I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left.
In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.
>I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.
I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.
That's not using tech that you're describing here. You're talking about literally learning some basic computer skills (such as word processor, excel, reading email, some basic website building, use printer, and some amount of programming)
For those, obviously you need a computer and completely agree that those are important skills to learn... But you maybe need to spend 1h/week during last 2 years of middle school on those at the computer lab (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
But for any other course such as Math, English (or whichever primary language in your country), second languages, history, etc. : that's where using tech is a mistake
A bit of tech is ok, but it cannot be "everyone does their homework and read lesson on a iPad/Chromebook"
> (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon Trail.
Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition? Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python? Should kids be forced to use physical copies of newspapers and journal articles instead of learning how to look things up in a database?
I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but it seems wrongheaded to completely remove things that are relevant skills for most 21st century careers.
> Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition?
I don't think there's anything wrong with showing kids some videos every now and then. I still have fond memories of watching Bill Nye.
> Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python?
No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop an intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
>> Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python?
> No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop an intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
I would think that it would make sense to introduce Python in the same way that calculators, and later graphing calculators are introduced, and I believe (just based on hearing random anecdotes) that this is already the case in many places.
I'm a big proponent of the gradual introduction of abstraction, which my early education failed at, and something Factorio and some later schooling did get right, although the intent was rarely communicated effectively.
First, learn what and why a thing exists at a sufficiently primitive level of interaction, then once students have it locked in, introduce a new layer of complexity by making the former primitive steps faster and easier to work with, using tools. It's important that each step serves a useful purpose though. For example, I don't think there's much of a case for writing actual code by hand and grading students on missing a semicolon, but there's probably a case for working out logic and pseudocode by hand.
I don't think there's a case for hand-drawing intricate diagrams and graphs, because it builds a skill and level of intimacy with the drawing aspect that's just silly, and tests someone's drawing capability rather than their understanding of the subject, but I suppose everyone has they're own opinion on that.
That last one kind of crippled me in various classes. I already new better tools and methods existed for doing weather pattern diagrams or topographical maps, but it was so immensely tedious and time-consuming that it totally derailed me to the point where I'd fail Uni labs despite it not being very difficult content, only because the prof wanted to teach it like the 50s.
Fwiw calculators were banned in my school. Only started to use one in university - and there it also didnt really help with anything as the math is already more complex
Those are great examples. Not familiar with Desmos, but 3Blue1Brown style animations are great.
The problem is that people seem to want to go to extremes. Either go all out on doing everything in tablets or not use any technology in education at all.
its not just work skills, its also a better understanding that is gained from things such as the maths animations you mentioned.
Until most kids are about 12 - 14 years old, they're learning much more basic concepts than you're describing. I don't think anyone is trying to take intro to computer science out of high schools or preventing an advanced student younger than that from the same.
I would rather a teacher have to draw a concept on a board than have each student watch an animation on their computer. Obviously, the teacher projecting the animation should be fine, but it seems like some educators and parents can't handle that and it turns into a slippery slope back to kids using devices.
So for most classrooms full of students in grades prior to high school, the answer to your list of (presumably rhetorical) questions is "Yes."
I am pretty skeptical about the value of learning to build websites. I think it is too tempting for students to devote significant time to something that is not foundational knowledge and where they won't get any valuable feedback anyway.
It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes, etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a captive audience that could have helped me refine my arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time on things like careless grammatical errors.
Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel, and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical thinking.
re: Anki. It is not as optimized but you can do SRS with physical flash-cards.
* Have something like 5 bins, numbered 1-5.
* Every day you add your new cards to bin nr. 1 shuffle and review. Correct cards go to bin nr. 2, incorrect cards stay in bin nr. 1.
* Every other day do the same with bin nr. 1 and 2, every forth with bin nr. 1, 2 and 3 etc. except incorrect cards go in the bin below. More complex scheduling algorithms exist.
* In a classroom setting the teacher can print out the flashcards and hand out review schedule for the week (e.g. Monday: add these 10 new cards and review 1; Tuesday: 10 new cards and review box 1 and 2; Wednesday: No new cards and and review box 1 and 3; etc.)
* If you want to be super fancy, the flash card publisher can add audio-chips to the flash-cards (or each box-set plus QR code on the card).
What for? I've been writing computer programs and documentation since 1969 and I can't touch type. I've never felt enough pressure to do it. I can still type faster than I can think. When I'm writing most of my time is spent thinking not tapping the keys.
I learned how to touch type in middle school with school software like Mario teaches typing and Mavis beacon. I peaked around 80wpm and I was faster than 90% of my classmates.
A few years ago I invested in a rectilinear split keyboard which has a slightly different layout, but much more ergonomic. But interestingly I can now type 120wpm+.
I think touch typing is very similar to learning penmanship (and I guess cursive to an extent). If I followed the exact rules I learned about handwriting in school, I'd have much more legible handwriting but I'd write so much more slowly. Instead I my own way, which lets me get my thoughts out quickly, albeit not as neat as "correct" penmanship. Fortunately typing is much more lenient on this front.
> Although [touch typing] refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys ... the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys.
The strict definition of touch typing reminds me of how when I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that there’s a specific way of holding chopsticks. You gotta hold the top one like a pencil, and rest the bottom one between the crook of your fingers and your ring finger, and make sure they’re the same length and the bottom one isn’t moving and you’re just using it as a base to press against.
And then I became an adult and visited China and met actual Chinese immigrants and married a native chopstick holder. And half of them don’t hold chopsticks “the real way”. Somehow it all works out. As long as you can eat a peanut with them, you pass.
As an adult I learned that there’s also a whole lot of prescriptive bullshit that basically nobody pays attention to. The strict definition of touch typing seems like one of those. If you can type without looking at the keys, you can touch type.
With such a strict definition the OP’s comment becomes basically meaningless. They could be referring to using index fingers only. They could be using an alternative keyboard layout. They could mostly be using left-hand only. Pretty much any WPM between 1 and 200 seems possible with the statement: “I don’t keep my fingers on home row in between key presses.”
In many cases the understanding of the term "touch typing" isn't just "typing without looking" but a very specific way of doing so.
You should be able to type without looking at your keyboard.
But the specific 5 finger arrangement taught often as "tough typing" isn't needed for that, some common issues:
- it being taught with an orthogonal arrangement of your hand to they keyboard, that is nearly guaranteed to lead to carpal tunnel syndrome if you have a typical keyboard/desk setup. Don't angle your wrist when typing.
- Pinky fingers of "average" hands already have issues reaching the right rows, with extra small or extra short hands they often aren't usable as intended with touch typing.
I guess this is technically correct in the same way that stenographers and highly-ergonomic alternative-layout keyboard users also don’t “touch type” according to a strict definition.
If you’re capable of typing quick enough to publicly take meeting notes, then it’s fine. But if you can’t, I could see it being professionally embarrassing in the same way that not understanding basic arithmetic could be professionally embarrassing.
That’s the kind of (in)capability we’re talking about when it comes to Gen Z. Like not knowing ctrl-c ctrl-v.
Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write than type
> Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write than type
Recordings are one of the worse ways to store knowledge for later reference, except in usual scenarios. They're very awkward to work with. The only plus is their cheap an easy to make.
Trust me, I work at a company where "documentation" is often an old meeting recording (and sometimes you have to count yourself lucky to even have that).
In general, mastery involves taking the basic mechanics of something and making them completely automatic, freeing up cognitive resources for higher level processes. Expert pianists don't need to look down at their hands when sight reading.
Fast typing is not about throughput, it's about latency. If I only needed to type fast enough to produce the 125-something lines of code I get into production per week, I would be able to work at a word a minute. Alas, that's not how that works.
IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought typing method and not just "typing without looking at the keyboard".
In general key arrangement traces back to physical limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.
But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if you are typing a lot.
The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something close to it.
As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending on left/right hand :/
Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small, or otherwise unusual...
Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a lot, some people have just some very touch typing incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).
Anatomy might matter if you're talking about world champion speed typing. I don't think it matters for just being competent (I say this as a man with short and fat fingers)
Touch typing is not a basic tech skill, and also pretty useless on the long term. I expect dictation to take over very soon, as finally voice recognition is getting to be usable, and commonplace.
> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy
They certainly will at home.
> I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
In which country?
I live in Mexico and even here you really need to go to the poorest families to find a home without a laptop. Even those families have multiple smartphones. Today a smartphone is not a good replacement for a laptop but maybe in a couple of years it will be.
Even if they have a computer at home, that doesn't mean they're practicing the relevant skills. Touch typing, word processing, researching a topic online, etc. are things that need deliberate practice. Based on my own experience, using a computer at home 99% of the time meant playing video games.
The following article suggests that in the United States, about 59% of lower income households have a laptop or desktop computer, compared to 92% of upper income households.
> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports, channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that every generation will know more and be "better" than the previous generation.
A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and have no idea where to change their instagram password.
So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids, who can't use computers anymore.
Boomers are split between a demographic that is very computer literate, having worked in/around science and tech for decades, and a demo that isn't remotely literate and may not even be online.
The latter is a fairly small demo though - supposedly around a third.
The split is more by education than by age.
Kids can use computers - phones - as app appliances, but they don't understand computers.
Peak literacy is young Gen X and older millennials.
> They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.
At least around 370 BC, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus discussing the invention of writing.
Thamus:
> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
> Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.
The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.
Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.
Is it possible that the inherent inefficiency of handwriting in recording information is what facilitates cognitive development? Writing information by hand requires the writer to parse the information being written and become skilled in understanding the most important aspects of the information to write since it is impractical to handwrite everything verbatim as it comes to mind.
Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.
>Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.
Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet. It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism". "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone tablets, we're a modern country". Just expensive nonsense in the absence of educational standards and physical development.
Meanwhile today Dutch kids get these extremely large screens at the front of the class to stare at all day for every little thing, the day's schedule, everything. Huge screens, some stretch nearly the entire width of the classroom, with about a third of desks within just three meters of it. All day.
I do think the general purpose screens of today are doing a disservice for education. There are too many possible distractions a child isn't prepared to resist yet. But it could enable more advanced workflow for personalized learning.
I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The bottom of the k has different needs.
Tech can save you from a bad educational environment. I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning. From visualizing linear algebra and analytic geometry problems to piracy.
If anything, the teachers need to improve their tech literacy.
There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.
As dangerous as this sounds, with guidance, I think it could be done. Government and public institutions love to lock the environment into something safe but useless for further learning and adaptability
Using tech also meant you got an iPad because otherwise teachers and IT would be overwhelmed. That the kids were already much more apt at using such devices was secondary.
In the context of general education I can understand the strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison, you need to give your users freedom.
An iPad absolutely doesn't make kids "better at technology", if anything it makes them worse because it just wraps everything up in a braindead simple package for consumption.
Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental level.
I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide those details from the end user.
And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in. But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes anyone more technologically adept.
20 year olds are bewildered when they see me opening a computer and replacing stuff instead of bringing it to a shop. "Where did you learn to do that?" It used to be the only way, everybody with a computer did it. The strange thing is that it's still possible but they don't think about it.
> After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.
I have several friends who work in education.
At one point there were computer labs in school, there was education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).
All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is, in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a net positive.
> EdTech
To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and faculties interactions with it is/are.
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.
Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.
I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers.
No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
If you’re smart AI saves you time getting to something you could probably achieve anyway. If you’re… not smart… then it will be a necessary crutch for you to get through life.
I can see the angle for making sure kids start using it before they develop the skills to become independent of it.
You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully. You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up questions.
I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.
I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.
It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you, but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult to make the investment worth it.
Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.
As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?
> It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response.
It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating such exercise would take and what should be the tools or sources to verify the output but that might be helpful excersise.
You also need to understand the limits of AI and that it has limits that a human that gives you usually correct and authoritative answers does not have.
I think it comes easily to the sort of people who comment here. Moat people have a very vague understanding of computers in general.
Are these supposed to be the "skilled" prompts? This just reads as a basic conversation and not as particularly well-written or well-defined prompts. So far everything I've seen about prompting "skills" has just come down to being able to articulate and critically think a bit.
It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.
The problem is that the task you've defined "split up a task to create a chain of agents" has changed dramatically in just the last six months, nevermind the last two years.
You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology if you try to make primary/secondary education too topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and how to think critically without ever touching a Large Language Model.
AI “workflows” share the same addictive characteristics of web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become addicted to the slot machines.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
Had a buddy who works at a prestigious university teaching film history tell me their big boss is basically forcing all classes including his ones on film history to incorporate AI education in some way. So silly.
It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the children don't give a crap about the technology. They will generally make the best of whatever resources they have and procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames because they make money. Ain't no different than how your local building or environmental inspector finds himself screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
> I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
This reminds me of Harvey Cragon's intro to computer architecture textbook...
When it introduces Harvard vs. Von Neumann architectures, it doesn't invent some dumb RISC computer to illustrate the difference... No... it makes you learn the actual von Neumann machine! Also Conrad Zuse Z machine.
Cragon's argument is that students will not learn the concept of engineering trade-offs, if presented with a clean "textbook" architecture.
I hated MIX for various reasons, it's sort of in-between simple and kludgy.
[0] Cragon was professor at University of Texas Austin ca 1980. Also the architect of TI's ASC in the 1960s.
>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can do your learning for you. The need for memorization of essential math identities (like multiplication tables and use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.
I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.
> You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths
You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.
> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising
They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
If AI is still too stupid to show people how to work with it, and to notice their lacks and anticipate their needs, it can't have become that indispensably useful.
The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.
Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.
And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.
This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"
That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an electronics engineer, in R & D).
For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.
AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.
You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
blaming discipline is how we got here. these devices are engineered by teams of psychologists to maximize engagement. expecting a 12 year old to resist what grown adults with PhDs can't is just setting kids up to fail. removing the distraction source is the rational move.
Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.
~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4.
there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field
no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
You assert a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials:
Screen readers take longer.
Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14
Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
"screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online.
The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.
Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.
I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
This is written with what feels like the peak understanding of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!"
>Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject
What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids
Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.
The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.
Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at advertisements and fake addiction research these companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
> Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to explain why this doesn't happen to men.
> Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups compared with the middle-income group (38.5%).
And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't happen to Black women.
> Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference in obesity prevalence among the income groups.
It also needs to explain why no statistically significant result happens for Asian women
> Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%) income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was only significant for white women.
Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience, Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they become richer, and White women get massively more convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but stayed the same.
That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this convenience angle.
I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks out, at least according to media reports about his family. Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption, seems hasty.
For a random individual plucked out of general population, you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for individuals that effectively determine what actual average is to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a proxy, but it is not hasty.
I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play out.
Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educational lectures.
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
> The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
I'm close-reading Aristotle in a Meetup group where we compare many translations and indulge the controversies in translating the Greek.
When I've tried to get LLMs to bear on a topic, they can't even relate to the concept I'm looking at, instead generating a summary of the easiest parts. LLM is basically a beginner student.
Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.
> And that much of Silicon Valley’s leadership (and the world’s rich, for that matter) send their own kids to Montessori, Steiner, and other educational institutions that prefer pencil and paper to digital tablet, conversations to smartphones, modeling clay and outdoor imagineering to online gaming.
> In their book, ‘Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,’ educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: “It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”
It’s probably more nuanced than this. Would I have let my kids use Facebook in the height of its popularity. Absolutely. It was fun, engaging and user driven.
Now it’s just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and boomers posting in groups.
I don’t even think it’s appropriate to call it social media anymore. It’s barely social.
Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.
Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.
So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens?
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
You feel pain? Doctor says it's probably in your head because statistically you shouldn't. -- Based on countless true stories.
Data is map, not terrain. It can explain some of the quantifiable world, not all of it. Common sense can also fill some of the gaps, some of the time. And there remains plenty still that's too entropic for our grasp. Waiting for data to speak is not always the best move. Heck, it might even sometimes be the worst. It seems this is a lesson we collectively keep forgetting over and over, despite the endless list of data-backed "facts" that, in hindsight, it turns out we were wrong or short-sighted about. Apparently, that too is human nature.
The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)
"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.
No, but I believe that science and quantifying the specific danger leads to better policies than going on vibes. For instance, laws to require safe storage are based on data quantifying reductions in harm to children [1]
Data beats vibes, even when vibes are qualitatively correct. I’m surprised this is surprising.
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman have much involvement in engineering after their products took off. After a certain point they were no longer engineers of their products.
There is the Stanford Persuasion Lab study on infinite scroll... rather than take it as a cautionary finding, tech has embraced the infinite scroll. Because incentives.
No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than phonics" crowd.
So it’s kind of an appeal to authority, without any evidence of authority?
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge, and their actions should not be used to inform one’s own opinions or social policy on the topic.
There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a favor and read it (pay attention to the population of studies —- many use adults in their 30’s or older as proxies for children).
You can absolutely find real data supporting your position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
No need for the leading question/bait when you know what they’re saying. No one said they’re experts on childhood development, they’re saying “it’s telling they won’t even let their kids use these services when they swear it’s safe for our kids to do so.”
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely addictive to kids who are none the wiser.
> What does that tell us?
It tells us three things:
1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature.
2. Get them to read books as an alternative.
3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.
I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes', but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this crap.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called having healthy boundaries.
Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere outside your house?
Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and generally require proof of age if there is any doubt. Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could do was say "no."
3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded equally to every other parental unit.
You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and "government enacts universal age verification surveillance" are not the only two options.
Also a good reason for why one shouldn’t have one’s child raised through the policies of people who don’t want kids. If they don’t have any skin in the game…
The key message that poster before tried to convey was
that they themselves do not believe into their own products,
not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This
ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using
it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be
quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while
riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless
video - this is quite addictive.
It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what technology companies market to the masses and what the people behind those technologies actually endorse for their families
You are assuming they all act as wise and with the foresight of Jobs.
Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on the relation of people and technology. The others are just finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.
> Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'
This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.
Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.
That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However, especially the US, few people will parent their children in a way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools, which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the children. The community with do nothing since they view the parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.
>Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is only an advisor to the leader of some some small little organization called the world economic forum says you and your children should be kept “happy” with drugs and video games.
Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your children “worthless” children.
I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.
When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you.
The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive!
Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.
In my university, probably because the CS department at the time was an underfunded offshoot of the faculty of Mathematics, we basically didn't have access to computers (and I didn't have a laptop of my own).
We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had taken "shortcuts".
I used to write code in a spiral notebook when I didn't have access to a computer. It was also hard to code on a computer in those days when the output device was an ASR-33, or a screen was 24x80.
> When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
That is a) a BS claim and b) wouldn't be a feature, on average, given the quality of college lectures.
It seems fairly clear that manual note taking help with learning, over using a computer, but overblown claims like this do more damage than good in convincing people to do the right thing.
This is hilarious. This comment would imply that the people who got multiple degrees and were very successful through their careers (that would be everybody in my generation: we started in 1980) learning from lecturers scribbling with chalk on a blackboard, writing it all down with pen on paper, somehow had a less effective education than modern students using modern tools. Yeah, looks all around, remembers training youngs, no, I don't think so... Actually sometimes it was bad because people, but sometimes it was fucking awesome. I lectured undergrad mathematics at UF and ASU using chalk and a blackboard and to this day that was some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Especially for the upper division classes, my students paid attention. They asked questions. It was glorious.
I attended a university where that wasn't a problem. Prof Daniel Goodstein, for example, turned his lectures into a video series "The Mechanical Universe". But, frankly, I liked his in-person lectures using the blackboard and chalk better.
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason.
Procrastination is hell of a drug.
I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.
Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.
I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.
It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty obvious that screens, such as iPads, are bad for kids' education. The homework on apps like i-Ready is mostly just crappy multiple-choice questions. I fail to see how that actually helps students. They should be challenged and kept in their discomfort zones. They need to experience problem-solving in all its forms and get feedback from teachers on how they solve a problem. They need to practice writing and long-form analysis, and get detailed feedbacks from teachers - things i-Ready just can’t provide. The funny thing is, so many Americans blame the system for inequality while embracing Jo Boalers' nonsense. Yet they flock to screens like moths to a flame, not realizing that wealthy families will just pay for private tutors while the kids without those resources get left behind, when enforcing hgher education standards could be arguably the cheapest thing to do[1]. How's that working out for equality, let alone equity?
[1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.
I know it's brutal, but my kids were raised with iPads, PS3-5, computers, age inappropriate Minecraft and youtube, all kids of gadgets and turned out ok, already earning money (in tech of course) - one is in UX / product building, another more on the core math/theorem side.
Protecting kids from tech is like raising your kids in a glass house, yes they are fine while inside but then what?
Your kids were raised on those before predatory people and unscrupulous corporations learned how to take advantage of them at scale.
To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so they are not targeted.
I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.
Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom.
e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet).
My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.
> I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.
I went to school a million years ago, but IIRC we kept our textbooks in the classroom until middle school (7th grade for me). Maybe one textbook might go home with math homework or an English project. For my kid, they would usually just send worksheets home; which is ok, but if you wanted to reference not on the sheet, too bad. Post-covid, there's a lot more dependence on google classroom with all that comes with it (but maybe that's also how the upper grades were working anyway)
E-readers with textbooks loaded could work, but hopefully the textbooks are tuned for the medium.
Anyway, isn't a heavy backpack a secret fitness program???
Anecdotal, but I do not think e-ink displays are as good for reading or benefiting from handwriting as an actual purely physical medium. They just don't have the affordances of durably occupying physical space. I say this as someone who has done quite a bit of review of the literature and has a kindle and a Supernote.
Yeah, I think eink displays are the happy medium for tech for kids. And even then, you should limit the capabilities to be effectively the same as working with paper.
Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give internet access. Let the device sync at school with required books and assignments.
Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's the extent of what they should have.
Ereaders (Kindle scribe specifically) has been a huge discovery! I cannot make any claims, but my daughter draws on it, writes on it, does homeworks on it and reads so many books on it (she is 7).
She liked it as soon as she saw it. I decided to gave her my Scribe,which I deeply miss.
It's essentially a notebook and a book reader.
You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs can only have notes on the side).
I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets please.
It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
The luckiest were us that got into adulthood during the 90's. Traditional studying at school and full digital afterwards. The last generation. That's the cause of the reverse Flynn effect: diminishing IQ of 18-yo's after 1995.
I don’t teach in a public school but we use tech to a very limited extent in my k-9 school grades 7-9 will be taking a computer skills course next year. We currently teach touch typing to grades 8 and 9. Everything else is pencil and paper. I think present day children are exposed to tech in non productive way ie mobile devices.
The number of kids who don’t know how to operate a mouse and keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult for some. It’s quite interesting honestly.
Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.
The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.
Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.
Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its uses :) )
A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
I really like the reMarkable tablets, but they are still not quite the replacement for a paper notebook that I would like. I think the main problem is that the refresh-rate/software is slow enough that trying to "page through your notebook" to find specific notes is a grueling experience. The alternative is to just make lots of one page notes, but things still become difficult to find (not to mention you add a lot of stress coming up with good names for stuff...)
It's the same in Norway, and news paper chronicles are going as far as saying things like "Now that we learned that we went to far, what do we do with the generation of kids we experimented on?". Food for thought.
I don’t know why the headline was changed for the link, but the headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are slippery things.
> whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based
There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom.
But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
Why do you think children will learn anything from a remark on a specific problem? If it were that simple, teaching would be easy. (Notice that teaching smart kids is easy).
Much of education requires making errors until you get it right a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors. Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.
> But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high confidence and believe it?
It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even more so if you ask it to use the internet etc.
But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself.
It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination rate.
If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.
I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.
I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
> With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.
Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.
Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.
It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home.
The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds.
We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness?
This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
yes, the distraction is real. How many times i was busy with my day job on some task when for some reason i had to wait for something (coworker reply, build to complete, approval to be granted) and automatically opened HN on in a new tab... 10 minutes of blackout and i'm on some random wikipedia page for no obvious reason related to my day job task... And i'm 40+ year old adult. Im scared to think what this level of distraction means for undeveloped brain.
The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.
That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.
The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.
And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.
Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.
Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.
To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad.
For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.
The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.
>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
I never said that AI should replace all teachers. AI can help provide more teaching labor (more teaching capacity). Every child can have a personalized tutor in addition to human teachers.
classic pendulum swing. we went all-in on screens without checking if they actually helped, now we're overcorrecting the other way. the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle but that doesn't make for a good headline.
Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books.
Laptops and tables are, as it turns out, not so cheap either. They need to be fixed or replaced at an alarming rate, and they lay claim to a much larger part of a school budget than books ever did. That is part of the reason that we revert back to pen, paper and books in Norway. First for 1-4 grade, but it will be push further up the grades as we go, I think.
Dot-matrix impact printers are still being sold and still have the lowest cost per printed page. The quality sucks, but for draft-only content (like LLM answers) that you're scribbling on it's not an issue. B/W laser printers are not too far behind though, just avoid brands like HP that gouge you on toner cartridges.
It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
100% support this. Computers in school -- except at specific times for specific purposes -- are a distraction. My teen told me he and his friends were watching Hulu in class on their Chromebooks because while the school district had locked down access to Netflix, Disney, etc., they forgot Hulu :/ The students also figured out ways to share links to game sites by using shared Google docs and using URLs that bypassed the school's controls.
The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in classroom education is essential at the lower grades in particular.
My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and she'd do remarkably better.
Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class is specifically about using computers.
Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
This is all downstream of the backlash against social media and AI, and it's attacking the symptom rather than treating it IMO. You don't need to abandon digital tools entirely, you need to control how they're used in the classroom.
Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts.
Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.
It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
Education research is really low quality. Like so many other fields in social sciences, the results rarely generalize beyond the direct findings, and only support the hypotheses in the mildest way. It cannot robustly guide decision making.
The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or point at differences in the stimuli, something which should obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking, article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.
Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better studies. The average education research study is several levels below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.
Yep. Part of the reason is the ethical problems with experimenting on children.
And part of the problem is that there is a ton of money to be made in education, so there is a lot of incentive to create or cherry pick data promoting one’s preferred (most profitable) policies.
Please don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments to HN [1]. You're welcome here, but only if you write in your own voice [2]. The community feels strongly about this.
It's significantly cheaper! A physical book can be loaned endlessly, as long as the binding holds up, and even if it gets damaged, it can be repaired. The contracts for ebooks at libraries often limit it to X number of circulations before the library has to pay again (this is how Overdrive/Libby works), or they have to pay per circulation (Hoopla). It's ludicrous.
Fully agree.
I went to school in Germany and many of our textbooks were free there.
Sometimes you would get a textbook that is already >= 10 years and out of shape but who cares?
Especially the basic knowledge does not change often.
Buying all these textbooks new every year feels like a scam to me as they are then only used for one year by the pupil.
Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price.
Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year.
Still, they were often seen as optional.
You could sell them after too. Now the book is the same price but it's a 1 year license. The platform we used was so restricted that it would block access the moment your network connection dropped.
Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied the books and they were the ones that the previous grade used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then they'd be replaced with new.
I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these days! We need to discipline them harder!"
My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in schools.
I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world.
I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home.
AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
don't worry, they'll have plenty of opportunity to mess with AI. Fun thing about AI is that you just use it and helps you, I don't know that there's much to learn there in terms of end user experience.
On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence) is not something you can skip learning and expect a good outcome.
Man, this is such an odd take. I don't need to imagine, I grew up in a country where math teachers would laugh you out of the classroom if you asked to use a calculator. Guess what? We did everything manually.
I then moved to North America for my last year of high school, and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical black box.
which city is that? I want to move there with my children.
If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as original work, feel free to move to Virginia.
I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left.
In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.
https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...
>I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.
I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.
That's not using tech that you're describing here. You're talking about literally learning some basic computer skills (such as word processor, excel, reading email, some basic website building, use printer, and some amount of programming)
For those, obviously you need a computer and completely agree that those are important skills to learn... But you maybe need to spend 1h/week during last 2 years of middle school on those at the computer lab (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
But for any other course such as Math, English (or whichever primary language in your country), second languages, history, etc. : that's where using tech is a mistake
A bit of tech is ok, but it cannot be "everyone does their homework and read lesson on a iPad/Chromebook"
> (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon Trail.
Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition? Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python? Should kids be forced to use physical copies of newspapers and journal articles instead of learning how to look things up in a database?
I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but it seems wrongheaded to completely remove things that are relevant skills for most 21st century careers.
> Would it be a mistake to use Desmos in a math classroom, or 3Blue1Brown style animations, to build up visual intuition?
I don't think there's anything wrong with showing kids some videos every now and then. I still have fond memories of watching Bill Nye.
> Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python?
No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop an intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
>> Should we not teach basic numerical and statistical methods in Python?
> No. Those should be done by hand, so kids can develop an intuition for it. The same way we don't allow kids learning multiplication and division to use calculators.
I would think that it would make sense to introduce Python in the same way that calculators, and later graphing calculators are introduced, and I believe (just based on hearing random anecdotes) that this is already the case in many places.
I'm a big proponent of the gradual introduction of abstraction, which my early education failed at, and something Factorio and some later schooling did get right, although the intent was rarely communicated effectively.
First, learn what and why a thing exists at a sufficiently primitive level of interaction, then once students have it locked in, introduce a new layer of complexity by making the former primitive steps faster and easier to work with, using tools. It's important that each step serves a useful purpose though. For example, I don't think there's much of a case for writing actual code by hand and grading students on missing a semicolon, but there's probably a case for working out logic and pseudocode by hand.
I don't think there's a case for hand-drawing intricate diagrams and graphs, because it builds a skill and level of intimacy with the drawing aspect that's just silly, and tests someone's drawing capability rather than their understanding of the subject, but I suppose everyone has they're own opinion on that.
That last one kind of crippled me in various classes. I already new better tools and methods existed for doing weather pattern diagrams or topographical maps, but it was so immensely tedious and time-consuming that it totally derailed me to the point where I'd fail Uni labs despite it not being very difficult content, only because the prof wanted to teach it like the 50s.
Fwiw calculators were banned in my school. Only started to use one in university - and there it also didnt really help with anything as the math is already more complex
Those are great examples. Not familiar with Desmos, but 3Blue1Brown style animations are great.
The problem is that people seem to want to go to extremes. Either go all out on doing everything in tablets or not use any technology in education at all.
its not just work skills, its also a better understanding that is gained from things such as the maths animations you mentioned.
Until most kids are about 12 - 14 years old, they're learning much more basic concepts than you're describing. I don't think anyone is trying to take intro to computer science out of high schools or preventing an advanced student younger than that from the same.
I would rather a teacher have to draw a concept on a board than have each student watch an animation on their computer. Obviously, the teacher projecting the animation should be fine, but it seems like some educators and parents can't handle that and it turns into a slippery slope back to kids using devices.
So for most classrooms full of students in grades prior to high school, the answer to your list of (presumably rhetorical) questions is "Yes."
I am pretty skeptical about the value of learning to build websites. I think it is too tempting for students to devote significant time to something that is not foundational knowledge and where they won't get any valuable feedback anyway.
It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes, etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a captive audience that could have helped me refine my arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time on things like careless grammatical errors.
Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel, and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical thinking.
re: Anki. It is not as optimized but you can do SRS with physical flash-cards.
* Have something like 5 bins, numbered 1-5.
* Every day you add your new cards to bin nr. 1 shuffle and review. Correct cards go to bin nr. 2, incorrect cards stay in bin nr. 1.
* Every other day do the same with bin nr. 1 and 2, every forth with bin nr. 1, 2 and 3 etc. except incorrect cards go in the bin below. More complex scheduling algorithms exist.
* In a classroom setting the teacher can print out the flashcards and hand out review schedule for the week (e.g. Monday: add these 10 new cards and review 1; Tuesday: 10 new cards and review box 1 and 2; Wednesday: No new cards and and review box 1 and 3; etc.)
* If you want to be super fancy, the flash card publisher can add audio-chips to the flash-cards (or each box-set plus QR code on the card).
what's funny is that they don't even teach basic tech literacy but just rely on kids to figure it out!
> how to touch type
What for? I've been writing computer programs and documentation since 1969 and I can't touch type. I've never felt enough pressure to do it. I can still type faster than I can think. When I'm writing most of my time is spent thinking not tapping the keys.
I learned how to touch type in middle school with school software like Mario teaches typing and Mavis beacon. I peaked around 80wpm and I was faster than 90% of my classmates.
A few years ago I invested in a rectilinear split keyboard which has a slightly different layout, but much more ergonomic. But interestingly I can now type 120wpm+.
I think touch typing is very similar to learning penmanship (and I guess cursive to an extent). If I followed the exact rules I learned about handwriting in school, I'd have much more legible handwriting but I'd write so much more slowly. Instead I my own way, which lets me get my thoughts out quickly, albeit not as neat as "correct" penmanship. Fortunately typing is much more lenient on this front.
You typed out this message by hitting individual keys as your eyes searched for them? Isn’t that mentally exhausting?
> Although [touch typing] refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys ... the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing
I think they're referring to the latter.
The strict definition of touch typing reminds me of how when I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that there’s a specific way of holding chopsticks. You gotta hold the top one like a pencil, and rest the bottom one between the crook of your fingers and your ring finger, and make sure they’re the same length and the bottom one isn’t moving and you’re just using it as a base to press against.
And then I became an adult and visited China and met actual Chinese immigrants and married a native chopstick holder. And half of them don’t hold chopsticks “the real way”. Somehow it all works out. As long as you can eat a peanut with them, you pass.
As an adult I learned that there’s also a whole lot of prescriptive bullshit that basically nobody pays attention to. The strict definition of touch typing seems like one of those. If you can type without looking at the keys, you can touch type.
With such a strict definition the OP’s comment becomes basically meaningless. They could be referring to using index fingers only. They could be using an alternative keyboard layout. They could mostly be using left-hand only. Pretty much any WPM between 1 and 200 seems possible with the statement: “I don’t keep my fingers on home row in between key presses.”
In many cases the understanding of the term "touch typing" isn't just "typing without looking" but a very specific way of doing so.
You should be able to type without looking at your keyboard.
But the specific 5 finger arrangement taught often as "tough typing" isn't needed for that, some common issues:
- it being taught with an orthogonal arrangement of your hand to they keyboard, that is nearly guaranteed to lead to carpal tunnel syndrome if you have a typical keyboard/desk setup. Don't angle your wrist when typing.
- Pinky fingers of "average" hands already have issues reaching the right rows, with extra small or extra short hands they often aren't usable as intended with touch typing.
You dont need to learn to touch type to avoid searching out each key individually. You just need experience.
I was taught touch typing as a kid. None of it took. I dont use the home row. I developed into the gamer home row hand positioning for typing.
I guess this is technically correct in the same way that stenographers and highly-ergonomic alternative-layout keyboard users also don’t “touch type” according to a strict definition.
If you’re capable of typing quick enough to publicly take meeting notes, then it’s fine. But if you can’t, I could see it being professionally embarrassing in the same way that not understanding basic arithmetic could be professionally embarrassing.
That’s the kind of (in)capability we’re talking about when it comes to Gen Z. Like not knowing ctrl-c ctrl-v.
My point is that there's almost nothing to teach about it. You just need to use a keyboard enough to build experience.
What could you possibly teach about touch typing besides just telling people to do typing tests or write papers over and over again?
People aren't bad typers because they weren't taught. They're bad typer because they dont type.
Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write than type
> Zen Z doesn't types to store knowledge. They would rather record the lecture or the meeting. I put aside my fone and put it on record while I am carefully listening to the meeting. I'm not even zen z. I would rather write than type
Recordings are one of the worse ways to store knowledge for later reference, except in usual scenarios. They're very awkward to work with. The only plus is their cheap an easy to make.
Trust me, I work at a company where "documentation" is often an old meeting recording (and sometimes you have to count yourself lucky to even have that).
> But if you can’t, I could see it being professionally embarrassing
I had a boss that typed with one finger on each hand, it was laughable, but he was an incredible programmer, so it didn't affect him at all.
I have an "unofficial" typing style. I tried learning official touch typing but it caused immediate hand cramps.
Touch typing would probably be faster, but I've never found slow typing speeds a limiting factor in either writing or software dev.
In general, mastery involves taking the basic mechanics of something and making them completely automatic, freeing up cognitive resources for higher level processes. Expert pianists don't need to look down at their hands when sight reading.
Fast typing is not about throughput, it's about latency. If I only needed to type fast enough to produce the 125-something lines of code I get into production per week, I would be able to work at a word a minute. Alas, that's not how that works.
https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
> touch type
can even be harmful
IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought typing method and not just "typing without looking at the keyboard".
In general key arrangement traces back to physical limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.
But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if you are typing a lot.
The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something close to it.
As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending on left/right hand :/
Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small, or otherwise unusual...
Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a lot, some people have just some very touch typing incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).
Anatomy might matter if you're talking about world champion speed typing. I don't think it matters for just being competent (I say this as a man with short and fat fingers)
Touch typing is not a basic tech skill, and also pretty useless on the long term. I expect dictation to take over very soon, as finally voice recognition is getting to be usable, and commonplace.
> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy
They certainly will at home.
> I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
In which country?
I live in Mexico and even here you really need to go to the poorest families to find a home without a laptop. Even those families have multiple smartphones. Today a smartphone is not a good replacement for a laptop but maybe in a couple of years it will be.
Even if they have a computer at home, that doesn't mean they're practicing the relevant skills. Touch typing, word processing, researching a topic online, etc. are things that need deliberate practice. Based on my own experience, using a computer at home 99% of the time meant playing video games.
The following article suggests that in the United States, about 59% of lower income households have a laptop or desktop computer, compared to 92% of upper income households.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/digital-d...
Yes. Kids can learn a lot of they do use computers to do things like research things.
Many parents don't themselves have the technical literacy to properly teach things like what thr filesystem is.
> It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports, channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that every generation will know more and be "better" than the previous generation.
A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and have no idea where to change their instagram password.
So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids, who can't use computers anymore.
Boomers are split between a demographic that is very computer literate, having worked in/around science and tech for decades, and a demo that isn't remotely literate and may not even be online.
The latter is a fairly small demo though - supposedly around a third.
The split is more by education than by age.
Kids can use computers - phones - as app appliances, but they don't understand computers.
Peak literacy is young Gen X and older millennials.
> They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.
At least around 370 BC, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus discussing the invention of writing.
Thamus:
> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha
> Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.
The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.
Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.
Is it possible that the inherent inefficiency of handwriting in recording information is what facilitates cognitive development? Writing information by hand requires the writer to parse the information being written and become skilled in understanding the most important aspects of the information to write since it is impractical to handwrite everything verbatim as it comes to mind.
Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.
I wonder whether it has contributed to the evolution of smaller brains: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...
> hack at stone with a chisel
Update your mental model, except for the grand works, they used sticks on clay tablets similar to writing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_tablet
>Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.
Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet. It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism". "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone tablets, we're a modern country". Just expensive nonsense in the absence of educational standards and physical development.
Meanwhile today Dutch kids get these extremely large screens at the front of the class to stare at all day for every little thing, the day's schedule, everything. Huge screens, some stretch nearly the entire width of the classroom, with about a third of desks within just three meters of it. All day.
I do think the general purpose screens of today are doing a disservice for education. There are too many possible distractions a child isn't prepared to resist yet. But it could enable more advanced workflow for personalized learning.
I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The bottom of the k has different needs.
Tech can save you from a bad educational environment. I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning. From visualizing linear algebra and analytic geometry problems to piracy. If anything, the teachers need to improve their tech literacy.
There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.
> I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning.
Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?
> There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.
Yes there is. Students were educated just a couple decades ago without it. We can easily return to that style.
>Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?
As dangerous as this sounds, with guidance, I think it could be done. Government and public institutions love to lock the environment into something safe but useless for further learning and adaptability
I don't know that it sounds dangerous.
I am wondering what you mean by it and why you think it's needed.
Using tech also meant you got an iPad because otherwise teachers and IT would be overwhelmed. That the kids were already much more apt at using such devices was secondary.
In the context of general education I can understand the strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison, you need to give your users freedom.
An iPad absolutely doesn't make kids "better at technology", if anything it makes them worse because it just wraps everything up in a braindead simple package for consumption.
Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental level.
I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide those details from the end user.
And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in. But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes anyone more technologically adept.
20 year olds are bewildered when they see me opening a computer and replacing stuff instead of bringing it to a shop. "Where did you learn to do that?" It used to be the only way, everybody with a computer did it. The strange thing is that it's still possible but they don't think about it.
You're assuming tech will ever be removed.
Kind of why Khan Academy makes me cringe.
> After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.
I have several friends who work in education.
At one point there were computer labs in school, there was education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).
All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is, in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a net positive.
> EdTech
To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and faculties interactions with it is/are.
"Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time: https://xkcd.com/1227/
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.
Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.
I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers.
No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
I suspect that, in practice, what many enthusiastic advocates mean by “learning AI” is actually “learning to need AI”.
In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to function without depending on it.
If you’re smart AI saves you time getting to something you could probably achieve anyway. If you’re… not smart… then it will be a necessary crutch for you to get through life.
I can see the angle for making sure kids start using it before they develop the skills to become independent of it.
You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully. You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up questions.
I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.
I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.
It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you, but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult to make the investment worth it.
Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.
As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?
> It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.
Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at using computers:
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response.
It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating such exercise would take and what should be the tools or sources to verify the output but that might be helpful excersise.
Similar to Google and Wikipedia lessons back in my day.
You also need to understand the limits of AI and that it has limits that a human that gives you usually correct and authoritative answers does not have.
I think it comes easily to the sort of people who comment here. Moat people have a very vague understanding of computers in general.
As someone who sells AI... You'd be shocked at how bad people are at using AI.
My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.
Presumably prompting skills like https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/CV...
Are these supposed to be the "skilled" prompts? This just reads as a basic conversation and not as particularly well-written or well-defined prompts. So far everything I've seen about prompting "skills" has just come down to being able to articulate and critically think a bit.
I’m not sure anything was clarified. Nothing about that conversation is special or unique?
I don't think they need to learn 'AI workflows' (whatever that means). But I think it makes sense to use the LLM's as a resource.
I've used them when studying new languages (human languages not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been really useful.
Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the things they are told.
It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.
They should at least require handwritten work, the kids will still be AI-stupid but will at least be able to write.
You remember better when you write, too.
I assume "AI workflows" means knowing how to split up a task to create a chain of agents that can complete a specific task reliably.
A bit like software development.
The problem is that the task you've defined "split up a task to create a chain of agents" has changed dramatically in just the last six months, nevermind the last two years.
You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology if you try to make primary/secondary education too topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and how to think critically without ever touching a Large Language Model.
AI “workflows” share the same addictive characteristics of web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become addicted to the slot machines.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
Had a buddy who works at a prestigious university teaching film history tell me their big boss is basically forcing all classes including his ones on film history to incorporate AI education in some way. So silly.
It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the children don't give a crap about the technology. They will generally make the best of whatever resources they have and procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames because they make money. Ain't no different than how your local building or environmental inspector finds himself screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
> I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
Yeah I'd be happier if they learned how an Apollo computer worked (even though it has virtually no relevance) than how to use Excel.
This reminds me of Harvey Cragon's intro to computer architecture textbook...
When it introduces Harvard vs. Von Neumann architectures, it doesn't invent some dumb RISC computer to illustrate the difference... No... it makes you learn the actual von Neumann machine! Also Conrad Zuse Z machine.
Cragon's argument is that students will not learn the concept of engineering trade-offs, if presented with a clean "textbook" architecture.
I hated MIX for various reasons, it's sort of in-between simple and kludgy.
[0] Cragon was professor at University of Texas Austin ca 1980. Also the architect of TI's ASC in the 1960s.
>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can do your learning for you. The need for memorization of essential math identities (like multiplication tables and use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.
I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.
> You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths
You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.
> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising
They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
If AI is still too stupid to show people how to work with it, and to notice their lacks and anticipate their needs, it can't have become that indispensably useful.
The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.
Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.
Luddite move.
Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.
And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.
This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"
That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an electronics engineer, in R & D).
For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.
Um... there's always exceptions.
I can keep enough digits in my working memory to do long division in the grocery aisle.
I also compulsively factor numbers on license plates..
AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
AI is here to stay. But learning to copy-paste homework into a chatbot is not really a skill one needs to learn.
As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.
That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.
You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
blaming discipline is how we got here. these devices are engineered by teams of psychologists to maximize engagement. expecting a 12 year old to resist what grown adults with PhDs can't is just setting kids up to fail. removing the distraction source is the rational move.
Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.
~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
But think of all the shareholder value that was created, surely that makes it worth it /s
The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4.
https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field
no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
You assert a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials:
Screen readers take longer.
Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source...
Another
https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut...
Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age actually.
Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to go for most.
"screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online.
The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.
Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.
I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
This is written with what feels like the peak understanding of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!"
An allowlist might be a good place to start.
That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad of 3
> You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book
If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!
Even with books, stuff happens, you can skip ahead a chapter, consult the index, follow a footnote... or put another book on the table.
It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time
>Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject
What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
> Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Wait what?
> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids
Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.
The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading.
Lots to think about there.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)
Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)
if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
What does that tell us?
It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.
Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
atlest buffet himself drank 6 cans of coke per day being a big investor in coke.
Yup - intentionally creating something that you know harms others for profit. Tech is looking more and more like tobacco companies every day.
Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at advertisements and fake addiction research these companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
a non-trivial number of HN is, in fact, literally (in)vested in their companies.
lotta folks here with FAANG pedigrees...
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
Tobacco executives probably prevented their children from smoking, especially as evidence emerged. That's just parenting.
It doesn't forgive them for lobbying ferociously against any regulation of marketing to children.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
> Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to explain why this doesn't happen to men.
> Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups compared with the middle-income group (38.5%).
And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't happen to Black women.
> Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference in obesity prevalence among the income groups.
It also needs to explain why no statistically significant result happens for Asian women
> Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%) income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was only significant for white women.
Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience, Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they become richer, and White women get massively more convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but stayed the same.
That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this convenience angle.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6650a1.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm
So how did people manage before we had these things?
bible study and alcoholism
I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks out, at least according to media reports about his family. Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption, seems hasty.
It seems wise to be wary of a salesman who won’t let his family use the product they sell. This seems very common in the modern tech industry.
If I were a billionaire I'd have servants who would use social media for my servants, to be fair.
Why have social media when you can have Jeeves "do it" for you?
Unless you’re a public figure who is posting as part of your “brand”… why use it at all at that point?
For a random individual plucked out of general population, you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for individuals that effectively determine what actual average is to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a proxy, but it is not hasty.
I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play out.
Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educational lectures.
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
Or you can watch cat videos.
> The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
No, they don't.
I'm close-reading Aristotle in a Meetup group where we compare many translations and indulge the controversies in translating the Greek.
When I've tried to get LLMs to bear on a topic, they can't even relate to the concept I'm looking at, instead generating a summary of the easiest parts. LLM is basically a beginner student.
Um... you'd think so... but the Perseus catalog is notoriously incomplete. They don't have all the key works of Aristotle in Greek.
> And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
I doubt that, but the others seem reasonable
Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
Everyone has access to the same models. Even the best internal builds are only a month away from public access.
The ones a year from now from all companies will likely be better than the best today.
That we shouldn't take child rearing advice from the man who killed himself with fruit juice.
As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.
> And that much of Silicon Valley’s leadership (and the world’s rich, for that matter) send their own kids to Montessori, Steiner, and other educational institutions that prefer pencil and paper to digital tablet, conversations to smartphones, modeling clay and outdoor imagineering to online gaming.
> In their book, ‘Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,’ educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: “It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”
"The Battle for Your Kids' Hearts and Minds" https://kidzu.co/parent-perspective/the-battle-for-your-kids...
Zucchini also thinks spending $80 billion on a failed metaverse is a good bet, so maybe they're not the experts of everything.
How much of that was actual spending—and if so, where did the money end up?—and how much of that was just fraud?
It’s probably more nuanced than this. Would I have let my kids use Facebook in the height of its popularity. Absolutely. It was fun, engaging and user driven.
Now it’s just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and boomers posting in groups.
I don’t even think it’s appropriate to call it social media anymore. It’s barely social.
Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.
I am only on FB for a group I admin that is useful and helps people. its more like forum hosting for me.
Almost all my friends have stopped posted. The only social thing I see from most people is wishing people happy birthday.
Yep, that's why it won't help. The rest of the time at home, they will stick to the screen.
Are Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman generally seen as experts in childhood development and education?
Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.
So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens?
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
You feel pain? Doctor says it's probably in your head because statistically you shouldn't. -- Based on countless true stories.
Data is map, not terrain. It can explain some of the quantifiable world, not all of it. Common sense can also fill some of the gaps, some of the time. And there remains plenty still that's too entropic for our grasp. Waiting for data to speak is not always the best move. Heck, it might even sometimes be the worst. It seems this is a lesson we collectively keep forgetting over and over, despite the endless list of data-backed "facts" that, in hindsight, it turns out we were wrong or short-sighted about. Apparently, that too is human nature.
The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)
"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.
You need science to realise that guns are a danger to kids?
No, but I believe that science and quantifying the specific danger leads to better policies than going on vibes. For instance, laws to require safe storage are based on data quantifying reductions in harm to children [1]
Data beats vibes, even when vibes are qualitatively correct. I’m surprised this is surprising.
1. https://journalistsresource.org/health/child-access-preventi...
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
No but they are experts in engineering their garbage to cause maximum damage.
Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman have much involvement in engineering after their products took off. After a certain point they were no longer engineers of their products.
They absolutely decide whether to have people employed in moderation or safety. Or what gets done with what those teams learn.
This seems to be a distinction without a difference. The buck stops with them.
That is worse.
"The product is disgusting, but there's nothing I can do; I'm only the CEO"
They are experts in their products.
No, they employ those.
In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about childhood development and education to get kids addicted early.
There is the Stanford Persuasion Lab study on infinite scroll... rather than take it as a cautionary finding, tech has embraced the infinite scroll. Because incentives.
No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than phonics" crowd.
So it’s kind of an appeal to authority, without any evidence of authority?
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
You are making an argument from authority too though.
Even ignoring my point, these people have more insight than anyone into their own products and their harmful/beneficial nature.
No, I am making no such argument.
I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge, and their actions should not be used to inform one’s own opinions or social policy on the topic.
There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a favor and read it (pay attention to the population of studies —- many use adults in their 30’s or older as proxies for children).
You can absolutely find real data supporting your position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
They quite literally have insider knowledge that others wouldn't
You think Jobs had insider data in the childhood development impact of iPads right when they were released?
No need for the leading question/bait when you know what they’re saying. No one said they’re experts on childhood development, they’re saying “it’s telling they won’t even let their kids use these services when they swear it’s safe for our kids to do so.”
TBH the problem is not the iPad here.
An offline iPad with a limited set of educational apps/books would be a good classroom aid
Of course, an iPad without those limits is bad
Are you certain about that being "good"?
It is not just about what you can access.
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely addictive to kids who are none the wiser.
> What does that tell us?
It tells us three things:
1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature.
2. Get them to read books as an alternative.
3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.
I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Part of being a parent is saying no when your children pester you for something you know is bad for them.
Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes', but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this crap.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called having healthy boundaries.
Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere outside your house?
Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and generally require proof of age if there is any doubt. Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could do was say "no."
3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded equally to every other parental unit.
You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and "government enacts universal age verification surveillance" are not the only two options.
exactly, makes me think... if person who makes the bread does not feed his own family, something is wrong
Also a good reason for why one shouldn’t have one’s child raised through the policies of people who don’t want kids. If they don’t have any skin in the game…
The kids you mention likely have multiple VR, AR and other gadget setups in their own home. Too much of a good thing is just that.
you're assuming zuck or jobs kids have anything resembling "normal" children lives
The key message that poster before tried to convey was that they themselves do not believe into their own products, not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless video - this is quite addictive.
It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what technology companies market to the masses and what the people behind those technologies actually endorse for their families
That the elite is poisoning the masses.
It tells us that you seem to assume a lot.
2 of your 3 pieces of evidence are your guesses ("I bet", "I assume").
That tells us more about you than about tech CEOs.
You are assuming they all act as wise and with the foresight of Jobs.
Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on the relation of people and technology. The others are just finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.
> Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'
This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.
Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.
In many places it's the teachers who move around all day while the students remain.
That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However, especially the US, few people will parent their children in a way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools, which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the children. The community with do nothing since they view the parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.
>Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
The telescreens are for you, not for them.
On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is only an advisor to the leader of some some small little organization called the world economic forum says you and your children should be kept “happy” with drugs and video games.
Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your children “worthless” children.
[1] https://youtu.be/QkYWwWAXgKI
The same goes for college.
I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.
When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you.
The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive!
Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.
I'm teaching programming and algorithms at uni. Only blackboard.
In my university, probably because the CS department at the time was an underfunded offshoot of the faculty of Mathematics, we basically didn't have access to computers (and I didn't have a laptop of my own).
We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had taken "shortcuts".
I used to write code in a spiral notebook when I didn't have access to a computer. It was also hard to code on a computer in those days when the output device was an ASR-33, or a screen was 24x80.
> When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
That is a) a BS claim and b) wouldn't be a feature, on average, given the quality of college lectures.
It seems fairly clear that manual note taking help with learning, over using a computer, but overblown claims like this do more damage than good in convincing people to do the right thing.
This is hilarious. This comment would imply that the people who got multiple degrees and were very successful through their careers (that would be everybody in my generation: we started in 1980) learning from lecturers scribbling with chalk on a blackboard, writing it all down with pen on paper, somehow had a less effective education than modern students using modern tools. Yeah, looks all around, remembers training youngs, no, I don't think so... Actually sometimes it was bad because people, but sometimes it was fucking awesome. I lectured undergrad mathematics at UF and ASU using chalk and a blackboard and to this day that was some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Especially for the upper division classes, my students paid attention. They asked questions. It was glorious.
> a BS claim
It worked for me. Have you tried it?
> given the quality of college lectures
I attended a university where that wasn't a problem. Prof Daniel Goodstein, for example, turned his lectures into a video series "The Mechanical Universe". But, frankly, I liked his in-person lectures using the blackboard and chalk better.
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason. Procrastination is hell of a drug.
I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.
To be fair, I did entertain myself by drawing comics on my notebook or playing with my pencil and rubber as if they were toy cars.
I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
Congratulations, you were exercising your literacy and art skills.
People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.
Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.
I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.
If you open any of my middle school notebooks you'll find around 5-10x more doodles than notes, by surface area.
It could be that the inability to doodle is actually cramping current students - it might be important to management of boredom?
Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.
It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty obvious that screens, such as iPads, are bad for kids' education. The homework on apps like i-Ready is mostly just crappy multiple-choice questions. I fail to see how that actually helps students. They should be challenged and kept in their discomfort zones. They need to experience problem-solving in all its forms and get feedback from teachers on how they solve a problem. They need to practice writing and long-form analysis, and get detailed feedbacks from teachers - things i-Ready just can’t provide. The funny thing is, so many Americans blame the system for inequality while embracing Jo Boalers' nonsense. Yet they flock to screens like moths to a flame, not realizing that wealthy families will just pay for private tutors while the kids without those resources get left behind, when enforcing hgher education standards could be arguably the cheapest thing to do[1]. How's that working out for equality, let alone equity?
[1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.
I know it's brutal, but my kids were raised with iPads, PS3-5, computers, age inappropriate Minecraft and youtube, all kids of gadgets and turned out ok, already earning money (in tech of course) - one is in UX / product building, another more on the core math/theorem side. Protecting kids from tech is like raising your kids in a glass house, yes they are fine while inside but then what?
It's great that your kids had none of the issues reported.
Others have had lives disrupted by addiction.
Your kids were raised on those before predatory people and unscrupulous corporations learned how to take advantage of them at scale.
To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so they are not targeted.
I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.
Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom.
e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet).
My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.
> I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.
I went to school a million years ago, but IIRC we kept our textbooks in the classroom until middle school (7th grade for me). Maybe one textbook might go home with math homework or an English project. For my kid, they would usually just send worksheets home; which is ok, but if you wanted to reference not on the sheet, too bad. Post-covid, there's a lot more dependence on google classroom with all that comes with it (but maybe that's also how the upper grades were working anyway)
E-readers with textbooks loaded could work, but hopefully the textbooks are tuned for the medium.
Anyway, isn't a heavy backpack a secret fitness program???
Trapper-Keeper!
Anecdotal, but I do not think e-ink displays are as good for reading or benefiting from handwriting as an actual purely physical medium. They just don't have the affordances of durably occupying physical space. I say this as someone who has done quite a bit of review of the literature and has a kindle and a Supernote.
Yeah, I think eink displays are the happy medium for tech for kids. And even then, you should limit the capabilities to be effectively the same as working with paper.
Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give internet access. Let the device sync at school with required books and assignments.
Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's the extent of what they should have.
Or get everyone a nice camping backpack. Still less than the iPad and duel purpose!
Ereaders (Kindle scribe specifically) has been a huge discovery! I cannot make any claims, but my daughter draws on it, writes on it, does homeworks on it and reads so many books on it (she is 7). She liked it as soon as she saw it. I decided to gave her my Scribe,which I deeply miss.
It's essentially a notebook and a book reader.
You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs can only have notes on the side).
I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets please.
It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
The luckiest were us that got into adulthood during the 90's. Traditional studying at school and full digital afterwards. The last generation. That's the cause of the reverse Flynn effect: diminishing IQ of 18-yo's after 1995.
I don’t teach in a public school but we use tech to a very limited extent in my k-9 school grades 7-9 will be taking a computer skills course next year. We currently teach touch typing to grades 8 and 9. Everything else is pencil and paper. I think present day children are exposed to tech in non productive way ie mobile devices.
The number of kids who don’t know how to operate a mouse and keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult for some. It’s quite interesting honestly.
Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.
The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.
Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.
Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its uses :) )
A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
I really like the reMarkable tablets, but they are still not quite the replacement for a paper notebook that I would like. I think the main problem is that the refresh-rate/software is slow enough that trying to "page through your notebook" to find specific notes is a grueling experience. The alternative is to just make lots of one page notes, but things still become difficult to find (not to mention you add a lot of stress coming up with good names for stuff...)
It's the same in Norway, and news paper chronicles are going as far as saying things like "Now that we learned that we went to far, what do we do with the generation of kids we experimented on?". Food for thought.
I don’t know why the headline was changed for the link, but the headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are slippery things.
> whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based
There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
Usually you have to prove the effect of introducing something new.
which, in this case, is a paper book
I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom.
But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
Why do you think children will learn anything from a remark on a specific problem? If it were that simple, teaching would be easy. (Notice that teaching smart kids is easy).
Much of education requires making errors until you get it right a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors. Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.
> But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high confidence and believe it?
It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even more so if you ask it to use the internet etc.
But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself.
It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination rate.
If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
I've used it for languages and studying some reinforcement learning stuff, including examples in PyTorch. I haven't had many problems with it really.
Once when I asked it some questions about a strategy game (Shadow Empire) it got them wrong, but the sources it cited had the correct information.
> Only if you are asking surface level questions.
I find it pretty accurate well beyond that level. How much of that is actually a problem in K-12 education?
using AI for education is one of the worst ideas for education.
Related:
Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841)
I support this. Having a boundary around tech is a great asset for a growing mind.
At the same time, get your kids a computer early so they can learn the basics. Maybe even keep it off the internet.
Skip phones and tablets altogether for as long as possible.
absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.
I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.
I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning though?
I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.
> With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
There are books with written solutions.
If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.
Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.
Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
Interesting. Where we currently live, kids carry all books back and forth between home and school every day in giant backpacks.
Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.
this is a problem. we make photos of the pages. i think there should be always a digital option when you have a physical book.
It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home.
The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds.
We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness?
This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
Open content textbooks are widely available, it's just a matter of adoption by the students.
> it's just a matter of adoption by the students.
I don't think it's the students who are signing textbook deals.
Or every student have the books they need, and are free to bring them home.
why not just buy 2 sets ? problem solved ?
yes, the distraction is real. How many times i was busy with my day job on some task when for some reason i had to wait for something (coworker reply, build to complete, approval to be granted) and automatically opened HN on in a new tab... 10 minutes of blackout and i'm on some random wikipedia page for no obvious reason related to my day job task... And i'm 40+ year old adult. Im scared to think what this level of distraction means for undeveloped brain.
The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.
That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.
The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.
And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.
Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.
Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.
To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad.
For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.
The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.
>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
Allegations without evidence.
Was always a stupid idea to bring screens into schools.
One very important aspect is that we learn through haptics and precise arm movements required to write/draw things down.
An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
That sounds very dystopian. The ai teacher part, not the no devices part
That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
It sounds distopian, but AI has been a big boost to learning at least for me personally. Of course the problem is when it's wrong.
I never said that AI should replace all teachers. AI can help provide more teaching labor (more teaching capacity). Every child can have a personalized tutor in addition to human teachers.
See Bloom's 2 sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
classic pendulum swing. we went all-in on screens without checking if they actually helped, now we're overcorrecting the other way. the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle but that doesn't make for a good headline.
Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books.
https://www.worldreader.org/
Laptops and tables are, as it turns out, not so cheap either. They need to be fixed or replaced at an alarming rate, and they lay claim to a much larger part of a school budget than books ever did. That is part of the reason that we revert back to pen, paper and books in Norway. First for 1-4 grade, but it will be push further up the grades as we go, I think.
Impossible for a Vocational Tech teacher in the networking field. How can I teach computers without computers?
(Maybe use some of those skills to figure out a way to read more than the headline.)
I recommend reading at least the closing line:
This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.
Which shifts things from "before high school" to "in primary school and then gradual introduce aspects on it".
Good.
This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.
Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
look up what you need - print physical pages - use pen | pencil - have a legal pad / notebook at hand - scribble down shit.
unfortunately now printing is expensive
Dot-matrix impact printers are still being sold and still have the lowest cost per printed page. The quality sucks, but for draft-only content (like LLM answers) that you're scribbling on it's not an issue. B/W laser printers are not too far behind though, just avoid brands like HP that gouge you on toner cartridges.
It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
100% support this. Computers in school -- except at specific times for specific purposes -- are a distraction. My teen told me he and his friends were watching Hulu in class on their Chromebooks because while the school district had locked down access to Netflix, Disney, etc., they forgot Hulu :/ The students also figured out ways to share links to game sites by using shared Google docs and using URLs that bypassed the school's controls.
The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in classroom education is essential at the lower grades in particular.
My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and she'd do remarkably better.
Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
computers are good learning tools for adults that learned how to learn with books.
I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class is specifically about using computers.
Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
This is all downstream of the backlash against social media and AI, and it's attacking the symptom rather than treating it IMO. You don't need to abandon digital tools entirely, you need to control how they're used in the classroom.
Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts.
Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.
I look forward to the (hopefully) positive results and what it will mean for most EdTech snake oil.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when reading a hardcopy book.
Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.
It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous...
2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c...
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...
4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag...
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
Education research is really low quality. Like so many other fields in social sciences, the results rarely generalize beyond the direct findings, and only support the hypotheses in the mildest way. It cannot robustly guide decision making.
The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or point at differences in the stimuli, something which should obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking, article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.
Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better studies. The average education research study is several levels below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.
Yep. Part of the reason is the ethical problems with experimenting on children.
And part of the problem is that there is a ton of money to be made in education, so there is a lot of incentive to create or cherry pick data promoting one’s preferred (most profitable) policies.
[flagged]
Please don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments to HN [1]. You're welcome here, but only if you write in your own voice [2]. The community feels strongly about this.
[1] see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This has been a shocking discovery for me too. The library near us recently said it's cheaper for them to buy a book then an ebook.
It's absolutely insane.
It's significantly cheaper! A physical book can be loaned endlessly, as long as the binding holds up, and even if it gets damaged, it can be repaired. The contracts for ebooks at libraries often limit it to X number of circulations before the library has to pay again (this is how Overdrive/Libby works), or they have to pay per circulation (Hoopla). It's ludicrous.
Yeah that's a shitty model. We desperately need digital ownership rights.
Fully agree. I went to school in Germany and many of our textbooks were free there. Sometimes you would get a textbook that is already >= 10 years and out of shape but who cares? Especially the basic knowledge does not change often. Buying all these textbooks new every year feels like a scam to me as they are then only used for one year by the pupil.
Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price. Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year. Still, they were often seen as optional.
the other part nobody talks about is hauling that bloody fuckton of paper to between house, its bus stop, the school, and its bus stop either.
You could sell them after too. Now the book is the same price but it's a 1 year license. The platform we used was so restricted that it would block access the moment your network connection dropped.
> sits on the shelf for the next kid.
Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.
Why did they do that?
Presumably because the school district got a slice of the money from the publisher.
What? Are you serious?? :o Sorry, this is the saddest sentence I have read in a long time.
Yep. A public school in NY suburbs in the early 1990s.
Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied the books and they were the ones that the previous grade used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then they'd be replaced with new.
I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these days! We need to discipline them harder!"
My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in schools.
I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world.
I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home.
AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
don't worry, they'll have plenty of opportunity to mess with AI. Fun thing about AI is that you just use it and helps you, I don't know that there's much to learn there in terms of end user experience.
On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence) is not something you can skip learning and expect a good outcome.
Man, this is such an odd take. I don't need to imagine, I grew up in a country where math teachers would laugh you out of the classroom if you asked to use a calculator. Guess what? We did everything manually.
I then moved to North America for my last year of high school, and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical black box.
which city is that? I want to move there with my children.
If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as original work, feel free to move to Virginia.