In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
Students aren’t being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They’re being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?
I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it’s just not sticking.
Exactly.
As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!
I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.
They’re usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else “fell through.”
We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.
It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.
It didn’t have to be like this. I’m very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it…
YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.
It would’ve been so great if for at least once say “We don’t have microsoft word tasks today, we don’t have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead.”