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.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
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.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at advertisements and fake addiction research these companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
We should. I do hate that Ozempic is a thing now. It is very easy to judge a persons' character if they are overweight or obese. And it should stay that way.
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
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.
For a random individual plucked out of general population, you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for individuals that effectively determine what actual average is to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a proxy, but it is not 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.
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
> The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
> 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.”
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.
Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman have much involvement in engineering after their products took off. After a certain point they were no longer engineers of their products.
Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.
So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens?
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)
"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than phonics" crowd.
So it’s kind of an appeal to authority, without any evidence of authority?
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge, and their actions should not be used to inform one’s own opinions or social policy on the topic.
There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a favor and read it (pay attention to the population of studies —- many use adults in their 30’s or older as proxies for children).
You can absolutely find real data supporting your position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
No need for the leading question/bait when you know what they’re saying. No one said they’re experts on childhood development, they’re saying “it’s telling they won’t even let their kids use these services when they swear it’s safe for our kids to do so.”
No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
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.
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.
I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes', but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this crap.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called having healthy boundaries.
Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere outside your house?
Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and generally require proof of age if there is any doubt. Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could do was say "no."
You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and "government enacts universal age verification surveillance" are not the only two options.
3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded equally to every other parental unit.
Also a good reason for why one shouldn’t have one’s child raised through the policies of people who don’t want kids. If they don’t have any skin in the game…
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
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.
The key message that poster before tried to convey was
that they themselves do not believe into their own products,
not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This
ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using
it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be
quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while
riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless
video - this is quite addictive.
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
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.
>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.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
> 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.
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.
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 but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
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.
I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers.
No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response.
It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
AI “workflows” share the same addictive characteristics of web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become addicted to the slot machines.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.
AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
> I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the children don't give a crap about the technology. They will generally make the best of whatever resources they have and procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames because they make money. Ain't no different than how your local building or environmental inspector finds himself screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
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.
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.
You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
~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.
That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
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.
Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
"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.
Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
>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?
> 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.
It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
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 drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
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.
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.
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.
An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
As a kid I fantasized about a machine that would just give me the worksheet/assignment/reading material and let me turn it back in to it.
I grew up in a post-Soviet country where schools had zero tech budget, so it was all books and chalkboards by default. Looking back that was probably fine for learning fundamentals. The kids who went on to competitive math and CS didn't need tablets in 3rd grade to get there.
The part nobody talks about is textbook cost. Digital textbooks were supposed to make education cheaper but somehow the subscription model made it more expensive. At least a physical book you buy once and it sits on the shelf for the next kid.
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.
Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
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.
A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
classic pendulum swing. we went all-in on screens without checking if they actually helped, now we're overcorrecting the other way. the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle but that doesn't make for a good headline.
I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom.
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'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
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?
It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even more so if you ask it to use the internet etc.
But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself.
It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination rate.
If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.
It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home.
The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds.
We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness?
This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? 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.
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).
The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
> 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?
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.
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.
Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books.
It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
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.
I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these days! We need to discipline them harder!"
My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in schools.
I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world.
I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home.
AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
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.
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.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
What does that tell us?
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.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
atlest buffet himself drank 6 cans of coke per day being a big investor in coke.
Yup - intentionally creating something that you know harms others for profit. Tech is looking more and more like tobacco companies every day.
Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at advertisements and fake addiction research these companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
We should. I do hate that Ozempic is a thing now. It is very easy to judge a persons' character if they are overweight or obese. And it should stay that way.
Poe's Law win... on human body weight! I'm impressed either way.
Even easier to judge someone's character by the vile shit they write online!
Found the overweight/obese person! haha xD
Easy to find on here!
Now, you personally attacked me first so I reply in the same fashion.
Good day.
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
Tobacco executives probably prevented their children from smoking, especially as evidence emerged. That's just parenting.
It also doesn't make them exempt from criticism for lobbying ferociously against any government restrictions against marketing to children.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
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.
It seems wise to be wary of a salesman who won’t let his family use the product they sell. This seems very common in the modern tech industry.
If I were a billionaire I'd have servants who would use social media for my servants, to be fair.
Why have social media when you can have Jeeves "do it" for you?
Unless you’re a public figure who is posting as part of your “brand”… why use it at all At that point?
For a random individual plucked out of general population, you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for individuals that effectively determine what actual average is to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a proxy, but it is not 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.
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
Or you can watch cat videos.
> The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
That we shouldn't take child rearing advice from the man who killed himself with fruit juice.
> And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
I doubt that, but the others seem reasonable
Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
Everyone has access to the same models. Even the best internal builds are only a month away from public access.
The ones a year from now from all companies will likely be better than the best today.
Zucchini also thinks spending $80 billion on a failed metaverse is a good bet, so maybe they're not the experts of everything.
How much of that was actual spending—and if so, where did the money end up?—and how much of that was just fraud?
Yep, that's why it won't help. The rest of the time at home, they will stick to the screen.
> 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...
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.
Are Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman generally seen as experts in childhood development and education?
No but they are experts in engineering their garbage to cause maximum damage.
Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman have much involvement in engineering after their products took off. After a certain point they were no longer engineers of their products.
This seems to be a distinction without a difference. The buck stops with them.
That is worse.
"The product is disgusting, but there's nothing I can do; I'm only the CEO"
Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.
So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens?
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)
"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
No, they employ those.
In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about childhood development and education to get kids addicted early.
They are experts in their products.
Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than phonics" crowd.
So it’s kind of an appeal to authority, without any evidence of authority?
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
You are making an argument from authority too though.
Even ignoring my point, these people have more insight than anyone into their own products and their harmful/beneficial nature.
No, I am making no such argument.
I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge, and their actions should not be used to inform one’s own opinions or social policy on the topic.
There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a favor and read it (pay attention to the population of studies —- many use adults in their 30’s or older as proxies for children).
You can absolutely find real data supporting your position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
They quite literally have insider knowledge that others wouldn't
No need for the leading question/bait when you know what they’re saying. No one said they’re experts on childhood development, they’re saying “it’s telling they won’t even let their kids use these services when they swear it’s safe for our kids to do so.”
No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
That the elite is poisoning the masses.
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.
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.
I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Part of being a parent is saying no when your children pester you for something you know is bad for them.
Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes', but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this crap.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called having healthy boundaries.
Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere outside your house?
Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and generally require proof of age if there is any doubt. Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could do was say "no."
You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and "government enacts universal age verification surveillance" are not the only two options.
3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded equally to every other parental unit.
exactly, makes me think... if person who makes the bread does not feed his own family, something is wrong
Also a good reason for why one shouldn’t have one’s child raised through the policies of people who don’t want kids. If they don’t have any skin in the game…
It tells us that you seem to assume a lot.
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
Are you certain about that being "good"?
It is not just about what you can access.
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
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.
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
you're assuming zuck or jobs kids have anything resembling "normal" children lives
The key message that poster before tried to convey was that they themselves do not believe into their own products, not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless video - this is quite addictive.
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
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.
>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.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
> 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.
In many places it's the teachers who move around all day while the students remain.
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.
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 but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
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.
I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers.
No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
As someone who sells AI... You'd be shocked at how bad people are at using AI.
My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.
Presumably prompting skills like https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/CV...
I suspect that, in practice, what many enthusiastic advocates mean by “learning AI” is actually “learning to need AI”.
In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to function without depending on it.
Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at using computers:
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response.
It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
AI “workflows” share the same addictive characteristics of web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become addicted to the slot machines.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
I don't think they need to learn 'AI workflows' (whatever that means). But I think it makes sense to use the LLM's as a resource.
I've used them when studying new languages (human languages not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been really useful.
Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the things they are told.
It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.
They should at least require handwritten work, the kids will still be AI-stupid but will at least be able to write.
You remember better when you write, too.
Luddite move.
Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.
AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
> I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
Yeah I'd be happier if they learned how an Apollo computer worked (even though it has virtually no relevance) than how to use Excel.
>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the children don't give a crap about the technology. They will generally make the best of whatever resources they have and procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames because they make money. Ain't no different than how your local building or environmental inspector finds himself screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
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.
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.
That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.
You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
~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.
That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
But think of all the shareholder value that was created, surely that makes it worth it /s
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]
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.
Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to go for most.
"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.
Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
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?
> 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.
It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)
if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
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.
To be fair, I did entertain myself by drawing comics on my notebook or playing with my pencil and rubber as if they were toy cars.
I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
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.
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.
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 could be that the inability to doodle is actually cramping current students - it might be important to management of boredom?
Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.
An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
That sounds very dystopian. The ai teacher part, not the no devices part
That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
As a kid I fantasized about a machine that would just give me the worksheet/assignment/reading material and let me turn it back in to it.
I grew up in a post-Soviet country where schools had zero tech budget, so it was all books and chalkboards by default. Looking back that was probably fine for learning fundamentals. The kids who went on to competitive math and CS didn't need tablets in 3rd grade to get there.
The part nobody talks about is textbook cost. Digital textbooks were supposed to make education cheaper but somehow the subscription model made it more expensive. At least a physical book you buy once and it sits on the shelf for the next kid.
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.
> 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.
What? Are you serious?? :o Sorry, this is the saddest sentence I have read in a long time.
Yep. A public school in NY suburbs in the early 1990s.
Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that.
In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
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.
A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
classic pendulum swing. we went all-in on screens without checking if they actually helped, now we're overcorrecting the other way. the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle but that doesn't make for a good headline.
I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom.
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'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
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?
It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even more so if you ask it to use the internet etc.
But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself.
It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination rate.
If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
I've used it for languages and studying some reinforcement learning stuff, including examples in PyTorch. I haven't had many problems with it really.
Once when I asked it some questions about a strategy game (Shadow Empire) it got them wrong, but the sources it cited had the correct information.
using AI for education is one of the worst ideas for education.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
Was always a stupid idea to bring screens into schools.
It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
Interesting. Where we currently live, kids carry all books back and forth between home and school every day in giant backpacks.
Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.
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.
It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home.
The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds.
We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness?
This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
Open content textbooks are widely available, it's just a matter of adoption by the students.
why not just buy 2 sets ? problem solved ?
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? 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.
Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning though?
I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.
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).
The problem with the back-of-the-book is that once you answer the same exercise few times, you remember what the result is and you work on memory not on skill. At least this is something i struggled with.
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)
LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
> 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.
One very important aspect is that we learn through haptics and precise arm movements required to write/draw things down.
look up what you need - print physical pages - use pen | pencil - have a legal pad / notebook at hand - scribble down shit.
unfortunately now printing is expensive
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.
Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books.
https://www.worldreader.org/
It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
Good.
This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.
Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
computers are good learning tools for adults that learned how to learn with books.
Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when reading a hardcopy book.
Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.
It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous...
2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c...
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...
4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag...
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
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.
I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these days! We need to discipline them harder!"
My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in schools.
I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world.
I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home.
AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
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.