special than writing on a digital screen. All of the science here is unconvincing at best and fake bullshit at worst.
It’s entirely a skill issue.
It could be a skill issue but if that’s the case I’d argue that introducing digital learning should have been a slower process. Anyway there are countless studies showing the differences between typing and handwriting (like this one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/) but I also have a story. Years ago I had a friend who was doing different neurological studies and she measured once the difference in the brain when writing vs typing. She said it was night and day. When writing the brain lit up almost completely, because handwriting engages so many centers for so many motions and memory recall etc. Typing she said looked almost the same as pressing a single button over and over. There wasn’t much engaging of other motions. I found it very interesting. This was years ago before social media, I don’t think smartphones were a thing yet much less tablets.
I am not saying that there is no place in learning for digital technology. It would be stupid to ignore them. But some things are better learned with pen and paper.
I feel like that’s still an implementation issue not the fact of that “digital is worse” and yeah you’re probably right - the roll out should be better. Using proprietary apple devices and shit by multi trillion budget enterprises (countries) is stupid. The government should task entire governed system with years of preparation and diligent implementation with optimized ebook software and curriculum distribution.
This is entirely a skill issue not a technology / medium issue.
Digital is clearly here to stay and superior form of information exchange - it’s literally called IT. To say that we should go back to pen, paper and text books is just pure incompetence. I speak from experience myself as I am a published author but I’m never writing an educational book again when websites exists - physical textbooks are incredibly archaic and should be abandoned entirely and I’ll die on this hill.
I am a scientist myself and I cannot see how you can solve maths and physics problems on a tablet. Maybe I am incompetent and lack the imagination but the physical limitations of these devices just make them cumbersome at best. Again I am not arguing against tablets computers etc. Just that some things are better learned with pen and paper. There are far fewer distractions and you get a much better picture when you have 3 pieces of paper in front of you with all the steps you took to get to where you are now in your solution than swiping back on the tablet. I am obviously biased but it just makes more sense to me.
Writing an article absolutely digital I would never argue against it. But actual learning is better analogue in my opinion.
And then there are the issues you mention about forcing people to use a certain brand for their education. Pen and paper is for everyone. Easily available and ready to use. I can see your argument for textbooks and here it is where a tablet could be useful (provided is distraction free). Load it up with textbooks and go. But even then my bias makes me skeptical. There are mental mechanisms to remember information from books. One can remember the placement on a page, the place in the book. In a digital version that constantly changes depending on how you read that.
Why does it have to be a tablet? Most physics and math probles are already solved in ipython notebooks. Seeing immediate rich features is crazy good for learning.
As for book unique benefits - yes but that can be replicated with software very well if not better. For example having an infinite board is incredible for mind mapping and just as an efficient work space.
We could argue day and night about benefits and capabilities of each form but reality is that software is incredibly important in our society today and yet people are still mostly software illiterate. Even if tablets and computers were worse than pens and textbooks it would still be more valuable to use them to expand general computer use skills.
Why is this getting down voted? This whole thread is fully of techno nerds who seem to be under 30 and grew up in the generation this article is talking about and smoking copium to make themselves feel better for being part of the less capable generation.
“But kids dumb” says the lead-brained
Bro, I’ve been around quite a few Gen Z adults. A few are solid, but the average, has way more anxiety, struggles to stay off their phone, has difficulty understanding many basic concepts.
Not saying the generation is lost, but damn are they starting further behind. This is a fairly broad sampling, both high school educated through people with graduate degrees.
Everyone knows the real problem was moving from clay tablets to papyrus. So unnatural.
It is not the same thing and you know it but you do you!
Why do you think other countries did it right? Does the article say that kids in other countries are smarter?
No, common sense says that.
Common sense isn’t real, it’s knowledge we take for granted … when it happens to be correct, which often enough it isn’t.
Norway did the same thing, and have now swapped back to books. I don’t think any other country did it right.
lol, I mostly ditched textbooks in high school not to support technology, but because I was tired of carrying around huge books in my backpack, the bulk of which I wouldn’t even need on a daily basis. Lo and behold, even 14 years ago, I could find pdf versions of most of my textbooks, some of which were offered officially from the publisher for free via the school.
The problems are the enshittification of the internet, the attention economy and the superb lack of American educational system, not technology itself. Almost every university in the world is filled with the sounds of clacking keys from laptops, this isn’t 1984.
Technology is part of it. For example, handwriting notes is proven to be better for information retention compared to typing.
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn’t changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
I have a few college “textbooks” from the 1930’s. They’re small
Did you not have a locker?
My high school didn’t have lockers. I assume mine isn’t the only one.
My highschool, which I graduated mid 2010s, didn’t have lockers.
We had gym lockers, which was just to put our stuff for that one gym period, it wasn’t “our own”.
So, no. Not all highschools have lockers.
My high school, among other interesting design decisions, didn’t have any lockers in the academic areas. So you had a locker that was way over by the gyms, or out by the shop classes, or if you were lucky in the cafeteria (because then you could at least stash your lunch in it).
The administration also seemed to be completely mystified as to why everyone carried around huge backpacks.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the text books that are the issue but rather the physical act of writing your own notes.
I think it’s that now people type all their notes into a laptop rather than write it down.
Yeah, makes sense. I “solved” that issue by still doing handwritten notes but then scanning them and converting them to digital notes afterwards.
That being said, I grew up in the 90s so I was never deprived of the skill of handwriting as a kid. It wasn’t until apple made touchscreens popular that shit kinda went downhill
