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>I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.

I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.

The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.

> They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.

Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?

Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.

The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.

I do think the general purpose screens of today are doing a disservice for education. There are too many possible distractions a child isn't prepared to resist yet. But it could enable more advanced workflow for personalized learning.

I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The bottom of the k has different needs.

Tech can save you from a bad educational environment. I think kids need extreme amounts of freedom with guidance on what are the best tools to be used for learning. From visualizing linear algebra and analytic geometry problems to piracy. If anything, the teachers need to improve their tech literacy.

There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.

Using tech also meant you got an iPad because otherwise teachers and IT would be overwhelmed. That the kids were already much more apt at using such devices was secondary.

In the context of general education I can understand the strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison, you need to give your users freedom.

You're assuming tech will ever be removed.

Kind of why Khan Academy makes me cringe.

> After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake.

I have several friends who work in education.

At one point there were computer labs in school, there was education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).

All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is, in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a net positive.

> EdTech

To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and faculties interactions with it is/are.

"Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time: https://xkcd.com/1227/

I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.

As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.

Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.

~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.

The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4.

https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]

there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field

no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)

About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age actually.

That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad of 3

"screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online.

The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.

Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.

I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.

> You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book

If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!

It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time

>Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject

What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?

> Source: I have 10 Finnish kids

Wait what?

> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids

Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.

The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.

if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.

It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.

Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.

I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks out, at least according to media reports about his family. Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption, seems hasty.

I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play out.

Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educational lectures.

> And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.

I doubt that, but the others seem reasonable

That we shouldn't take child rearing advice from the man who killed himself with fruit juice.

As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.

> And that much of Silicon Valley’s leadership (and the world’s rich, for that matter) send their own kids to Montessori, Steiner, and other educational institutions that prefer pencil and paper to digital tablet, conversations to smartphones, modeling clay and outdoor imagineering to online gaming.

> In their book, ‘Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,’ educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: “It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”

"The Battle for Your Kids' Hearts and Minds" https://kidzu.co/parent-perspective/the-battle-for-your-kids...

Zucchini also thinks spending $80 billion on a failed metaverse is a good bet, so maybe they're not the experts of everything.

It’s probably more nuanced than this. Would I have let my kids use Facebook in the height of its popularity. Absolutely. It was fun, engaging and user driven.

Now it’s just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and boomers posting in groups.

I don’t even think it’s appropriate to call it social media anymore. It’s barely social.

Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.

Yep, that's why it won't help. The rest of the time at home, they will stick to the screen.

Are Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman generally seen as experts in childhood development and education?

TBH the problem is not the iPad here.

An offline iPad with a limited set of educational apps/books would be a good classroom aid

Of course, an iPad without those limits is bad

He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely addictive to kids who are none the wiser.

> What does that tell us?

It tells us three things:

1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature.

2. Get them to read books as an alternative.

3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.

That the elite is poisoning the masses.

exactly, makes me think... if person who makes the bread does not feed his own family, something is wrong

The kids you mention likely have multiple VR, AR and other gadget setups in their own home. Too much of a good thing is just that.

you're assuming zuck or jobs kids have anything resembling "normal" children lives

It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what technology companies market to the masses and what the people behind those technologies actually endorse for their families

It tells us that you seem to assume a lot.

That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However, especially the US, few people will parent their children in a way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools, which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the children. The community with do nothing since they view the parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.

So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.

2 of your 3 pieces of evidence are your guesses ("I bet", "I assume").

That tells us more about you than about tech CEOs.

You are assuming they all act as wise and with the foresight of Jobs.

Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on the relation of people and technology. The others are just finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.

> Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'

This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.

Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.

The telescreens are for you, not for them.

On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is only an advisor to the leader of some some small little organization called the world economic forum says you and your children should be kept “happy” with drugs and video games.

Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your children “worthless” children.

[1] https://youtu.be/QkYWwWAXgKI

I'm teaching programming and algorithms at uni. Only blackboard.

> When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.

That is a) a BS claim and b) wouldn't be a feature, on average, given the quality of college lectures.

It seems fairly clear that manual note taking help with learning, over using a computer, but overblown claims like this do more damage than good in convincing people to do the right thing.

Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason. Procrastination is hell of a drug.

I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.

People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.

Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.

I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.

If you open any of my middle school notebooks you'll find around 5-10x more doodles than notes, by surface area.

It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.

> I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.

I went to school a million years ago, but IIRC we kept our textbooks in the classroom until middle school (7th grade for me). Maybe one textbook might go home with math homework or an English project. For my kid, they would usually just send worksheets home; which is ok, but if you wanted to reference not on the sheet, too bad. Post-covid, there's a lot more dependence on google classroom with all that comes with it (but maybe that's also how the upper grades were working anyway)

E-readers with textbooks loaded could work, but hopefully the textbooks are tuned for the medium.

Anyway, isn't a heavy backpack a secret fitness program???

Anecdotal, but I do not think e-ink displays are as good for reading or benefiting from handwriting as an actual purely physical medium. They just don't have the affordances of durably occupying physical space. I say this as someone who has done quite a bit of review of the literature and has a kindle and a Supernote.

Yeah, I think eink displays are the happy medium for tech for kids. And even then, you should limit the capabilities to be effectively the same as working with paper.

Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give internet access. Let the device sync at school with required books and assignments.

Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's the extent of what they should have.

Or get everyone a nice camping backpack. Still less than the iPad and duel purpose!

Ereaders (Kindle scribe specifically) has been a huge discovery! I cannot make any claims, but my daughter draws on it, writes on it, does homeworks on it and reads so many books on it (she is 7). She liked it as soon as she saw it. I decided to gave her my Scribe,which I deeply miss.

It's essentially a notebook and a book reader.

You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs can only have notes on the side).

I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets please.

Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its uses :) )

Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.

That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.

The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.

And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.

Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.

Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.

To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.

Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad.

For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.

What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.

The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.

>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.

Allegations without evidence.

Usually you have to prove the effect of introducing something new.

Why do you think children will learn anything from a remark on a specific problem? If it were that simple, teaching would be easy. (Notice that teaching smart kids is easy).

Much of education requires making errors until you get it right a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors. Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.

> But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.

Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high confidence and believe it?

using AI for education is one of the worst ideas for education.

I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable.

I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.

I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).

Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)

Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning though?

I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.

> With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.

Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?

There are books with written solutions.

If you aren't sure your answer is correct then you're more likely to redo the problem or try to confirm it with fuzzier calculations. This is difficult and is great exercise.

Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.

Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.

Interesting. Where we currently live, kids carry all books back and forth between home and school every day in giant backpacks.

this is a problem. we make photos of the pages. i think there should be always a digital option when you have a physical book.

why not just buy 2 sets ? problem solved ?

That sounds very dystopian. The ai teacher part, not the no devices part

(Maybe use some of those skills to figure out a way to read more than the headline.)

I recommend reading at least the closing line:

This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.

Laptops and tables are, as it turns out, not so cheap either. They need to be fixed or replaced at an alarming rate, and they lay claim to a much larger part of a school budget than books ever did. That is part of the reason that we revert back to pen, paper and books in Norway. First for 1-4 grade, but it will be push further up the grades as we go, I think.

Dot-matrix impact printers are still being sold and still have the lowest cost per printed page. The quality sucks, but for draft-only content (like LLM answers) that you're scribbling on it's not an issue. B/W laser printers are not too far behind though, just avoid brands like HP that gouge you on toner cartridges.

This is all downstream of the backlash against social media and AI, and it's attacking the symptom rather than treating it IMO. You don't need to abandon digital tools entirely, you need to control how they're used in the classroom.

Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts.

Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.

Education research is really low quality. Like so many other fields in social sciences, the results rarely generalize beyond the direct findings, and only support the hypotheses in the mildest way. It cannot robustly guide decision making.

The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or point at differences in the stimuli, something which should obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking, article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.

Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better studies. The average education research study is several levels below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.

Please don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments to HN [1]. You're welcome here, but only if you write in your own voice [2]. The community feels strongly about this.

[1] see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This has been a shocking discovery for me too. The library near us recently said it's cheaper for them to buy a book then an ebook.

It's absolutely insane.

Fully agree. I went to school in Germany and many of our textbooks were free there. Sometimes you would get a textbook that is already >= 10 years and out of shape but who cares? Especially the basic knowledge does not change often. Buying all these textbooks new every year feels like a scam to me as they are then only used for one year by the pupil.

Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price. Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year. Still, they were often seen as optional.

the other part nobody talks about is hauling that bloody fuckton of paper to between house, its bus stop, the school, and its bus stop either.

You could sell them after too. Now the book is the same price but it's a 1 year license. The platform we used was so restricted that it would block access the moment your network connection dropped.

> sits on the shelf for the next kid.

Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.

don't worry, they'll have plenty of opportunity to mess with AI. Fun thing about AI is that you just use it and helps you, I don't know that there's much to learn there in terms of end user experience.

On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence) is not something you can skip learning and expect a good outcome.

Man, this is such an odd take. I don't need to imagine, I grew up in a country where math teachers would laugh you out of the classroom if you asked to use a calculator. Guess what? We did everything manually.

I then moved to North America for my last year of high school, and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical black box.

which city is that? I want to move there with my children.

If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as original work, feel free to move to Virginia.