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 was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.

I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn’t want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that’s enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.

How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?

Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.

Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.

Personally, if AI wasn’t so destructive, or blatantly stolen as it was, and they changed basically everything about it to make it more reliable and stuff, I agree. I do think eventually something that is called AI will do that, but it won’t be the LLM tech we have today that’s for sure, it will be some other form of tech.

I would love if they had something like you see in the futuristic movies where theres a hologram teacher, could have every kid have their own. I just don’t forsee it happening reliably with our current tech.