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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it rather depend on what you're trying to teach? To push an over simplistic alternative, maybe it hinders the syllabus but necessarily learning in the broadest sense.

I'm not sure I've thought this through very deeply at this stage but I do have a deep distrust of formal education. I learned by playing with stuff until it broke and skim reading chunks of books I didn't have the patience to finish.

Also - the classroom is full of distractions of other kinds. Move here, do this, listen to this, copy that. There's a huge amount of busy-work at school that is only tangentially related to learning. Technology might not be a magic bullet but it's no worse than some of the nonsense kids are put through.

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A huge amount of early schooling is little more than basic socialization, literacy, numeracy, some vocabulary, and most of all daycare. Later it ostensibly becomes more focused on learning, but really it mostly just teaches people how to learn (in theory); that pretty much continues through high school, and sometimes much of university.

It's a pretty ancient edifice that exists in the current form due to societal, intellectual, bureaucratic, political and corporate inertia. All of that is backed by the terror parents feel that if they "get this wrong" the child will be unable to get ahead in the world (at best) or intellectually/socially ruined (at worst). This is further exacerbated by parents who, far from appreciating just how long it takes for real learning to begin (and how much of it is always self-guided), think the key to raising bright children is Mandarin in infancy.

It is far worse than other nonsense. Can you think of one advantage of computer technology in the classroom? Tech company PR is really good, but edu tech is really just part of the corporate takeover of education that's happened over the last few decades.

Additionally, almost all technology will be superseded by AI in the future, which means that training young kids in technology is literally preparing them for unemployment. At best, kids trained in tech will be used as flesh-and-blood beta versions of future AIs. I would go as far to say that exposing kids unnecessarily to technology is a form of child abuse. A very rounded education is preferable to being unemployed and tech-literate, bitter at the AI that is doing the job that you trained for.

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