Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

The issue here is that the technology itself, instruction, and implementation was incredibly poor this century. Schools weren’t doing basic things like typing classes for primary school, there was no instruction on how to program or use the operating systems, and kids weren’t given PCs; they were given tablets and chrome books which favored internet access based learning platforms over products stored locally on machines.

I grew up during the 1980s, and my primary schools had 1 apple pc in the classroom. We took turns learning typing. We learned how to operate the machines by inserting floppies and typing commands. Things we were given access to were all instructional. I have vivid memories of learning math via computer with a program called number muncher.

Access to the tech was limited and supervised. This is what created an environment that taught me how to use computers as I transitioned to secondary education. This century, all of the implemented controls were related to limiting access to pornography rather than teaching students anything about the actual tech. Now we have a generation of people entering the workforce that don’t know how to use PCs just like the boomer demographic.

When I first started working on computers in 1994, I thought that by 2010 every kid/teen/adult would be able to repair their computers themselves. How wrong I was. They know how to use computers and tablets but the hardware is a mystery to them.

I worked at a STEM university and was helping a Computer Science student with his laptop. It had a SSD and a platter HD in it for storage. The platter HD was failing and needed replacing. I wrote to the student stating he “needed a new HD”. He had no clue what I meant. He didn’t even know it was possible to replace. He was going to buy a new laptop.