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Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention
Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families
Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.
"Educational" software is terrible.
It educates kids to use MS Office and ChatGPT.
Many got chromebooks and just had google everything.
The issue was not being willing or able to curate their online experiences when given computers.
It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it'd be a book.
Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It's especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.
I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I've been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that's probably the main factor here.
School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it's just hard when it's this bad for this long. We're talking decades of decline.
That is brought up near the end of the article.
While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.
“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”
Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.
“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”
Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went "well, young people 'just understand' technology, we don't need to teach it anymore" and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I'm focused on the USA - I doubt "Cooney Horvath" is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are "INHERANTLY DUMBER" (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it's trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
THIS. PREACH. I couldn't say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.
"Technology" is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. "Technology" didn't cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.
Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.
But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely "technology." They're consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.
In 95% of cases, I'll wager, nobody's getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to "replace" standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.
we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.
So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that's open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research...) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than
"Let's copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase."
My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren't working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.
Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it's not 1-step on her iPhone. It's tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.
We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that's how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer smoking and gambling .
If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.
Mainstream technology doesn't connect us, it isolates us. It doesn't educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing "friction" to rob our wallets and personal data.
I'm INFURIATED that most people can't even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the "future" is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.
I feel like we need to start "desktop computer clubs" or something. Seeing this crap like they're trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book...
moreover, I'm convinced the entire reason my generation (millennials) turned out to be tech-savvy was because adults didn't understand it, were trying to control and curtail our usage, and we were mostly focused on finding ways to circumvent boomer and gen-x meddling in our usage.
Nah that's not it. People who used computers in the 50s, 60s and 70s were tech savvy. But that was just a small percentage of the population.
When mass adoption of computers started in the late eighties, through the nineties and early 00s computers needed a lot of tinkering and care in their usage.
People were forced to use their brains to use the computer and learn tech skills. Then computers started to become a lot more streamlined and people didn't have to put as much thought into using them. It parallels cars and TVs, just in a more complex system.
People who used computers in the 60s were more tech savvy than people who used computers in the 70s who were more savvy than those in the 80s who were better at computers than those in the 90s and so on. Because they had to learn more to use them and take care of them.
New tech (like the web) meant you had to get used to new stuff, which younger people do better than older people.
But if you speak to a boomer who has kept up with the technology you can bet that they are more capable and have more knowledge about tech than us millennials.
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you'd be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: "Forget everything you've learned about maths so far, this is something completely different". And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don't focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I'm an old fart and it feels very "Everything was better when I was young". So don't take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
I'm 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
Students aren't being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They're being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
That poor child in the stock photo getting shown for an article on how children are getting dumber...
That being said, the reason why children are getting 'dumber' is probably because a) education is getting less money every year b) social media is destroying their attention span c) intelligence isn't valued enough by society
At no point is getting a notebook part of the problem. Young people need to learn how to use technology.
Problem: we're not spending enough on educators to teach kids
News Articles: we paid apple 10 billion dollars but the laptops made these kids dumber.
I honestly blame the software we use. It's made to be profitable, not to educate. Every fucking article is full of bullshit "click here!" for profit.
Where is the global and universal app to learn fucking everything? That teaches you, lets you read unlimited textbooks (oh piracy!) or science papers, quizzes you, scores you, lets you compete with others, gives you a diploma that is worth something?
Why do we expect an internet that has been captured by capitalism and is algorithmically tuned to maximize profit and brainwashing to be good for intelligence? That is what advertising is brainwashing, and it ru(i)ns everything.
PS: Of course, I have no idea how good online learning resources of schools actually are. I'm just going to assume they are abyssal. Because why wouldn't they be terrible.
I work with college students and unfortunately regardless of the cause this seems to be true. Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: "This has generally been considered a bad idea."
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must've thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
...We were more optimistic about the internet then.
...But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
The dark ages didn't begin because the library of Alexandria fell, but because it was allowed to fall.
This is fundamentally our fault
It sounds like it's false, but even if it were true, companies like Fortune are working hard to make it true. They want suckers who don't think, who don't remember, who can perform high level labor at almost no cost, so the rich can get richer.
I make a comment saying the title here, like a week ago, and its controversial.
I say 'if you don't understand this that's because you're not familiar with current stats and papers'.
Look.
Everybody is scrambling to actually explain the causal mechanism(s).
... The observed effect though, is so broad and obvious and undeniable, that that's why everyone is scrambling to try and explain it.
Personally, my inclination is that for-profit, advertisement-oriented social media apps are the 'cigarettes' of the digital age... because they are literally precision designed to hijack your attention, cause addiction via hijacking your dopamine/reward neurochemistry, prey on and exploit all your innate/subconscious insecurities, and they reward and amplify convenience, outrage and excess.
But that's just a hypothesis. Again, what's undeniable is that... we have, broadly, peaked.
Unless of course we can figure out how to reverse that, and then actually implement whatever needs to be done, to actually reverse it.
So the interesting line for me, that many comments obviously didn't read, is:
Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school
So there clearly is something up with computers in school. But this doesn't exclude the possibility that the kids who are getting their brains fucked by addictive algorithms are then more likely to fuck about on school computers. This line:
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.
Suggests it's not "tech" but "distractions enabled by tech" which is having the effect, i.e. if school laptops and tablets were locked down you wouldn't see as much of an effect.
One of my first forays into computer science was learning how to bypass the various school firewalls in grade school lol
IMO, in the US
I don't think it's tablets and laptops that caused the decline as much as what they grant access to. The conspiratorial side to me is dying to believe that the massive Gen AI push by the government and businesses is not only about the money, but also about producing an idiot generation.
LOL what on earth if FORTUNE of all places doing publishing an article on this?
Fortune:
Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior...after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.
Up next: "These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?"
▶️ Fortunate_Son.wav
Nothing in USA rewards intelligence. Not education system, not employers, not government. Why develop a skill that isn't in demand? Would you want to develop medieval brickmaking just because some researcher is measuring for it?
The problem isn't "Tech" or "Laptops" or even "Tablets" ; but the addictive nonsense so-called "Tech-companies" spend all their efforts designing instead of trying to solve any actual problems...
I feel bad for the girl in the picture. She turns up every time the "technology makes kids dumbfucks" argument surfaces. Feel like ive seen her about 20 times in the last year.
Imagine being the face of that.
i can’t imagine that forcing kids to go to school during a pandemic where a disease spread whose long-term effects include cognitive impairment had a good impact either
You gave a bunch of kids systems they're completely locked out of modifying and garden walled to shit and then act shocked when they learn nothing from them.
Jesus
For sure. I love my kids, he's 15. He scores above average in the state/national tests (map ect). He can tell me the date, when the first bomb dropped in fallou 4, but has no fucking idea when the declaration of independence was signed, can't figure out how to cook anything from a box, can't name 10 countries in the world, and had zero idea how to do anything for himself.
The sad thing is I taught for 20 years in elementary level. All the have us teach is tests, ELA, Math, fuck science,art, geography,history. These kids are literally functionally mentally handicapped because they just want higher and higher test scores to jerk off to at the cost of kids who are functional.
They say things like this about every generation. Boomer kids had their brains rotted by TV and rock’n’roll. GenX couldn’t do long division because of calculators. Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting. In the bronze age, writing totally destroyed the youth’s ability to memorise epic poetry. And so on.
Standardised testing results plummeting for the first time ever is quite a bit different to the anecdotal generational gripes you’re describing.
The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents.
Scientists: This is the first time this has actually happened based on measurable data.
You: Old people have been saying the same thing forever.
Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting.
Unrelated but I am pretty annoyed articles can refer to age groups as "gen z" or "millenial."
It's not some universally agreed number. They could just say "kids aged 12-24." It's more empirical.