This is incredibly misleading in so many ways.
First off, having lower scores on standardized tests does not somehow mean that there is cognitive decline. You can not measure intelligence as it is an abstract concept that doesn’t have a clear definition to begin with. Even if you could, there is zero possibility of it changing in a meaningful way as humans are still humans. Technology is being scape coated here as it is a much easier answer than addressing the systemic issues with the education system. The average age of a person in the US is almost 40 which means on average a person hasn’t been in high school in 20 years. Public school systems have gone down hill significantly as the government is run by a voter base that cares way more about retirement and loweing taxes than it does on securing the future for young Americans. The “technology” problem is really just private equity and other large companies preying on the school system to sell destructive digital products to schools that can’t afford to hire more staff. Teachers don’t get paid much to begin with but it is way cheaper to pay a few thousand to a large company for a education platform than it is to hire a few extra people. Furthermore, students are now being subject to massive draconian style surveillance and other phycologically damaging techniques which lead to the destruction of identity and the death of creativity. No long are students allowed to explore the world as that would be far to dangerous. We put students in a phycological prison and then wonder why they aren’t doing well on tests.
You can not measure intelligence as it is an abstract concept that doesn’t have a clear definition to begin with. Even if you could, there is zero possibility of it changing in a meaningful way as humans are still humans.
You are arguing against yourself here, if it’s fundamentally not possible to measure it then speculation around what a measured value could and could not be used for is useless, especially in such absolutist terms.
If it is measurable then variation could and would exist, based on the external interactions with whatever phenomenon would affect this variable.
With the exception, of course, of it being some fundamental constant, which would be unusual in a scientific sense.
The rest i mostly agree with, though i might move around the cause and effect a bit on some of those, but it doesn’t really change the outcome.
Public school systems have gone down hill significantly as the government is run by a voter base that cares way more about retirement and loweing taxes than it does on securing the future for young Americans.
There’s plenty of funding available. Funding per pupil, adjusted for inflation, has never been higher. The problem is more about where the money is going rather than there not being enough of it.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one seeing this. “Technology” wasn’t the problem, the problem was “learning platforms” that don’t actually teach anything useful, and the fact that teachers weren’t the time or resources to actually integrate it meaningfully. Just throwing kids at Blooket or whatever nonsense software the district paid for is not “integrating computers into the classroom.”
Before I got a smartphone, I didn’t read books.
Now I listen to maybe 6 books per year, and read the equivalent of probably >20 books per year from news articles and Wikipedia.
It’s not the tool that matters, it’s how you use it
The public school system makes reading such a unpleasant experience that kids avoid touching where ever possible.
For many people, it was the opposite.
And most folks with the tool are using it to scroll silly memes on places with names like tiktok, reddit, and lemmy
Only YOU can prevent memes on Lemmy
No I don’t think I will.
I don’t think it’s as black-and-white as it’s being presented. I think it comes down to how the laptops and tablets were used, not that they were used. Devices should be used in combination with textbooks (edit: and more traditional teaching methods). It’s just that the methodology was trash. Teachers relied on these devices entirely.
I grew up using computers in combination with textbooks in the 90s because the capability of computers was limited back then, and I did very well in school. And I did very well in college after. So did my cohorts. But my teachers and professors knew how to use these tools together.
Education supplier contracts should be dependent on efficacy. I worked for one that sold English courses around the world and they knew it was rubbish, the exams had very low pass rates, not because the students were stupid but because the course was shit. That was a textbook based course.
When I was in Uni 10 years after you, we all got our textbooks from our peers on a Dropbox that just got passed down from student to student.
Took me a few years to figure this out, and saved me a tooon of $$ by not having to buy textbooks.
And I always preferred the digital version. So much faster to Ctrl+f or flip back between the appendix and the chapter.
That’s what I did for my second undergrad degree and for my masters. Definitely saved a lot of time and money ❤️
Yeah, I would have loved to have one notebook/laptop instead of 6 heavy books and have to waste time going to my locker to change them out so I didn’t carry all of them at once. Also would be easier to take notes
first of all, everyone needing their own, individual copies of a textbook was bullshit pushed by the textbook publishers to make sales. They could just be in the classrooms and shared between classes and replaced as necessary.
second, taking notes on a laptop/tablet would have been awesome, too.
third, being able to use the internet for research while in high school? also would have been great, and was in college-- although… the internet back then was also a much more straightforward academic resource and not the toilet it is today, along with instructors who actually gave me pretty good advice on how to use it. Nowadays, there would need to be an entire class on how to use the Internet for research purposes while steering clear of the turdbergs of mis/disinformation out there.
students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
So it sounds like the problem isn’t the computers, it’s kids using the computers to fuck off and being distracted.
Do these not come with any sort of parental controls?
Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!
We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…
By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)
We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).
I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.
Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.
I guess it’s too much to ask for parental controls to actually function properly without significantly impairing students’ ability to learn.
Parental controls are an excellent tool to teach kids how to bypass parental controls.
I support this, so long as there’s no rules against kids learning how to bypass parental controls. It’s basically a CTF. All kids should learn how to mitigate internet censorship.
My daughter learned how to spoof her MAC address at age 12 to bypass any controls I added. Then I went with a separate WiFi for her which physically powered down when needed. She ‘solved’ that with a hammer to the lock on the cabinet with the equipment.
How did you reward her for this epic win?
“Would someone think of the children” gets used way to much to defend policies that harm children
Surveillance and control around tech has become highly advanced which means that it isn’t trivial to bypass restrictions like to was before. Chromebooks get locked down heavily and everything students do is carefully watched and controlled. What’s worse is that kids who can afford a laptop will have a major advantage which will further increase inequality.
