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As a Computer Scientist, I increasingly believe this tech might actually be poison for the human mind, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I want to believe we can make it actually useful. But I don’t know if that’s possible or not.
Lets be clear: the tech is fantastic, the application is not. We are handing children mind control feeds while they are still forming their identity. If we had these kids working in linux shells, learning the nitty gritty problem solving behind the tech, learning how to use it to build rather than shoehorning it into problems that absolutely dont need it then I think the story would be different
I get your point bro, but it’s just half of the story. The real issue is not tech as a whole, but the conflict of interests of big evil corps. Tech is fantastic and can supercharge human learning, but the fact that most software is made with the sole purpose of maximizing engagement had led to those issues. The issue is the business model, not the tech itself
I think the problem with computers is when you make shit too easy.
Play a game. Tap on store. Tap on install. Play.
When I was growing up getting shit to run on my 286 was a challenge, Changing memory allocations, IRQ ports, a myriad of errors and work arounds, cfg files, memory editing, command lines, basic, and all that stuff meant you were forced to think.
The irony is script kiddies of the 90s would be viewed upon as hardcore hackers these days.
Indeed it warmed the cockles of my heart when my son got into Half Life and asked me to show him how to use the console.
I was like, awww you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
Some one has PAID them to do this. They’re a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they’ve even had the majority of the time… and they took just as much of a part in the “dismantling the public education system”.
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They’ll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
It’s also happening in areas where education HASN’T been defended or dismantled. It’s happening in areas that aren’t Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can’t be solved because whatever is happening isn’t being caused by them.
Which locations weren’t impacted by the first trump administration’s education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There’s basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
In this instance, I’d say it doesn’t.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don’t care as much about failing grades, and the “no child left behind” has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means “your kids going to the next grade, regardless”
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
“The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never” - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent
No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.
Key word “had”
Back in the 00’s when I was secondary school. My friends and I, would turn off the firewall, and bypass the website restrictions. This is just so we could download and play runescape, but I also played the halo combat evovled demo. It was only my group of friends who figured out how. We never shared the simple method with anyone, because we didn’t want it getting patched.
Tech Is Amazing for learning, but the unfortunate truth is that companies got a conflict of interests when it comes to education. The same companies who are pushing the most braindead brainrot and designing apps to be as addictive as humanly possible are then the same ones who sell school learning applications
Ask yourself, What Would Black Hat do?
No idea
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Correlation
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Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
But sure, also, they’ve replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
Don’t forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
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We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Teachers are paid a pittance in the US. Shows our values as a society. They’re educating the next generations, but that doesn’t make number go up right this second, so they are compensated accordingly.
Exactly, it’s a sad reflection of priorities. The work they do shapes the future, yet the pay doesn’t reflect that impact at all.
It’s more than just lack of effort here though, it’s systematic pollution they are allowing into our food and water with abandon.
into education too, into everything they can actually
Teachers are a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We’ll all run out of money!
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
You know, it wasn’t always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside’s out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we’ll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand~ Bo Burnham
I suppose what’s needed is to look at data from other countries and see if the data is similar. They’ve found a correlation but, as anybody remotely versed in science should know, correlation does not imply causation
You’re absolutely right. Looking at data from multiple countries would help show whether the pattern holds or if it’s just a local coincidence. Correlation can point us toward questions, but it’s never proof of causation on its own, that requires much deeper analysis.👌
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu’d windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It’s not merely tech that’s to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don’t have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends’ dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - “A hacker put a virus on there”), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
There are studies that show the tactile nature of books and hand written notes improves retention and encourages more thought, so it would seem likely that going more digital would have negative impacts on education.
Even that grifter Sam Altman was talking about how he takes notes a while back.
I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.
The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.
I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t a dig at Gen Z. For as long as we’ve been testing, which is like 50 years I think, the new generation has outperformed the previous one and that’s a good thing.
Having this generation underperform means that we have failed them and we need to figure out exactly how we fucked up. The evidence is really strong that technology in the classroom is a significant contributor.
It’s closer to 100 years at this point.
Don’t forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
Selling Apples ?
Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.
It’s so sad that we love shitting in younger generations and we love making things harder for them. This isn’t a new concept btw. Americas been doing that for generations
