Technology

Yeah, I would have loved to have one notebook/laptop instead of 6 heavy books and have to waste time going to my locker to change them out so I didn't carry all of them at once. Also would be easier to take notes

When I was in Uni 10 years after you, we all got our textbooks from our peers on a Dropbox that just got passed down from student to student.

Took me a few years to figure this out, and saved me a tooon of $$ by not having to buy textbooks.

And I always preferred the digital version. So much faster to Ctrl+f or flip back between the appendix and the chapter.

Education supplier contracts should be dependent on efficacy. I worked for one that sold English courses around the world and they knew it was rubbish, the exams had very low pass rates, not because the students were stupid but because the course was shit. That was a textbook based course.

Parental controls are an excellent tool to teach kids how to bypass parental controls.

I support this, so long as there's no rules against kids learning how to bypass parental controls. It's basically a CTF. All kids should learn how to mitigate internet censorship.

Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!

We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like "Barn Swallow", "Guitara Latina", or "Sperm Whale" and get my search blocked because of certain "keywords" in them...

By highschool that didn't really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I'm not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)

We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn't touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).

I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can't remember the website name tho.

Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.

And most folks with the tool are using it to scroll silly memes on places with names like tiktok, reddit, and lemmy

The public school system makes reading such a unpleasant experience that kids avoid touching where ever possible.

For many people, it was the opposite.

Public school systems have gone down hill significantly as the government is run by a voter base that cares way more about retirement and loweing taxes than it does on securing the future for young Americans.

There's plenty of funding available. Funding per pupil, adjusted for inflation, has never been higher. The problem is more about where the money is going rather than there not being enough of it.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one seeing this. "Technology" wasn't the problem, the problem was "learning platforms" that don't actually teach anything useful, and the fact that teachers weren't the time or resources to actually integrate it meaningfully. Just throwing kids at Blooket or whatever nonsense software the district paid for is not "integrating computers into the classroom."

You can not measure intelligence as it is an abstract concept that doesn’t have a clear definition to begin with. Even if you could, there is zero possibility of it changing in a meaningful way as humans are still humans.

You are arguing against yourself here, if it's fundamentally not possible to measure it then speculation around what a measured value could and could not be used for is useless, especially in such absolutist terms.

If it is measurable then variation could and would exist, based on the external interactions with whatever phenomenon would affect this variable.

With the exception, of course, of it being some fundamental constant, which would be unusual in a scientific sense.

The rest i mostly agree with, though i might move around the cause and effect a bit on some of those, but it doesn't really change the outcome.