Technology

There's a big difference between "hey kids, use this machine, it has Internet access and Brand products" and "hey kids, ask me anything you'd like, and I'll give you the Brand approved answer."

Well obviously the propaganda I grew up with is better and clearly didn't affect me at all..

I think this heavily depends. Sex education for a lot of places, especially in rural areas, tends to be fucked up backwards and downright harmful. Last I checked several states have abstinence only sex ed and do things like show kids a bunch of pictures of STDs and leverage scare tatics to deter them from having sex. I think opting out of that shit show and having a candid conversation with your kid about sex is probably the ethical thing to do in those places.

Who cares, as long as it's copyleft?

yup, it's the same playbook Apple had in the 80's and 90's. Get them into schools and get everyone used to their ecosystem so they would buy their products after graduating. Bill Gates did the same thing in the 90's to outfit computer labs in schools with a bunch of Dell computers.

I did! The IT department literally laughed at me. I also tried to get them to let teachers install uBlock Origin, because they apparently will watch educational YouTube videos in class sometimes, and then get random ads for everyone to suffer under. But uBlock Origin doesn't have their support... Ironically, they only support Windows computers and iPhones on the school network. Android, MacOS, and Linux are all officially unsupported.

The school IT department is often the math teacher’s side hustle or a badly paid gamer dude with Microsoft certifications.

Surveillance and tracking is the least of their concerns.

I’ve asked about this a few times and I was told by our administration that every company we work with signs a data privacy agreement stating that they will not sell or compromise any sensitive student data. But I was also told that our administration team doesn’t usually follow up with these companies to make sure they’re following the rules. Therefore it’s an unfortunate situation of, “above my pay grade.” Also, when opting out of a Chromebook, you’re only making sure your kid doesn’t go home with one. Most, if not all, teachers don’t shy away from Google Classroom…

The IT Department knows about all the problems it's the administration that does not care and won't let the IT people do anything. Also, you don't want to know how bad the procurement process is with most school systems.

So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don't align with the earmark, it's incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can't really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can't really do anything else with it.

That doesn't even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There's so few real options that it's incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it's collusion.

They also have to be paying for the software that tracks how many prints you use. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s just one of a million little ways that they make sure to punish anyone stupid enough to teach.

I ended up buying my own printer. Printing alone got me to the maximum $300 of classroom expenses I was allowed to write off on taxes.

Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.

"it's only an hour of homework!"

-Each of your 6 teachers