Comment by mlsu
2 hours ago
It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
Now that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is outdated.
Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators can be overkill. I’ve only used one in college, and it was for a few exams about polar coordinates and transmission lines, IIRC. For everything else, the simpler scientific calculators were enough. Multiplying matrices and graphing functions doesn’t take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.
> Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum
The ~30% of US high schools that still have shop classes use power drills.
> The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Although this is the case for many people, I personally struggle to process information and write it on paper at the same time. Thus, I strongly prefer digital note-taking and use Obsidian or just vim instead of paper.
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shop class and drivers ed used to be offered by schools...
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I learned typing in 3rd grade iirc. That seems reasonable for a fundamental skill.
My kids are in grade 3 and 6 and nobody ever taught them to type. They just handed them a Chromebook and assumed they know what they're doing.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.
The problem is everyone knows you learn to type when you get on IRC, but you can't put elementary school kids on IRC.
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You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more than a billion typewriters, IIRC.
> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...
As someone who hates handwriting in bluebooks, and who types constantly, yes: I think we should bring back in-class writing by hand, we should lock up cellphones for the school day, and we should proctor exams. If you're not doing this, your students will be stuck to a screen all day, pay no attention to class, and use ChatGPT under the desk to cheat.
> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand
You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).
In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.
Yes, I really am. For the purpose of learning, internalizing and organizing information, hand writing is superior to typing in every case. It's physiological.
Back when I was in middle school, we had "digital typewriters" that worked fine, and was brought out far more often than the laptop cart or computer lab.
You've got to be kidding. Writing longhand was always a miserable experience for me no matter what technique or pen I used. Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...