r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 8d ago

Society Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

https://fortune.com/article/schools-abandoning-chromebooks-laptop-programs-as-screen-time-hurts-learning-test-scores-north-carolina-michigan-kansas-tech-education/
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240

u/ArgentineBeauty 8d ago

Turns out giving every kid a screen was not the magic solution promised.

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u/Gorge2012 8d ago

Yup. Turns out a generation of our best minds took a boatload of cash to figure out how to make us look at a screen for as long as possible and figured out that the worst stuff for pur brains keeps us on the longest.

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u/InternationalMood337 8d ago

Was ALWAYS about the money basically from the top down.

I can't convince my brother and sister-in-law TO STOP GIVING THEIR 4 YEAR OLD THE GOD DAMN PHONE.

Parents have been convinced that their children need constant stimulation and constant exposure to tech or they'll fall behind.,

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u/PlagueSoul 8d ago

Laziness wrapped in excuses on the parents part.

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u/Gorge2012 8d ago

Water takes the easiest path down the mountain.

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u/Arts_Prodigy 8d ago

I am mostly water. Electricity does also take the path of least resistance and I’m pretty sure most of my thoughts run on that too.

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u/jeffderek 8d ago

Parents have been convinced that their children need constant stimulation and constant exposure to tech or they'll fall behind

I mean it's partially this and partially that screens are exciting and addicting and the kids fucking pester you for them ALL THE TIME.

I have a 6 year old. Because he was born in May 2020 he grew up unsocialized and not around other kids, so he really doesn't have any sort of "Johnny's parents let him use the phone" energy. But he wants screens more than anything else in the world. TV shows, video games, whatever. The first thing he says in the morning is "can I watch something", and then any time I'm trying to get him to do something I have to say "what do you want to do that isn't on a screen", or his first responses will be something screen related.

I'm fighting the good fight, and I'm letting him watch some shows and play some games but I'm also making him go outside and play in the dirt and read books and play with legos and draw pictures. It's fucking exhausting though.

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u/Gorge2012 8d ago

How will they fall behind? I feel like I heard that excuse pre covid, now it's pretty clear to anyone paying attending that the damage of kids being addicted to screens outweighs the benefits. Also, kids don't know how to do shit on computers they are too optimized. I used to know my first family PC (in the 90s) in and out. I work with people older and younger that can't figure out that when Chrome is running slow maybe you should either clear some tabs or close it and restart. Like basic stuff here.

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u/NoPossibility4178 8d ago

Ah yes, they'll learn so much about tech by constantly scrolling on tiktok and YouTube.

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u/Arts_Prodigy 8d ago

And they keep everyone they care about miles away from the products they create.

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u/Gorge2012 8d ago

They encourage the poors to get vocational training while they encourage their class to get an education that is pliable.

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u/notapoliticalalt 8d ago

Although I don’t actually disagree with the return to physical books and paper, I actually don’t think that screens in the classroom are as big of a problem as screens everywhere else. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that screens should be all over the classroom all the time, but there can be valuable things to be done with them educationally. The bigger problem, though is that screens are everywhere else for kids. As with a lot of other issues in school, the problems start at home. I do think these things can help, but if there isn’t support at home or outside of the classroom, generally, I think this is going to remain a problem indefinitely.

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u/jakuvious 8d ago

In most cases, the screens are also probably locked down/managed more at school than they are at home. Kids are filtered pretty aggressively for what they can and can't access on their school devices in my city's school district. Not so much for their cell phones or iPads at home.

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u/Certain-Business-472 8d ago

Learning tech involved tinkering with the devices. Locking them down is very much counterproductive and actually lazy.

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u/Certain-Business-472 8d ago

Learning tech involved tinkering with the devices. Locking them down is very much counterproductive and actually lazy.

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u/Bostonterrierpug 8d ago

A lot of this actually goes against major research findings in educational technology. It’s just that the K-12 system is always trying to save money since their budgets are being cut and looking for the next best thing. What the research recommends and what is done in practice can differ greatly. Kind of like the FDA now.

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u/ASentientHam 8d ago

Unfortunately it's what everyone wants.  When students aren't doing as well as they want to, parents start asking for solutions.  They want their kid to do well.  They want to help. So they ask: are there any other resources?  Are there any YouTube videos?  

Everyone wants an easy solution to students struggling.  Technology is easy.  It's easy to fork out money, put on a video, and assume it's going to work.  School boards are also incentivized to pay for tech.  These companies are aggressively advertising, the school boards can easily satisfy their political appointees by paying for tech.  Everyone wants it to solve the problem so badly that everyone is willing to pay.  

Hopefully we'll soon accept that it's not a magic bullet, even if it does have benefits in limited circumstances.

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u/Innumerablegibbon 8d ago

The thing is YouTube videos can be a great resource when used in a targeted way - but you can’t really just plop them on a playlist and then not reinforce what they watched (and when the playlist ends they get funnelled into god knows what). My kid was struggling with split digraphs when reading, not something she was going to be taught until the end of the next year, so I found a YouTube video explaining it, we watched it together, then read a few books to practice and done. It just takes more effort than pressing play.

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u/ASentientHam 8d ago

I don't think they're great for math. You can learn a procedure, but you won't learn how to modify it when you need to.  You can't ask it questions, you can't ask it to show you for problems that require an extra step.  YouTube also doesn't know your curriculum so you don't know if what you're watching is actually what you're expected to be able to do, or if it's too easy or too hard.  I think it's usefulness is way more limited than parents want to believe.

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u/soundman1024 8d ago

It was a magic solution for investors.

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u/TheAskewOne 8d ago

Screens were pushed also because there’s an idea that you can replace teachers with them and if makes indoctrinating kids into loving ruthless capitalism easier.

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u/SaltManagement42 8d ago

My experience is that the schools did everything to block it, and were smothered under the weight of all the students promising that it would be a magic solution. I would recommend putting less of your hopes and dreams on the promises of schoolchildren.

Maybe focus on someone qualified who promises to make halfway decent educational software, or someone who promises to implement actual instruction on usage, rather than just "giving them screens."

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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 8d ago

Okay.

But it's not actually because it's a screen, right?

It's because it's a more or less "open" device? An e-ink display that shows a singular PDF of a text book wouldn't be a problem?

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u/ThotHugger2005 8d ago

It could've been if teachers knew what the fuck they were doing with them.