[caldarons]

As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea.

In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.

Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.

Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It's bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.

So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).

[scythe]

I think a lot of it started because of one of the better intended projects — the One Laptop Per Child movement that tried to give laptops to kids in poor countries. A key premise was that a laptop could be cheaper than all of the textbooks normally required, so the whole thing was really saving money.

But envy is one of the most powerful forces in politics, even when it doesn't make sense. So the idea that children in Namibia were getting laptops, while kids in Virginia weren't — even though it was a money-saving trick — that was just unacceptable. And unlike in the OLPC, schools bought laptops from a variety of vendors, mostly interested in upselling lots of unnecessary features rather than providing a lightweight textbook device. Anyone familiar with the history of the TI-83 understands that corporations selling technology to schools are the lowest form of life.

I can't say for sure that this is what caused it, but it was right around the time that laptops started showing up in schools, and also when the concept of the "netbook" was introduced. The early netbooks certainly seemed to be imitating that weird green blob-shaped thing that OLPC hoped would revolutionize education in the less developed world.

[aleph_minus_one]

> the One Laptop Per Child movement that tried to give laptops to kids in poor countries.

Relevant:

Morgan G. Ames

The Charisma Machine

The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

> https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/

[ghaff]

The idea of using electronics in classrooms to help education long predated OLPC. Obviously it took different forms but it has a very long (and mostly not very happy) history.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.

I would not fault computers here. At my school time, when pupils were bored, they covertly played card games like Skat [a German card game] or graph paper games like Battleship, Racetrack, Connect Four, ... under the school desks.

I still remember this one girl who, when the teacher confiscated one deck of Skat cards, the moment that the teacher looked away, simply took out another deck from her school bag, and play continued (she played Skat semi-competitively, so she nearly always had, I think, dozens of decks of Skat cards in her school bag).

Another former friend had an insane creativity in turning stuff that one could find in a pencil case into contraptions for shooting rubber pieces.

Technology changes over time, humans don't.

[DoughnutHole]

The existence of pre-internet distractions doesn’t negate the potency and pervasiveness of post-internet distractions.

Yea bored kids have always found ways to entertain themselves in class. But this is a matter of scale.

Kids being able to covertly play battleship on pen and paper is many steps removed from every kid in the class being constantly plugged into a network where the wealthiest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars competing for their attention.

Kids with unfettered access to the internet in the classroom might as well be sitting in a casino.

[martopix]

It's not quite the same. I, a responsible adult, find myself fiddling with my phone when attending talks, even when I'm supposedly interested in the talk. Once I start, I missed the beginning and don't understand the rest of the talk even if I try to focus later. The level of temptation is quite different.

[andybak]

Would the issue be resolved by a resiliant way to lock all devices into a particular mode?

i.e. "Word processing only" "specific website(s) only" etc

I'm aware that actually implementing this in a fool-proof way is non-trivial - but would it in theory solve the issue and allow the benefits of tech?

I can't imagine taking notes by hand any more.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Would the issue be resolved by a resiliant way to lock all devices into a particular mode?

In my experience, pupils are insanely creative in getting around such restrictions: pupils have a lot of time, and in each grade there is this one guy (nearly always male) who combines being knowledgeable in computer topics, and having subversive traits (if not in the grade, there exists someone who has a big brother with these traits who will have a lot of fun helping his little brother to destroy the digital cage). Once a way is found, in a few days it has spread around the schoolyward.

[mythhabit]

Fine if they control the devices, but it better be well working, otherwise it will be a huge distraction and potentially be taking time from the teacher<>student interactions.

[Erratic6576]

I graduated and went to Germany for seconds. Got myself a fancy laptop so I could thrive during the lessons, browsing Reddit. I wish I had known

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.

Whether they like it is not is secondary; did they learn to use the machine? Because some amount of ability to use computers is rather important in the modern world.

[thunky]

If a kid can play video games in school all day and still make grades, then there is something wrong with the school, not the student.

[op00to]

It’s amazing that laptops were the thing that introduced distraction to pupils in school. Not paper football. Not whispering. Not passing notes. Not staring out the window. Not sleeping. Not spending too much time in the bathroom.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

The person you're replying to never said anything like it, they said it made distraction worse. You're arguing in bad faith.

[squarefoot]

I recall of epic battles with pens turned into blowguns. Making lessons interesting is a lost art, and uninterested pupils will always find a way to distract themselves with what they have at hand, laptops or not.

[kergonath]

That’s a straw man. Nobody said that there were no distractions in classrooms before laptops, just that they made it orders of magnitude worse. Which they did.