It’s upsetting how it has become.
Our child is ready to start kindergarten. Do you know what they want as supplies?
No crayons, no pencils, no notebooks. No playdough, no shaving cream. Not even paper towels to clean up the inevitable mess.
Headphones. That’s it. A pair of corded headphones with the child’s name on it. WTF???
Their day was to be divided into hourly slots of apps. Followed by “recess” which was watching PBS Kids in the auditorium. I can’t even… What are they doing?
We are going to try to homeschool because I can’t imagine I can do worse than that.
That isnt the norm, thats insanity. My kid comes home everyday with arts and crafts. I think they might be responsible for a notable decline in tree cover at tis point.
Mines the same, its a lot of paper per kid. I never see a paper delivery truck though…
We had computers in elementary school. Around 3 or 4, they were standing in a corner of the classroom. I think my teachers husband just brought them in after his workplace decommissioned them. When you finished a task early, you were sometimes allowed to play around on them. I remember Paint, playing Pinball and Solitaire, and just clicking around/discovering the Windows UI. This was around the year 2000, we had no Internet, the computers were running Windows 95/98. I am not sure if we used them for any class-related activities. WordPad was installed, but no other Office stuff, I believe.
I am glad that I grew up when computers were still understandable. Nowadays, kids get iPads, which teach them to be obedient consumers, but they will learn nothing about computers themselves. Too many layers of abstractions, all intended to obscure the underlying technology, and lock down the devices.
Children have a natural desire to explore, which is completely wasted with modern devices. Let them open Paint.exe with Notepad and see what happens!
Similar case for me but I am a little younger (early to mid 00s for me). Around that age we had a Windows XP computer to mess around with in kindergarten sometimes but very rarely. We really started using computers a lot in the lab around 2nd or 3rd grade but only to teach us typing and to take tests. Ironically most of our tests were for reading quizzes called AR tests and we would earn points which would allow us to win some sort of reward if we acquired enough points by getting good scores on the quizzes. They should bring that shit back because it worked for me.
This is a fluff article but about a well signposted issue in education: tech in schools may be pushing education backwards.
Many countries have embraced tech in schools - such as laptops for students - and big tech companies in the US have been enthusiastic about getting their tech in front of young people as they will be the consumers of the future. But despite the billions spent it seems to actually be damaging education.
There are educationalists pushing for tech to be taken out of schools and go back to methods that actually do produce consistently good results.
For many years I have thought that elementary schools should be free of any modern electronic tech. In middle school it should be introduced but not connected to internet (word processors, interactive encyclopedias or coding like we used to learn it in the '80s or '90s, BASIC, Logo, that kind of stuff).
Finally, introduce internet in high school, in a controlled way, focusing primarily on knowledge and research sites. No LLMs included.
Of course you can’t control what happens in the students’ homes, but that should not affect what happens at school, specially if you replace homework with schoolwork, which I also think it’s better in the long run).
If i had a kid, it would be a Linux desktop or laptop at like 8 years old, no internet or limited internet when supervised. Zero iPads. Zero YouTube slop.
Would be a guaranteed autistic furry on the future fediverse 🤣 I kidddddd
I do have kids and this is really the only way, the path of least access needed. The parental controls built into most of the services are limited and/or ineffective. Its most of the reason I have my own media server. The kids have Linux computers with no browsers installed.
The trickiest thing is that most other parents dont seem to do much of this, so the kids think we are a bit strange compared to everyone else.
Youre the person every parent should be. The other people are the idiots for not properly teaching their children, IMO! But those parents probably aren’t tech literate themselves.so its a downward spiral.
It’s because the boomers running shit thinks kids have as much difficulty with tech that they do.
Kids will just pick that shit up, thats the entire point of why we stay kids so long.
But if you don’t teach them critical thinking at that age, they’re fucked for life.
Even if they learn current tech, it’ll be different by the time they get jobs.
But critical thinking never changes
Yup. Give 'em laptops or tablets if you like. Maybe you break their distance vision in exchange for saving their backs from the half a dozen hardback tomes and trapper-keeper we used to lug around. Textbooks can be updated quicker, incorporate video, and if there are public domain texts, they can be provided for free. Completing worksheets with a keyboard and trackpad also doesn’t worry me, and I actually wish we had class discussion boards when I was in school.
Leveraging tech because it provides some practical benefit is just common sense, but thinking the tech is the benefit is stupid, so of course that’s where we are, driven by the olds you mention, as well as a healthy ecosystem of ed-tech grifters.
Eink tablets I think would be an amazing middle ground.
They can pick it up after, it’s just much harder
They really can’t…
They can learn some critical thinking later, but it’ll never be the same as if they learned it as children.
Like if you found out you were in the Olympics for the 100m sprint next year. You could improve your performance in a year, but you’ll never match someone whose trained their whole life at it.
For all intents and purposes every improvement between now and next year aren’t gonna matter, last place is last place, regardless of your time.
That’s what it would be like to not learn critical thinking until an adult.
Yeah you’re right. Makes me even more grateful for my education.
American education system really peaked with “The Oregon Trail Generation” before No Child Left Behind…
And that’s a thought that’s kept me awake more than a few nights, because we still didn’t get a good education.
Ever since the focus has been short term cramming for tests. All the shit that got tossed out was about critical thinking and empathy, and somehow people are still shocked later generations are lacking both at concerning levels.
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This is more about using pen/pencil and paper instead of laptops rather than phone distractions.
I should dig it up, but I remember there’s a connection between handwriting and memory. Handwriting can help reinforce ideas and commit it to memory better than typing.
Meh, typing has other advantages too.
Like to memorize a random password or something, type it a couple times and when you need to remember it consciously you can just type it or even imagine typing it.
But “muscle memory” helps you remember the password better than as a string of unrelated charecters.
We just know the advantages of writing because it’s been around so long.
The advantages of typing, aren’t proven or even discovered yet.
But yeah, the answer is never one or the other, it’s both.
