Comment by livrem

Swedish parent here. I have not seen any effect from this yet. Hopefully there will be some improvements in time for my youngest kid. A new year in school began last month, and for my oldest kids what "acquiring knowledge primarily from freely available digital sources that have not been vetted for accuracy" means in practice (and if anything, so far it has been worse this last month than ever before): Each child gets a Chromebook. They get assignments through Google Classroom. Typically the assignments are things like "here are 20 questions; find answers!" and they are more or less on their own Googling and reading Wikipedia to figure things out. I noticed for a few assignments they get lists of recommended reading as well, and sometimes links to youtube videos that are relevant. And links to some awful, ad-riddled, quiz-site, for practice, that at least one of the teachers like to link to.

If I understand correctly some of the linked articles and videos are on some paywalled sites containing content specially made for school, so presumably there was some vetting there? When I had a brief look at some articles on subjects I happen to know a bit about I was not particularly impressed though. The printed books they used to have were WAY better.

Not that I am sure things are automatically better on paper. I read 99% ebooks and prefer that to books. But what they get now is not anything like the same books, but digitally, unfortunately. And linking to ad-supported sites, in addition to all the Google-dependencies, makes it worse.

On the positive side, my oldest son quickly figured out how to install Linux on his Chromebook to run games. I do not think they are allowed to do that, but I am not going to read the fine print to find out.