In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
Kids these days
It sounds like it’s false, but even if it were true, companies like Fortune are working hard to make it true. They want suckers who don’t think, who don’t remember, who can perform high level labor at almost no cost, so the rich can get richer.
Yeah thats click bait.
None of tbe cognitive assessment tools we have are reliable in any scientific way. It’s all IQ test level of fundamental misunderstanding of human intelligence.
That being said there is 1 truth in the article - we do need to address learning to ways of human actually learn. Laptops or books or whatever it’s mostly irrelevant. Grades and exams and class of 20 people is not how humans learn. The entire education industry needs to be fundamentally reshaped.
Unpopular opinion: AI is the right tool for education revolution and many people are already taking advantage of this tool while education institutions close their eyes and push paper tests. LLMs are never going away.
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went “well, young people ‘just understand’ technology, we don’t need to teach it anymore” and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I’m focused on the USA - I doubt “Cooney Horvath” is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are “INHERANTLY DUMBER” (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it’s trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
THIS. PREACH. I couldn’t say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.
“Technology” is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. “Technology” didn’t cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.
Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.
But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely “technology.” They’re consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.
In 95% of cases, I’ll wager, nobody’s getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to “replace” standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.
we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.
So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that’s open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research…) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than
“Let’s copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase.”
My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren’t working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.
Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it’s not 1-step on her iPhone. It’s tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.
We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that’s how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer smoking and gambling .
If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.
Mainstream technology doesn’t connect us, it isolates us. It doesn’t educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing “friction” to rob our wallets and personal data.
I’m INFURIATED that most people can’t even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the “future” is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.
I feel like we need to start “desktop computer clubs” or something. Seeing this crap like they’re trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book…
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: “This has generally been considered a bad idea.”
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must’ve thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
…We were more optimistic about the internet then.
…But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
Unrelated but I am pretry annoyed articles can refer to age groups as “gen z” or “millenial.”
It’s not some universally agreed number. They could just say “kids aged 12-24.” It’s more empirical.
Students aren’t being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They’re being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
Exactly.
As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!
I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.
They’re usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else “fell through.”
We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.
It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.
It didn’t have to be like this. I’m very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it…
YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.
It would’ve been so great if for at least once say “We don’t have microsoft word tasks today, we don’t have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead.”
and welcome to 'short attention span theater"
There’s no scientific proof of “shortened attention spans”.
pay attention… https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11236742/
Wow, a generation of kids dumber than their parents. Kids of MAGAt parents must be a sight to behold.
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
That’s just not true. People don’t learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.
I’m 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
I get the writhing because of muscle memory but reading is reading…
Books are tactile and involve more of your perception.
We are more distractible when reading on digitsl devices though. Perhaps with the exception of dedicated ebook readers.
In addition to fhat I wonder if eInk and actual paper are more conducive to prolonged reading as well, less eye strain
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you’d be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: “Forget everything you’ve learned about maths so far, this is something completely different”. And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don’t focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I’m an old fart and it feels very “Everything was better when I was young”. So don’t take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
A core moment of my life was when, late at night, doing homework for assembly class, I finally GOT that “The instruction is the data is the number”. I would be surprised if students today have an opportunity to get to that realization.
I’m just gonna toss this out there…
You old fucks1 are siding with someone non-ironically named “Cooney Horvath” who, btw, is trying to sell books on how best to teach. Hoodwinked I say. Absolutely hoodwinked. “Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!” “They expect to be able to learn spelling and writing without a chalk board tablet? Preposterous!”
1 - Used as a term of endearment.
“Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!”
I know this is an exaggeration for emphasis… but people who learn the abacus method are faster and more accurate at basic addition.
LOL what on earth if FORTUNE of all places doing publishing an article on this?
Fortune:
Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior…after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.
Up next: “These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?”
▶️ Fortunate_Son.wav
You get it!
Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention
Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families
THANK YOU. As a teacher, this guy made me rage hard. And even harder when older teachers who already hate technology latched on to it as an excuse. Show me evidence for fucks sake when middle school teachers are ALSO now teaching multiple subject areas, have way less prep time, the school has less money, are also responsible for live online grading and access to assignments.
Also, I love fediverse. Rational mind heaven
Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.
The issue was not being willing or able to curate their online experiences when given computers.
“Educational” software is terrible.
Someone clearly hasn’t played Typing of the Dead.
It educates kids to use MS Office and ChatGPT.
Many got chromebooks and just had google everything.
You shut your whore mouth about Oregon Trail
Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It’s especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.
I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I’ve been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that’s probably the main factor here.
School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it’s just hard when it’s this bad for this long. We’re talking decades of decline.
It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it’d be a book.
Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.
I know you’re joking, but what would result if this actually happened would be after 1 week 99% of the laptops would never be powered on again and simply be handed back in at the end of the term.
I’d be more worried about the 1% that are still being used. You’ve created a group of kids that know more about the computers than most IT departments.
Those aren’t kids to worry about. Those are kids to put into advanced classes because they’ve got some great understanding of complex topics and problem solving skills.
Well that’ll definitely make them resilient in the face of adversity, at the very least.
That is brought up near the end of the article.
While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.
“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”
Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.
“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”
Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable.
It doesn’t have to be. Rote memorization always is for me, but that’s not really learning. And you can focus on just about anything when the alternative is a shitty textbook poorly explaining something that just won’t click with you. Look out the window, doodle, count the ceiling tiles, daydream about not being stuck in school, …
The burden of proof is on you for your claim.
Why does learning not need to be effortful or not difficult or not oftentimes uncomfortable?
Yeah, I have literally never gotten better at anything without effort, difficulty, and sometimes being uncomfortable. These things are ingrained to mastering any skill.
I also think schools are not evolving to the reality. There’s little incentive to memorize facts in a world where they are so easily acceptable. So we shouldn’t teach the memorization of facts.
We should teach people how to use information, how to criticize it, how to synthesize it, how to apply it. If these pursuits are taken seriously students will retain the information.
This issue is that’s much more difficult to test for than the memorization of facts.
I was homeschooled. My mom was always avidly against what she called “read and regurgitate.” Instead she supported “teach how to learn.”
It was a different world back then, but the lessons still serve me well.
I teach immigrants the local language, and students are never grateful to be taught a language. Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s not. There are thousands of words that people use in common conversation, tens of thousands that you can find in standard newspapers and normal literature, and even more if you want to read academic or specialized literature. When I teach the meaning of one word, that’s giving the students a fish. When I teach them how to break down prefixes or give them advice for increasing their exposure to language input, that’s teaching them how to fish.
The problem is that it only works for students who care. That’s fine by me, because I teach adults and they can decide whether they want to learn or not.
I don’t know how k-12 teachers navigate that, because it’s not exactly the student’s choice- we’ve decided as a society that kids need to learn certain things, whether they want to or not (basically), and that means that schoolteachers need to be able to teach students who don’t care or actively want not to learn (at least about a given subject). Just teaching them to teach themselves doesn’t work there, so you have to teach them some facts, because otherwise they won’t learn any.
It sucks, but I don’t know if it can be fixed. It’s reasonable that students don’t care about every subject, and it’s reasonable that there are things we’ve decided they need to learn, regardless of their interest. Teachers can’t always make a subject interesting to everyone, so sometimes you have to teach the base facts.
My seventh grade English teacher got permission from admin (she told us this) to spend her whole semester with us teaching vocabulary. Word roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. That was helpful, and interesting, and the first time I enjoyed learning English. I still struggled in English, but I did better after that.
Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
I relate to this immensely. I’m taking german classes currently and the professor is driving me insane.
She uses an immersion only method where she speaks German at us and we do exercises from a book.
I am slowly getting an understanding of the past imperfect and various grammatical rules but only barely. There has been no real instruction on how these rules work so when I encounter a new verb or noun it’s a total guess everytime.
From my understanding speaking with some Germans, this is the preffered method for teaching English to school children. Which I must admit does seem to work well the English proficiency of the average person is quite high, even amongst those too afraid to speak it their comprehension is high.
The issue is I do not want to be learning German for the next 8 years as a German student would learn English in school. Also my brain is fundamentally different than a child’s. If they were to explain the rules and grammatical concepts it would be much much easier to understand.
A blended approach where the rules for new grammatical concepts are first explained followed with the immersion based exercises we’ve been doing would be ideal.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I actually teach German, and especially for students who have a good language sense for English (so if “I singed a song” immediately sticks out to you), tenses are mostly (with some obvious exceptions, like present progressive and preterite/perfect) pretty similar.
She’s probably trying to get your brain to recognize an irregular verb so you don’t have to learn each verb anew, but that’s a problem you’re less likely to have as an English speaker (for example, you’d say “Morgen singe ich, gestern sang ich, heute habe ich noch nicht gesungen,” which is pretty intuitive after English).
Fwiw, you do retain it longer if she sets it up so you can draw your own conclusions, but you also learn more slowly. And if you’re highly motivated, you’ll probably remember it well enough either way.
The whole class speaks English at a B2 level since that’s what is required for International students at the university. I do feel like that could be capitalized on given the similarities.
Honestly I truly feel like I paid someone to read the Kurs DaF A1 book to me. Rarely there are other exercises or explanations.
Comparing other language course I’ve had I liked my high school French teacher’s approach. She primed us with explanations of the new concepts and grammatical rules. Then she followed up with immersion and exercises.
My Spanish courses in college and high school were just memorization based. I technically reached a higher level of course in Spanish, but remember next to nothing. My comprehension of French is much better.
Truthfully I need to dedicate more time to my German, but my other studies being all English take up my time. I’m here for a master’s degree. The language is an additional skill I would like.
And if you care for learner’s perspectives, give quizzes. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we took our first test I felt a lot of concepts click into place because I had to perform if that makes sense. It’s like my brain felt the pressure and acted. It made me wish we had regular quizzes on the content in between tests.
it’s like blaming the obesity epidemic on plates…
when it’s microplastics!
Then it’ll make the wealthy stupider.
I would be willing to bet that is the case, but good luck doing a study to test the hypothesis.
I make a comment saying the title here, like a week ago, and its controversial.
I say ‘if you don’t understand this that’s because you’re not familiar with current stats and papers’.
Look.
Everybody is scrambling to actually explain the causal mechanism(s).
… The observed effect though, is so broad and obvious and undeniable, that that’s why everyone is scrambling to try and explain it.
Personally, my inclination is that for-profit, advertisement-oriented social media apps are the ‘cigarettes’ of the digital age… because they are literally precision designed to hijack your attention, cause addiction via hijacking your dopamine/reward neurochemistry, prey on and exploit all your innate/subconscious insecurities, and they reward and amplify convenience, outrage and excess.
But that’s just a hypothesis. Again, what’s undeniable is that… we have, broadly, peaked.
Unless of course we can figure out how to reverse that, and then actually implement whatever needs to be done, to actually reverse it.
Fully back up your theory for the main cause. Screen time has vastly taken over the times of students as their brains are developing and by and large it feeds the least enriching, least challenging content as it has the highest propensity for addiction (under the guise of user retention)
I predict we’ll view this experiment with the same confused disgust as we do when we hear that doctors used to prescribe cocaine for pretty much anything. The software engineers who aided any of this are going to be ashamed of their work.
I do not disagree that social media is having a negative effect but just the over abundance of information, ease of access to it, and a lot being false. It’s exacerbated that we treated iPads and phones like our parents did television as a “shut up kid” distraction.
I don’t think it’s tablets and laptops that caused the decline as much as what they grant access to. The conspiratorial side to me is dying to believe that the massive Gen AI push by the government and businesses is not only about the money, but also about producing a dumber generation.
I absolutely agree with you.
Computers used to be multi-purpose tools. They existed to benefit their users and make tasks easier.
Now their mainstream “considered ideal” form is just a constant dope-feed that drains your wallet and sells your every waking moment to anonymous bidders. The less you can rely on your own brain, the more you’ll pay to rely on theirs.
Computers and those who understand them run society now, and there’s definitely an obvious push toward techno-feudalism. A class of “Those Who Understand”, served by a forever disadvantaged class of “Those Who Do Not.”
A stark contrast can be seen by using any Linux machine, for instance. It’s there for you. It is a tool that expects you to gain understanding and familiarity as you use it, rather than handing you all the answers without challenging you to think about anything.
As you gain familiarity, simply using the computer itself feels educating, it gets fun. You are rewarded for trying things by getting smarter.
Compare to any “normie OS.”
“No.” It says. “You’re too stupid for any of this. Pay your subscription and ask Ai maybe.”
The body is just as much in charge of the brain as the brain is of the body, it’s certainly a combination of factors including how we are using our bodies while learning, writing is fundamentally human and intellectual, pushing buttons to type, not so much.
That’s a muddied ground to tread. People who can’t draw can still interpret art, but I tend to agree with you. There’s a lot about how the brain works that we still don’t know
The dark ages didn’t begin because the library of Alexandria fell, but because it was allowed to fall.
This is fundamentally our fault
I say we’re already in a modern dark age, not because of lack of knowledge to pass around but the omnipresent nature of it now a days with so much being fabrications. We started giving kids access to tech as their mind developed and we’re seeing it has highly negative consequences on unfettered use.
