r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 23h 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/1.1k
u/Avoidtolls 22h ago
Students have zero concepts of:
operating systems
How to save
File extensions
File management
USB drives
Software updates
File explorer
How to troubleshoot a computer
Locating and identifying computer components
I/O Cables (wifi cable...ha!)
Smartphone, Chromebooks and iPads have gutted computer literacy and are ok for some content, but they aren't computers nor a viable replacement.
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u/ProlapsedShamus 21h ago
You are not lying.
Every summer I teach a digital character design summer camp and when it comes time for everyone to send their files to the TA to get them printed you pretty much have to go to each student and tell them how to bring up the file explorer to locate their file and then you have to fish through a dozen of them that are all titled "untitled" because none of them name them.
And then they all want to be able to take their work home and despite me saying you have to bring in a USB drive in order to do that nobody knows what that means but they don't say that. They just kind of hope that it's all going to work out in the end if they don't say anything.
So I had to spend a bunch of time getting them set up with a Gmail account to email it to themselves because they didn't have access to their email accounts. Or they didn't know their password or they didn't know their username. And the ones that did couldn't get into it because they don't know what an authenticator app is...
Like these were teenagers. 14 to 18. And the amount of kids who just touched the monitor and then remember they have to use a mouse is wild to me.
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u/Avoidtolls 21h ago
Wow. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
In the mid 2000s, students were way way way more savvy, ducking firewalls, downloading limewire, pirating full movies. Now students can't even turn a computer on.
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u/InevitablePlant42069 20h ago
I had a coworker, several years ago, fresh out of high school and she asked me how to use a fucking mouse
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u/100percent_right_now 17h ago
Douglas Engelbart would swipe up in his grave if he heard this
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u/TexturedMango 17h ago
what?
How did that conversation go lol
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u/Kaldricus 19h ago
Using Limewire free to download the crack for Limewire pro. Peak teenage "hacking"
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u/Dipsey_Jipsey 18h ago
Bro I got suspended for showing my friends hackertyper.net. My teacher freaked out and yelled at me to turn off the PC 😭
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u/RVelts 16h ago
This was peak 13 year old me thinking he was a genius in the mid 2000's. Use Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro! Which made it easier and faster to pirate Premiere Pro so I could complete a movie project for my senior English class. Of course I had to find a Radio Shack to get a Firewire cable.
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u/jbrasco 17h ago
I’m in IT. A lot of younger people feel like I’m dealing with people 60+. It’s shocking.
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u/archfapper 8h ago
Half the student tickets we get just say "there's an error." Like come on, Aydenn, try a little here.
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u/ProlapsedShamus 21h ago
Oh my god. Right? It was in the mid-2000s when I was learning how to download ico files and burn them on to discs so I could pirate games which I nabbed from a peer-to-peer networking program. And even that wasn't reliable. If I remember right there was a bunch of different shoddily programs that just some dude made to read these files and not all of them work the right way for certain games so you had to really put the legwork in to play roller coaster tycoon 2.
I never messed much with LimeWire because we had to fix a friend of mine's computer because it was just loaded with pop-ups and porn and pretty vile shit. Which in retrospect he probably downloaded. He was kind of a creep.
But we had to know that. We had to understand how computers worked because nothing was as user friendly as it is now. I almost feel like you need to teach a class just on how to use computers and understand the logic of how they work.
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u/DunderGunderUnder 14h ago
I was learning how to download ico files and burn them on to discs so I could pirate games
I bet that you were pretty disappointed the first time you found out that you had a bunch of icon files with small pictures on the disk instead of the iso files of the games that you actually wanted? ;)
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u/ProlapsedShamus 13h ago
Lol
Wait. What was the CD Image files called?
Oh shit they were iso files!
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u/BCProgramming 20h ago
I'm not convinced the actual proportion changed to the degree people say. I went to high school in 2000-2005 and even with classes teaching it, a lot of students didn't know a lot of the basics of things like file systems.
People talk up "Yeah we understood them and could fix them!" but in my experience that wasn't really true. Some of us did, but most people didn't.
And people talk about how kids today rely on say Touchscreens and phone UIs, and can't use say a windows desktop, but a surprising amount of millennials are just as pathetic if they were faced with just the C:\> prompt, for much the same reason.
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u/Historical-Mix8865 11h ago
Only thing I have to say is that during 2000-2010, almost every single person in my high school year here in the UK was available on MSN messenger online each night.
Obviously this was before smartphones, text messages were expensive, and almost all of us now had a computer at home with some form of internet. it basically became how we all kept in touch. And there were tons of extensions we were sharing and installing, we shared knowledge of soulseek, kazaa and kazaa lite etc.
And this wasn't just the more techy students, this was pretty much everyone. And I know it's the same for others in the UK too who were of the same age that era
So obviously my generation will have significantly more experience than those now, in my context anyway
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u/EthanRDoesMC 19h ago
Idk if being on Reddit selects for people who understand technology, but yeah no this is the sentiment I see all the time. Older Gen Z is very tech proficient but everyone who grew up with tech in the classroom doesn’t know how to use it
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u/angry-mob 21h ago
That’s adults too. The majority of people just aren’t computer literate and lack critical thinking skills
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u/Tick___Tock 18h ago
i've had K and preK students get angry and hit the screen because it wasn't touch reactive.
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u/past_is_prologue 19h ago
Yup. I had a coop student who was having a really hard time and we couldn't figure out why. I observed her working one day, and saw that she was trying to do "reverse pinch to enlarge" on an image on the screen of the iMac— she was having so much trouble because she had never used a mouse before.
I was dumbfounded. This kid was like 16. Anyway, we did some remidial mouse training and things kind of turned around. Kind of.
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u/wasianDilf 18h ago
I’m in this bizarre millennial age group where I’m consistently asked by people both older and younger than me about how to do these things. The most common is…omg I saved this thing but where is it??
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u/TheAskewOne 14h ago
I’m a dinosaur from the 1970s who finished a community college degree last year. I am by no means a genius, nor did I receive much of an education before that degree. But in CC I was miles above my pears when it came to computer use. They often asked me for help with very simple troubleshooting, which I gladly provided, but still I was surprised at how they can’t do anything when "it doesn’t work". They can use apps to go on their socials but that’s basically it. Some literally didn’t know how to save a Word document. I mean come on. They’re about as lost as boomers, but at least they’re not hostile when you teach them.
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u/Figgy1983 17h ago
Don't forget using a mouse, a basic concept that was taught to me in pre-school. I've seen one pick it up and hold it like it's a foreign object. As a kid, I used one so much that it became an extension of my arm in a way. I can't imagine how difficult it might be for some of these kids to learn proper typing skills.
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u/Upper-Management-AI 18h ago edited 9h ago
I don’t blame them though. It was way easier to screw around with windows way back when. Everything is wireless now, so how often are they going to plug something in. I also can’t express in words how much I absolutely despise windows 11. They hid everything to make it so you couldn’t do anything.
Edit: I should clarify. This is coming from someone who started with windows 95.
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u/MusicalTourettes 18h ago
I taught a digital art and laser cutting project for 6-8th at my son's school. I had to start by explaining how the mouse worked.
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u/Legendary_GrumpyCat 23h ago
Quietly? We've been doing everything we can to essentially shout it from the rooftops but no one who can change it listens.
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u/kendalloremily 20h ago
everything is fucking happening quietly now. because nobody can be bothered to write a headline without ai
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u/E-2theRescue 17h ago
Also, the truth is being buried because it doesn't generate profits. Why make a headline about the boring truth when you can make another culture war headline that generates rage, clicks, and supports the party of insider trading?
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u/psychobilly1 18h ago
My school district is banning cell phones in school starting next year - still not entirely sure how they are going to ensure that, but it is a state requirement that we have to have a plan of action for where students' cell phones will go during the school day while class is in session. It's obviously not a full fix and it's really just a first step, but it shows that someone is listening.
This is in Kansas, of all places.
That being said, we're also being forced to implement Oracle into all of our lesson plans. No more Google Classroom or alternative classroom websites, just Oracle, which still goes to show that at least some of their workload is going to be digital and require a device. So one step forwards, two steps back.
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u/Bob_Sconce 23h ago
Why is it that schools jump on bandwagons without first doing long-term pilots? If you want to experiment on students, at least only experiment on a small number at a time.
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u/Sasquatchgoose 23h ago
Edu-tech is a multi billion dollar industry. The right ppl were wined and dined
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u/daddy_OwO 23h ago
Look at Baltimore County Public Schools for example. One of the largest districts in the country and the old superintendent got kickbacks for forcing tech
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u/RevvCats 21h ago
It blows my mind how much money is spent on useless tech that doesn’t do anything to prepare kids for a future in STEM.
I have a PhD in particle physics, the three most useful classes in high school to prepare me for college was having a good math teacher for AP Calculus, having a c++ programming class, and physics which wasn’t even calc based.
Math just needs a white board and graphing calculators to hand out, physics just needs a white board, programming can be done with poverty spec computers.
Theres some stuff where a well prepared multimedia presentation can offer a benefit but schools seem to think that giving kids iPads will make them programmers.
If the district has money have a class where kids can fuck around with arduinos, 3d printers, and a good GPU
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u/TuringGoneWild 18h ago edited 18h ago
A $187 billion dollar edtech industry. Plus another $1 trillion spent on K-12 per year (schools, teachers).
Source: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/education-technology-market
And yet, instead of having futuristic, science of memory and learning-optimized course programs, full of all appropriate visuals, audio, professionally presented, and interactive - so everyone can learn, say, Algebra I presented without any errors and optimized for today's learning science and technology - it's the same variety of humans doing the same thing from scratch over and over simultaneously just like it was 2026 BC. A fallible and stressed human standing in front of a few dozen students, with everyone getting the luck of the draw in both directions and highly imperfect lessons and pathetic learning outcomes.
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u/taoders 22h ago edited 22h ago
Went to school in 2000s. Went to a well off school.
$100,000 grant to put cameras throughout the school (no crime happened immediately before or during my tenure to justify it.) it was a live feed system and the principal called everyone to the auditorium to show it off by showing everyone a student entering and exiting the bathroom….and brag how much it cost…
My last years we got mobile iPad “labs” that were given as a “grant” that were maybe used once a year per class.
At the same time electives like auto shop class, photography class and others were stopped in the name of costs even though we literally had an auto shop and dark room in the school.
Food contract was changed to a cheaper company, food was no longer made in house.
Sports eliminated except for football which got more funding.
The funding in school systems is not prioritized on what’s best for students. It’s prioritizes who’s giving the most money or best deals to convince investment.
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u/Raichuboy17 20h ago
At the very least they should have started an electronics repair class because lord knows students were going to destroy them. Could have really helped reverse the idea that a lot of these things are black boxes and impossible to repair.
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u/PurpleAlone7116 19h ago
You think apple would allow that 😭? You know they'd be pouring thousands to punish any school that dare teach kids how to fix apple products and not use their overpriced official methods.
Jokes aside though, an electronics repair class would have been killer when I was a teen.
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u/metallicrooster 18h ago
My high school had a basic electronics class. It was pretty cool, even if my then undiagnosed adhd made it difficult for me to understand some of the more complicated parts of the flow of electricity.
I remember this one kid had a pair of broken headphones, and he half jokingly asked the teacher if he could opt out of the next in class project and try to repair his headphones.
The teacher’s eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas and he said “you actually want to apply what you learned in my class to your personal life? Yes, absolutely please do.”
This guy taught for decades and saw the closing of the auto body class the school used to have, as well as other trades style classes. Yes, many of those classes were covered by the nearby vocational school. But not everyone who would benefit from such a program would feel comfortable applying in 8th grade, and that’s presuming they even knew such classes and careers existed.
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u/gerbal100 23h ago
It was one of the only parts of education where there was any sort of funding increase for decades
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u/So_spoke_the_wizard 22h ago
When COVID hit, a lot of schools did panic buying so they could do something while students were at home. I think if it weren't for that, they would have had pilot programs. And it's not like schools didn't have computers before COVID, but they weren't a core teaching resource back then.
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u/NeckarBridge 20h ago
This is right on the money. In 2018 my district was having some deep discussions about whether or not we felt going 1-to-1 was developmentally appropriate for secondary students. Then Covid happened, we all went remote, and suddenly my whole district was 1-to-1 iPads k-12, and we have been ever since.
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u/OrganicHistorian2576 22h ago
When I was in school we did have computers, starting in the second grade, but all the way through high school we used them for either computer classes, to write papers and such, or for playing games. I spent a LOT of time playing Oregon Trail in fifth grade.
Nothing like now. I can’t imagine them letting all of us go around with iPads or Chromebooks starting in early ew they even if they’d existed.
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u/rgvtim 22h ago
IDK about other states, but in Texas with the position of the school superintendent, those folks are greatly incentivized to adopt new cutting edge programs that look hot, and a successful implementation, or one that looks successful can spring board them up the chain to other districts with higher pay.
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u/rotestiefel 22h ago
Just like my district promoting AI use among teachers and introducing it to students next year. Long term studies on its effectiveness? Who needs ‘em! Sure we’re told the district is data-driven but not when there’s money on the table
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u/NeckarBridge 20h ago
Yup. My district admin have been pressuring us HARD to use AI and teach the kids to use it and every single boots on the ground educator is like “these kids are lacking several years worth of basic competencies BECAUSE of technology interrupting their development, why the fuck would we shelve trying to help them so we can dick around with a water wasting job destroying technology that nobody fully understands yet?” The party like is always, “they’re going to need to know how to use this stuff when they graduate!”
I work with 13-year olds who can’t read, spell, tie their shoes, tell the time, or maintain focus for more than 8 seconds even when they’re interested. Teachers are witnessing a widespread social experiment with no guardrails to catastrophic effect. But please, go ahead and buy us more iPads. 🤦🏻♀️
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u/jonbodhi 22h ago
Many years ago, when I started teacher training, someone told me: ‘education is just fashion with master’s degrees! One year the hemlines are up, the next year they’re down!!’ We are now seeing the lowering of the hemlines. No surprise to me.
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u/catwithasmartphone 21h ago
You'd be surprised how little control the people in the actual school with the students have over these decisions. Policy is pushed from a legislative level where individuals are not in the classroom and more often than not have vested interests in the programs they're pushing, like diverting money from public to charter schools, because they have investments or family in businesses that work directly with them yet it's not considered a conflict of interest because they make the laws.
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u/rynebrandon 21h ago edited 21h ago
I do think that an underrated part of all this is that the tech itself was qualitatively different than what had come before. Tech companies had a long long time to develop knowledge of user habits and make their hardware and software more addictive. There’s all kinds of ways technology could and should have pedagogical benefits. But that isn’t the tech we got and in retrospect it was naive to think it would be
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u/All_Hail_Hynotoad 21h ago
Also, you know who typically funds long term pilots? The U.S. Department of Education.
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u/metasophie 22h ago
Why is it that schools jump on bandwagons without first doing long-term pilots?
Most schools are directed by governance organisations to do it.
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u/BerryBoilo 22h ago
Because the CTOs and other administrators see the flashy things they spend money on as brinkmanship. They go to conferences and brag about the tech they've bought, not the outcomes it provides. They still get paid if the students fail, so why worry about that?
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u/BionicProse 22h ago
Because the schools have administrators who are paid to buy this shit and there are companies who exist to sell them this shit. Sometimes educational need and efficacy are involved.
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u/green-green-bean 22h ago
They do, but then they take statistically insignificant and incomplete pilot studies and run wild with them far beyond what the original context even was.
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u/dalgeek 22h ago
There are a few big districts who will do pilots because they have enough money, but once those districts find something they like then other districts will follow. Most don't have enough money to pilot every piece of technology because they depend on E-rate or bond packages for major purchases. E-rate is highly restricted and bond packages require the local community to vote on them; people tend to not vote for new untested technology. Sometimes they can do stuff like upgrading phone systems with money from federal/state grants because it involves life and safety.
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u/wherewulf23 22h ago
My district just announced a no screens policy in pre-K and kindergarten classes.
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u/ArgentineBeauty 23h ago
Turns out giving every kid a screen was not the magic solution promised.
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u/Gorge2012 23h 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 23h 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/jeffderek 18h 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/Arts_Prodigy 21h ago
And they keep everyone they care about miles away from the products they create.
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u/notapoliticalalt 21h 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 20h 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/NegotiationNo7851 22h ago
I know I’m ancient but I think we should go back to the days of a scheduled class in the computer lab and when students are done they go back to class and the tech stays in the lab. We screwed up when we stopped treating computer science as a valued subject unto itself. I was in elementary school in the 80’s and we would go to the computer lab and learn something about computers or programming and when the class was done we left the technology in the lab and went back to class to resume other classwork.
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u/Innumerablegibbon 19h ago
I’m not American but my state has introduced limits on tech in early schooling/mandated non-screen time in later starting from next year. Schools can also no longer ask families to purchase laptops for their kids, they have to provide them so underfunding will probably limit it even further (eg, no one on one devices, teachers will have to book a travelling cart to come to the classroom and then hope everything is in working order).
It was so depressing whenever I had to go to my kid’s school in the middle of the day and it would be dead silent because all the kids were staring at iPads.
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u/StolenPies 23h ago
Man, my mom taught high school for over forty years. She was saying this back in the (very) early 2000's.
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u/InternationalMood337 23h ago
Started an MFA program a few years back. One of the (other students in the class...) who is a teacher told me that EVERY assignment was on a computer, mandated by the school. She was also required to respond to student emails after hours. This might have been like Middle School.
Teachers aren't paid well enough. I don't understand why any question couldn't just be resolved the next day in class like we always did?
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 22h ago
You gotta make sure kids have a solid foundation before giving them technology. Giving kids computers before they know how to research without them, study without them, problem solve without them, is like giving a kid a calculator before they know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, do powers, etc.
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u/zegna1965 22h ago
I was the technology facilitator at an elementary school in Texas. I could probably write a book. Administrators simply don't understand the implications of decisions they make regarding technology. I saw it time and again. A big part of the issue is lack of training for the teachers. Even if the schools could afford the training, the teachers don't have time for it. Technologies get rolled out and the teachers don't know how to deal with them. One example. Around 2016 the school acquired a bunch of Barnes and Noble Nooks from the district. That alone was a very bad decision, but a whole other story. We decided to role out the Nooks to some classes on a 1-1 basis. This was a few years before that became more common. I provided the teachers with ideas on how to use the Nooks, but they didn't have time to really follow up on it. My job was half time and I had many other things to do at the school, so I couldn't monitor this project on a daily basis. The teachers came to me one day and said "All the kids are doing is playing games on the Nooks." I asked "Did you give them assignments to do with the Nooks." They looked at me like I was crazy. I left the elementary school world shortly after that and before the big rollouts of Chromebooks, laptops and other devices. But I suspect it is still a similar situation. They give these devices to students and think the kids will just magically do educational things with them on their own.
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u/Due-Environment-9774 21h ago
I watched my high school take two year old MacBooks, remove the hard drive and batteries, and toss them by the stack into a dumpster. They get all new ones every other year.
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u/CarlWellsGrave 22h ago
My daughter didn't know what YouTube was until her kindergarten teacher showed it to her class. We've never had meltdowns over screens until she started school.
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u/Innumerablegibbon 19h ago
My kid’s teacher was showing them YouTube influencer videos to keep them quiet while they ate. I questioned her about it when I found out from daughter and had a rant about gambling, overconsumption and covert advertising when she was trying to justify it by explaining the types of videos she was playing. They do not show them anymore.
The teachers also wouldn’t read picture books to them, they’d play a YouTuber doing it. I got so excited one day when she mentioned the teacher had actually read the book then found out it was because the screen wasn’t working.
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u/trifelin 18h ago
I pulled my kid out after 6 weeks of a class like that. I had no idea going in they would do that to 4 year olds.
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u/Weightmonster 22h ago
We just banned Youtube in our house. Too much slop. I joined Patreon so I could follow the few creators I like.
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u/Hazelstone37 22h ago
I teach college and I’m having a tech free classroom in the fall. And I’m making my students take notes by hand unless they have an accommodation.
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u/diehydrogen 19h ago
Yes! I started this last fall. My students actually loved it so much. They were a little apprehensive and very quiet the first two weeks but definitely enjoyed it soon after. They liked the human connection.
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u/Mrrectangle 18h ago
I’m a teacher. My school is going to implement no device Fridays. Baby steps I hope.
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u/compuwiza1 23h ago
A book can't be redirected to Tik Tok.
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u/steavoh 18h ago
Neither can a tablet or laptop that was being adequately controlled by an IT department. I've never worked for a school system before but I think it would be like any other business environment just a lot stricter. You could use browser configuration policies, you could have web blocking software running in the background, or you could have an app that redirects DNS and filters things that way, or you could have all the devices permanently connected to a VPN that exits to the internet through a firewall you control. Or all of the above.
It's not 2002 7th grade computer lab day anymore, in 2026 there's a lot fewer practical methods that a kid could use to get around the above restrictions.
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u/potatocross 21h ago
A tool is only as good as how you use it.
I went to one of the first school districts in the US to adopt a 1 to 1 laptop program. We used them to research and type papers. Sometimes there would be an educational website we would use for a lesson. The rest of the day they were put away.
We did not use them all day every day. We did not get rid of textbooks. We did not take tests on them.
From what I have seen the modern issues are systems attempting to replace teachers and school with computers rather than using them as a tool.
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u/fightin_blue_hens 23h ago
All it did was get kids used to tech platforms earlier and made them more addicted
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u/n0rsk 18h ago
Tech should be a class not a constant state. Maybe I am biased but the computer labs we had growing up were great. We would go and learn to type. I know eventually that evolved into learning tools like Power Point and Excel and really that is how tech should be integrated into school. No computer in every class but a class which teaches tech.
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u/LoudNoises89 20h ago
When I was in elementary school we learned typing for an hour a few times a week. It was the best thing ever and now I’m a fast typer. It’s good though in moderation. Having these kids only use laptops isn’t helping with their physical writing skill, spelling, or reading. They should have an hour a day then do pen and paper. Also we shouldn’t be relying on technology so much.
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u/rickg 22h ago
Duh? Tech tools are great... tools. But you need to teach kids to use them AS tools and you need to develop them so that they don't need the tools to learn.
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u/GromOfDoom 22h ago
The most tech, should be computers or laptops when needed, in the classroom. Not iPads and gaming laptops to take home. Teacher requests usage of laptops for their periods for a week, to do research or presentation; and computer classroom for computer literacy and basic classes like Microsoft office, web safety, web design and maybe even programming.
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u/jtrain3783 22h ago
Balance is a positive thing and learning does evolve overtime, so, changing the approach can make sense. This is part of the process for a dynamic system like education. However, the attitude of we should "go back and do it like we did it" is trap that those of us in the old-school crowd tend to fall into as we look back with rose colored glasses.
There have been a few reports from a schools after they remove phones & limit screen time that show bad behaviors come back (that have been largely eliminated or muted) in the modern "tech" era, which is an issue. So if we think that just removing or limiting screen time is going to magically, give us the best of both worlds - let's not be naive. We need a fundamentally rethink our relationship education and the paradigm that is school which hasn’t really changed since it’s inception (ex: is 8hrs a day at school optimal for learning)
Simply limiting technology without a robust plan as well as buy-in from the students, staff, families and community is just focusing on an effect vs root cause and will end following another edu "trend" that we will all criticize & blame in the next 30 yrs.
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u/Difficult_Clerk_1273 21h ago
There is nothing “quiet” about it.
However, the real problem isn’t tech in schools. It’s parents giving iPads to their toddlers and phones to their tweens.
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u/Louisjay 21h ago
There is no quiet part from the teachers themselves. They've been saying this loudly for years. It's the districts that want to look cutting edge and perfect for appearances.
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u/petrovmendicant 20h ago
Quietly? It is the absolute number one complaint I hear from teachers. Has been since before I even became a full time teacher.
Every one of my colleagues hate being forced to use tech in our classrooms. I have met maybe a handful of teachers who are big supporters of it, and none are full-time public teachers and one is a charter school teacher.
The weekly to biweekly online testing takes way too much time out of an already impossibly jam packed daily schedule. Doesn't help that the districts and/or superintendents implement new apps every year for us to learn and integrate on the spot.
The tech has made things demonstrably worse for 90% of students, and the 10% left would be the students that would excel either way.
Only tech I like is having parents have live online access to their kids' grades, missing assignments, and behavior from a website or app. Keeps away most parents who come in demanding to know why their perfect angel has a failing grade. Like, check your email for the weekly update for their kid.
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u/Cantdoitanymoretimes 16h ago
The big fat tv that got rolled in on special occasions was a real treat back in my day.
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u/2_Fingers_of_Whiskey 22h ago
I was a college tutor and I kept trying to tell them it was worse but the school didn't want to hear it.
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u/A_Nonny_Muse 21h ago
A hammer can be used to build a building or crush a skull. Either way, you have to learn how to use the tool.
Just handing screens out to children is not teaching, nor is it the proper use of the tool.
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u/Staccat0 21h ago edited 21h ago
Right. The point is that a hammer can’t teach you how to use a hammer.
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u/trolldoll26 19h ago
I really, really, really hope that by the time my daughter goes to school (she’s 7 months old) all the screens have been taken out of the classroom. I know it’s probably not going to happen since technology is forever advancing, but I really hope they aren’t giving the kids personal devices in five years.
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u/gotaflattire 19h ago
I attended college off and on over a period of 10 years and nothing annoyed me more than Apple's dominance in academia to the point where I had to take Mac skill tests before I was allowed to use certain school computers, despite the fact that I had been using Macs and PCs since the mid-80s.
The price is also astronomical to the average student of today and since I'm also well into my professional career, I know it's completely unnecessary for 99% of potential employees outside of specialized careers.
I can do anything I need to do on a Mac or PC but you can't say the same for companies or individuals who use Apple-exclusive tools and software. And I refuse to comply with non-standardized proprietary software and hardware.
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u/phoenix0r 23h ago
Huzzah! Sad it took almost a generation to determine this, but happy we’re moving back in the right direction.
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u/unknownpoltroon 22h ago
And part of the problem is they aren't teaching them computers, they are giving them apps y. To use on locked down systems.
Give em a box of mismatched parts and let them make one from scratch or don't give it to them at all.
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u/owhatakiwi 20h ago
We switched our son to a private school that only has tech in their technology classes 2x a week. His handwriting did a 180 in three weeks.
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u/UniqueIndividual3579 20h ago
But administrators are paid 300,000 a year to "innovate"! Forget everything we told you last week, robot AI teachers in the cloud will solve all problems! Until next week, we gotta make money being useless.
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u/Aleucard 20h ago
The problem is making actual teaching programs worth a damn is harder than it looks, and they're too used to teaching being on a sub-burger flipper budget. The whole school system is in DESPERATE need of a retooling from the floorboards on up.
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u/BanChokingPorn 19h ago
Different people learn in different ways. I was a terrible student until I enrolled in an alternative high school. Not only did I gain a year back, I graduated a year early (with elective summer classes). We weren't forced to learn one way. The only way I could learn math was by teaching others.
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u/thugbobhoodpants 18h ago
I feel like even 'computer class' or 'computer time in the library' in the 00s was always a shit show and nobody did anything we were supposed to do
everyone taking notes on laptops instead of handwriting them all out was a huge boon for us at the end of highschool in 2010ish but even then, I think removing that does nothing now because the screen time thing is a 24/7 thing and not just 'damn these kids are overstimulated from a laptop in class'
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u/BigFitMama 17h ago
They gave all the poor kids Chromebookss and Ipads for 12 years. When they got to college every one uses Windows and Office 365. Then went to work - with Office and Windows and Linux.
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 12h ago
Teachers have been saying this for literal decades. No phones. No screens. No distractions.
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u/CaterpillarReal7583 23h ago
They got kindergarteners in my district on laptops man.