The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
Get Google out of our schools
We have a county near me that has just committed to doing away with Chromebook’s and going back to pen and paper. The reason being that literacy scores in that area have dropped rather significantly. I worry that whether it is literacy or technological competency students are doomed to fall in one direction or another.
It does feel like there are already countries doing this effectively and thoughtfully, its just the vast majority of them are not.
Computers have nothing to do with it. It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing. Other countries like China, Taiwan, and Finland have been able to adopt technology with no loss in reading literacy. It’s because they have focused, thought out integration and not just slapdash by whatever corporation gives them the best deal.
I totally agree though. It seems like right now either kids are stuck in front of a computer with no prep or any other supplemental education, or they’re completely unplugged and unprepared for interacting with technology outside of an iPhone.
It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.
The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?
spoiler
In the olden times, animals could speak English, just like you and me. There was a lovely enchanted forest that flourished with a bunch of these magical animals. One day, a hare was relaxing by a tree. All of a sudden, he noticed a pineapple sitting near him.
The hare, being magical and all, told the pineapple, “Um, hi.” The pineapple could speak English too.
“I challenge you to a race! Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” The hare looked at the pineapple strangely, but agreed to the race.
The next day, the competition was coming into play. All the animals in the forest (but not the pineapples, for pineapples are immobile) arranged a finish/start line in between two trees. The coyote placed the pineapple in front of the starting line, and the hare was on his way.
Everyone on the sidelines was bustling about and chatting about the obvious prediction that the hare was going to claim the victory (and the ninja and the toothpaste). Suddenly, the crow had a revolutionary realization.
“AAAAIEEH! Friends! I have an idea to share! The pineapple has not challenged our good companion, the hare, to just a simple race! Surely the pineapple must know that he CANNOT MOVE! He obviously has a trick up his sleeve!” exclaimed the crow.
The moose spoke up.
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”
“You fool! You know what I mean! I think that the pineapple knows we’re cheering for the hare, so he is planning to pull a trick on us, so we look foolish when he wins! Let’s sink the pineapple’s intentions, and let’s cheer for the stupid fruit!” the crow passionately proclaimed. The other animals cheered, and started chanting, “FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN!”
A few minutes later, the hare arrived. He got into place next to the pineapple, who sat there contently. The monkey blew the tree-bark whistle, and the race began! The hare took off, sprinting through the forest, and the pineapple … It sat there.
The animals glanced at each other blankly, and then started to realize how dumb they were. The pineapple did not have a trick up its sleeve. It wanted an honest race — but it knew it couldn’t walk (let alone run)!
About a few hours later, the hare came into sight again. It flew right across the finish line, still as fast as it was when it first took off. The hare had won, but the pineapple still sat at his starting point, and had not even budged. The animals ate the pineapple.
1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? a. they were annoyed b. they were amused c. they were hungry d. they wanted to 2. Who was the wisest? a. the hare b. moose c. crow d. owlWithout reading the article(and therefore knowing the desired answer):
No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple. I would say that they wouldn’t have eaten the pineapple due to their amusement, but “annoyed” can be inferred, “hungry” is possible since it’s been a few hours, and “they wanted to” is fine.
As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl(“the” implying that the owl is real, in my interpretation, because I want it to mean that) is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event which wasted everyone else’s time. The hare raced a fruit, the crow had a decent idea but was foolish to claim it so decisively, and the moose couldn’t understand the intention behind a common saying. Of course, the question is about who is the most wise, not about who is wise, so foregoing the owl idea it’s a whole other thing.
Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol
No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.
This is why I look sideways at the “Americans only read at a 6th grade level” statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.
As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event
This still feels like a trick answer, because “owls are wise” is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way. You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.
You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.
You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.
But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It’s not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It’s the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.
Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol
The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.
But you could achieve the same results by asking “What side will a coin land on if I flip it?” a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land
Since there’s no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you’re filtering out a certain number of students as “failures” without interrogating why they failed or what you’re even testing them to do.
That story feels like someone was enraged by ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ while writing it.
I think at least one class a day for some sort of technology literacy is important. Maybe some typing courses or web development or coding courses or graphic design or even how to create chat bots…
But as much as I’m into tech I agree that kids shouldn’t be staring at screens all day.
Interesting thought.
I don’t know that technical comp is going to be a problem, they’re going to likely have access to a phone or tablet from a very young age. There’s nothing they need for the most part that exceeds google docs and a website that they can likely pick up quickly.
I wonder if the technical needs will slowly change over time. Companies are still full of pc’s when a keyboarded tablet would probably be fine for 9/10 of the job needs in white collar land.
Right tool for the job. Teach the kids how to use technology to their advantage and when not to go for a laptop.
That said pen and paper is a relatively recent invention too.
It’s also a BIG privacy issue.
Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.
If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.
Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.
That plasma giving everyone headaches now
This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.
During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.
They were never used in lessons.
Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That’s when kids weren’t coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.
I gave my high school teachers fits because I’d sit in the back of the class and read my dad’s old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They’d be annoyed to see I wasn’t grinding my way through “Crime and Punishment” or “Great Expectations”, but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.
Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they’re getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been
- Larger class sizes
- Teachers with less education / professional experience
- Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner
Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there’s one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.
Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.
Are Chromebooks screens that bad?
Teacher here: In my classroom I’m purposely moving towards pen and paper. Each middle schooler has a Chromebook and it has wrecked their brains (along with social media and phones that they are on outside of school.) You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them. Tech needs to be used, but right now it is killing any curiosity and stamina for learning that they have left.
You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them.
Why even have games in them? If I am an entrepreneur, a school notepad or laptop without games is a good business idea…
School Chromebooks don’t come with games, except for the “No Internet Game” which is baked into Chrome. The games being used are web games. Schools have blocking agents, but the websites mutate faster than the blocking software. (Looking at you .io domains)
My school eventually deployed software that only allows students on teacher approved sites, a “block all BUT…” rule and the little devils learned that if they opened more than 50 tabs that agent stopped filtering. I’ve also had students buy an identical Chromebook to their school issued one and use a hotspot to bypass all detection and filtering.
Just like everything in life, uncooperation means the system is broken in some way. This is not about being assertive enough so that children, teenagers or adult students will have to live off the current tyrrany - but realising that this system is designed to encourage this.
The students no matter the age know best; and in this case their word, that AI has no place in their education, should be obeyed by the ones truly ignorant of the educational system.
The internet is full of games
Maybe they’re just sick of staring at screens, and the Chromebook screen was the thing they hated the most because of the activities associated with it. Plus if you’re using it for most school work, a kid would be likely to be staring at that longer than their phone or other devices at home.
Maybe, way worse than their screens though, is the fact that they run
chromeBootlickerOS.
It’s happening.
Can’t wait until it happens at work.
Oh wait, it’s not, and this is dumb?
Public education either needs to be reclaimed and rebuilt from all the corrupting influences that have torn it apart. I’m not worried about the children of intelligent people, who can fall back on enrichment provided by their families, but so many kids are, at best, getting left behind or worse, being indoctrinated with all sorts of corpo-fascism now inherent in the system. Most kids seem to be coping pretty alright, so far, but I worry about the trends, and the future.
First off, congratulations on posting the comment you were working on instead of deciding you didn’t care enough to hit send. Second, I’ve done exactly what you’ve done, so if I’m a pedant I’m also a hypocrite. Third, I’m really really curious; what was the “or” half of the either/or statement you started at the beginning of your post? Or did autocorrect change really to either? Inquiring minds want to know
Every one of these parents uses technology in their work, I’m betting. They’re seeing their kids up to be under prepared for the future. These are probably the same parents who complain that they don’t teach cursive in schools anymore.
Brother, I became a software engineer and I didn’t use a laptop for classes until college. Shoving Microsoft and Google products down school kids’* throats does nothing to “prepare them for the future”.
And for those people who don’t become engineers? What about those kids who don’t have access to a computer outside of the phone in their pocket? If we want to increase computer literacy, it has to be in schools because it’s definitely not going to be at home in the vast majority of cases.
We don’t need kids going analog unless they choose a career path in a computer-related field. We need schools to be teaching proper computer and media literacy to prepare them not only for a work future, but a media future filled with AI slop and grifters. Not teaching them these valuable skills is how we get kids in their 20s right now getting their news from a fish on tiktok.
Kids are already coming out of school computer illiterate. They know how to use specific applications, but don’t know things like directory hierarchy. Onboarding young people into working with general office productivity like SharePoint, or giving them a real grown up laptop instead of an ipad is like teaching boomers to open PDFs all over again. All the same old training and helpdesk calls.
the solution is the same as it was 30 years ago: computer class where they deep dive into how the things work, not just how Microsoft and Apple decide the things are used.
I don’t disagree. We need better computer literacy programs in school. But removing technology from learning 100% isn’t the alternative. Those parents are still probably going to stick an unregulated, fully accessible iPhone in their kids hands where they’re going on Instagram and tiktok with no media literacy skills. How is that any better?
Ah, you don’t understand nuance, I see.
Go back and reread my comment, then reply to me when you’re ready to engage with what I actually said, and not a bunch of scary strawmen you’ve built.
How did I miss the point? You said you didn’t use a computer in school until college, and then you talked about shoving mainstream bloatware into kids eyes. I don’t see how I missed those points. I’m also assuming when you went to college was a different point on time than it is right now. As you know, a lot has changed in the computer and online scene in the last 6 years, and exponentially moreso in the last 3.
Alright I’ll spell it out for you. For some context, the article in the post (which you probably didn’t read) describes how schools are sending tablets and laptops home with elementary and middle school children. I specifically stated that I didn’t use a laptop for school until I was in college, and implied that my technology literacy did not suffer despite such “late exposure”.
I did not say that I didn’t use a computer until college. You made that up. I’m not advocating to remove all technology from school. That’s a strawman you’ve built to argue against. I used computers all throughout my time in school, starting in like 2nd grade. We had these things called computer labs, where a teacher that specialized in technology would teach us the ins and outs of using a computer, how to be safe on the internet, and provide adult supervision and guidance. In middle school, we had designated computer lab time to work on book reports, lab reports, research projects, etc. I carried a usb stick around with me to save things onto, which I would then take home, where I could continue working on my assignments on our family computer. My parents established rules and boundaries for using the home computer, and were another resource I could go to for help and guidance.
But we also wrote stuff down. Like with pencils, on paper. And had teachers up at the front of the room giving lectures, helping us through example problems, teaching. That was the primary way we learned. We weren’t sent home with an iPad and some edutainment games and told “good luck!” like the kids described in the posted article.
I’ll say it again, but I’ll reword it in more plain language so there’s less chance of misunderstanding: sending school children home with corpoware-riddled tablets and laptops with little to no guidance and expecting them to use that for the bulk of their schoolwork (the thing described in the article) is not a good way to foster technology literacy.
You know what apparently you didn’t work on during school? Basic discussion techniques and the ability to be civil.
Know what’s better than learning something? Learning a second way to do it. Learning cursive has more benefits than simply being able to read/write it.
Kid’s brains are sponges and multiple studies over the years all show a direct correlation with learning more/varied things at an early age drastically increases the ability to keep learning later in life.
Again, I don’t disagree. That’s yet another reason why cutting technology out of the learning experience will only hinder development.
You have a point; however, it is important to balance out the skills which are technology enabled and those that are physical. In an educational system IT would be a subject dedicated for this kind of thing.
Children, teenagers and others should absolutely be prepared for the digital world. But that means having a balanced curriculum that enables the usage of devices if so desired. Of course, that also means they should be prepared for analog life as handwriting for example, is a translational skill that is essential.
I don’t disagree at all. However, no kid can go tech free in school and be prepared for any sort of productive existence afterwards. Yes, that sucks. Yes, it also sucks that the majority of our experience is measured in productivity. But that’s capitalism. I wish it weren’t that way.
These parents certainly aren’t going to prepare to prepare their kids for a digital future. Heck, they’re probably falling for the same AI garbage their kids are going to fall victim to. Just like everything else, literacy needs to be part of the school curriculum.
I really don’t know why a bunch of people savvy enough to be on a federated social platform are so against this. It’s bonkers to me.
They’re putting AI in children’s school laptops? Not only teaching them to think less, but letting a corporation directly influence them?
Its working exactly as intended.
They are Chromebooks. A gigantic corporation is already influencing them?
There’s a big difference between “hey kids, use this machine, it has Internet access and Brand products” and “hey kids, ask me anything you’d like, and I’ll give you the Brand approved answer.”
Kids have two options. Out dated propaganda, or propaganda that might hallucinate a few key details.
Well obviously the propaganda I grew up with is better and clearly didn’t affect me at all…
We all need to do this. I’d be raising hell if my kid were in school these days. He graduated in 2016, just before things got REALLY bad.
I read /r/teachers, and I’m shocked that kids are being passed up through the grades who can barely read, and can’t focus on anything at all for more than one minute. They’re allowed to eat in class? Look at their phones? They get up and wander around, and even leave the classroom? WTF?
“Sit down! Shut up! Put the damn phone away and pay attention!”, is what I’d say right before I was fired from being a teacher, I suppose.
said she was only allowed under state law to opt the children out of standardized testing and sexual health lessons,
WTF? Why the fuck can someone opt kids out of EITHER of these things?
There’s an argument to be made against standardized testing. Very neurodivergent individuals, for example, can suffer a lot under bad standardized tests. Idk, though, it would be better to just make a better system, rather than letting people opt out. As long as that’s not happening, there is, however, an argument against standardized tests.
Christians. They deserve special treatment, because they are all special.
Well the latter is pretty easy, it’s easier to sexually molest children that haven’t gone through sex education.
I think this heavily depends. Sex education for a lot of places, especially in rural areas, tends to be fucked up backwards and downright harmful. Last I checked several states have abstinence only sex ed and do things like show kids a bunch of pictures of STDs and leverage scare tatics to deter them from having sex. I think opting out of that shit show and having a candid conversation with your kid about sex is probably the ethical thing to do in those places.
I’ve opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.
real GNU at home
GNU/Hurd… or GNU/Linux?
I’ve recently taken to calling it GNU+Linux.
Who cares, as long as it’s copyleft?
Sounds great but I can guarantee no IT team wants to deal with this
This - like most problems we’ve created in the US - comes down to money. Google will often donate/grant Chromebooks to schools in order to create future
addictscustomers. It would cost schools a lot more to do what’s right (or at least better) for their students, so they don’t do that thing.yup, it’s the same playbook Apple had in the 80’s and 90’s. Get them into schools and get everyone used to their ecosystem so they would buy their products after graduating. Bill Gates did the same thing in the 90’s to outfit computer labs in schools with a bunch of Dell computers.
I’m curious to know if anyone here has ever approached the school IT department to ask what steps they take to mitigate or eliminate surveillance and tracking in these devices. I know it’s inherent in Google products to begin with, but do they even try? Or pretend to try? Or admit they don’t care?
I did! The IT department literally laughed at me. I also tried to get them to let teachers install uBlock Origin, because they apparently will watch educational YouTube videos in class sometimes, and then get random ads for everyone to suffer under. But uBlock Origin doesn’t have their support… Ironically, they only support Windows computers and iPhones on the school network. Android, MacOS, and Linux are all officially unsupported.
I’ve asked about this a few times and I was told by our administration that every company we work with signs a data privacy agreement stating that they will not sell or compromise any sensitive student data. But I was also told that our administration team doesn’t usually follow up with these companies to make sure they’re following the rules. Therefore it’s an unfortunate situation of, “above my pay grade.” Also, when opting out of a Chromebook, you’re only making sure your kid doesn’t go home with one. Most, if not all, teachers don’t shy away from Google Classroom…
The school IT department is often the math teacher’s side hustle or a badly paid gamer dude with Microsoft certifications.
Surveillance and tracking is the least of their concerns.
The IT Department knows about all the problems it’s the administration that does not care and won’t let the IT people do anything. Also, you don’t want to know how bad the procurement process is with most school systems.
Good point. I’ve never worked in education. I neglected the fact that they’re just fulfilling orders. I believe you it’s probably a shitshow with privacy and preemptive security procedures almost non-existent.
I don’t work for a school, but I apply default policies to stop tracking/telemetry on all the company computers. I wasn’t asked to, nor do my coworkers seem to care nearly as much. So the answer is probably that it will entirely depend on the IT admin they hired and how much they care
It’s sorta the opposite. It’s not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it’s that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.
Worse than that though, it’s a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It’s just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.
