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

This is likely a hot take but, I don’t think this was the fault of the in-class laptops. They thought removing phones were going to solve the issue, it didn’t, they thought computers were going to solve the issue, they didn’t.

The core issue is: School is fucking boring. As a kid/teen you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk listening to a teacher yap about shit that at the time you don’t believe is even important so you can regurgitate said useless information in tests that you then proceed to forget 2 weeks after taking. Hell even now I think I learned more actual life and useful skills in college. I have more engagement and entertainment working a full time job, than I did in a classroom, and at least I was making money with the job.

The school districts are shocked that upon providing a tool that could be used to lessen the tedium and lifelessness that school shoves down kids throats they then misused said tool. I don’t understand it.

Make learning fun and engaging, add actual life skills to classrooms like how to read an analog clock, or how to write a check. Talk about how to survive in the real world, how interest works, how your credit score is really important, maybe how the government works cause I know I never had a civics class. Stuff that kids in middle/high school would actually care about, instead of how to solve 3 unknowns in an equation, or how to find an angle of a triangle when you know the 2 angles, or learning about colonization for the 8th time. Make it so it isn’t just “read this board, repeat on the test”.

If you solve the underlying issues at play, instead of trying to remove the tools that kids are misusing in order to fix the issue that the school system as a whole created, I think it would be found that computers would be a net positive. I know having a computer in class significantly improved my scores and learning capability, as I could use it for legible note taking, and I could record sessions if I needed to. Yes I definitely accessed coolmathgames at times but, I can tell you right now, the ability to do that helped remove the monotony of the classroom, and if I didn’t have that tool at my disposal, I would have simply zoned out and gained nothing out of the day, instead of what I did. My scores definitely wouldn’t have gone up like the article seems to be alluding to.

I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.

So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.

But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.