Silicon Valley’s supposed obsession with tech-free private schools (2019)
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In all seriousness I think we are still in the discovery process of what tech will help with and what it won’t.
That's sort of like saying that writing is helped tremendously by access to pen and paper.
Usually the question of "does tech in the classroom help" is related to overall educational outcomes. And where it's not so clear is the fact that, well, overall educational outcomes in the US have been on a downward trend for decades despite access to tech in the classroom only increasing over time.
Note that the SATs have been renormed a couple of times.
> I think we are still in the discovery process of what tech will help with and what it won’t.
In 40 years of computers in the class, we've discovered that tech in the classroom doesn't help with anything.
Honestly, they've learned way more programming at home. I mean more than the zero they've done at school.
I even fixed the command prompt to display which git branch I'm on, but that's not enough.
Learning strict syntax and semantics is the most difficult for students just starting out with programming. It's not wasting time at all. Programming on paper can work great, as long as the syntax is well-defined and graded for.
Not sure how to explain, but there was no need to have any extra time spent on getting the syntax right. If you could figure out the logic, that was what you were supposed to be learning.
I'd say this one is probably a wash, whereas in the other subjects it's actively harmful.
In every job you will use a computer.
The article spends about a third of length on the topic if tech might be good for kids or not, the rest (and the meat) is an argument against "the techies as thought leaders because we live in a tech world", and the idea that tech people are uniquely able to understand the consequences of tech on society just because they built it. Actually when reflecting to that, it's even more ironic that the comments in this tech forum fail to address the point and even the top comment talks about the author "inferiority complex".
I for one have a fundamental creed from using the internet since the 1980s and computers since the 1970s:
99% of a all problems best solved without technology and if your first go-to is a technology solution, you are an idiot, a shitty engineer and questionable as a solution creator.
Why? Because I've seen technologies come and go all bleating the same promises that are never kept. And if you truly examine the problems they are trying to address, you see most of the time that the question is wrong or the answer is ill-posed. Most peoples are solvable by communication between humans in a negotiated fashion. These are also the cheapest and fastest solutions. The details of what negotiation means are pretty wide open, but still technology should NEVER be your first, second, third or fifth solution proposal!
So always the fourth, then?
i dont get this weird journalist hate fest about "techies" as if average software engineers call the shots on what their employers do either. its such a well orchestrated distraction. the average engineers job is to execute, not to decide what to build. just like every other industry, a few people at the top call the shots on what to do, the rest of us are executing or making tiny decisions on how to do it. me and Mark Zuckerberg are both "techies"... no difference right?
> "technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them"
I do. And I have. Although I speak for only one technologist.
> "These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children."
Some of us do because we _design_ it, and under conditions of NDA. Only recently leaks of emails proved this precise point. Many more of us have "not-secret" wisdom as we proudly publish scientific papers about it. Moral judgements aside, we know what this stuff does. But the author attempts to insinuate the language of conspiracy.
> "Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist."
Then either the author has not been living, working and researching very well, or his confidence is misplaced.
Same here. I'm a programmer, and my goal is to delay phones for my kids until the last possible hour.
My kids spend time drawing, doing sports, reading books, swimming, playing with friends and animals.
Phones and devices are like digital crack for kids, and they prefer to keep hitting that lever over any of these other activities when the option is there.
You can just look at "https://marbotic.com/" for example, it's not worse than having your kid play scrabble or chess.
If somehow you kid get addicted to it then after they played all the level they will be able to read write and do math at the 3rd grade level :)
Their screen time is limited to a small amount of passive consumption per week (2 * 1/2hr episodes on Netflix per week, or a movie), and engaged or creative use of a tablet for about 2h/week. Lately that's been drawing tutorials on youtube, duolingo, wordle.
We're pushing off allowing them to have their own phones for as long as possible. We're friends with a lot of families with the same approach, but also a lot of friends of my older (10yo) kid do have phones already. At some point it will be very difficult when they start getting left out of the party (so to speak).
My best case scenario is that the extra time this frees up will give them the space in their lives to grow talents and health that they wouldn't otherwise. I'm much happier to see my sons getting really good at pencil drawing and playing soccer than having a social media profile or being good at some video game. I feel having a really healthy body and some old school analogue skills like drawing will carry them further than whatever general digital distractions have to offer.
Yeah, we don't want to raise a phone zombie. But I believe you can do that without totally shielding them from tech.
edit: a word
Exactly. Is there any actual data showing software engineers and the like are less likely to have phones or tablets for their kids?
My guess is that it's the opposite, but that would undermine the author's point.
There's an extremely strong inverse correlation between education/income and how long people allow their children to use screen media devices. Low income, low education = high screen media time with a sharply increasing trend. High income, high education = low screen media time with a mostly flat trend. This is also happening at the same time that low income families are also having a declining rate of home access to laptop/desktops.
Suffice to say that if it turns out that screen media is indeed detrimental to the development of children then we're basically ensuring that the socioeconomic divide is going to turn into a chasm.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20211230141505/https://www.commo... (This study for some reason has been removed from their site, and so I am linking to the archive.)
Depends on what's the alternative for all that screen time. If these parents could substitute screen time with healthy family / healthy / educational activity, then sure, media time is making things worse. I'm pretty convinced that the extra presence of screen time at the lower socioeconomic scale is a consequence of parents' lack of time, education and resources to provide that kind of alternative. So, the actual alternatives to screen time might likely be worse (inattention, boredom, early exposure to adult world, etc).
Well said.
We have a no B-word rule in our house.
"Boredom" is a cultural malaise. Neither my partner nor I ever use the word. Until age 5 my kid never had the concept of "being bored". But after starting school she started coming home, huffing and shrugging like a teenager and saying "that's boring!".
She gets sent to her room to "find something interesting to think about", and 30 seconds later she's happily playing a dolls game or shooting her bow and arrows at the wardrobe.
To take a Wittgensteinian approach - words "stand in" as templates for as yet unformed concepts - young children use words with no understanding of their adult meaning, so they'll say, "that's gay", or "that's spazzy", (or whatever word they picked up in the playground) which means something like "I want be in control, and so I reject whatever it is you think I want". In 2022 "boring" is the worst accusation that can be levelled against anything.
It's adults who create and propagate the conceit of "boredom". How could anybody actually be bored in this world, with all the marvels and freedom we have?!
What adults mean is something different; "Don't leave me alone with myself, exposed to the existential chasm in my soul, and my abject learned helplessness".
I've come to accept and adopt my late father's idea about the purpose of portable music players, which he formulated shortly after the Sony Walkman had got competition from other brands of cassette players, and which now, after an (in retrospect rather short) interlude of dedicated MP3 players, applies to the music player apps in smartphones:
That's why everybody[1] nowadays walks around constantly marinating their brains in a drizzle of background music[2]: To drown out their own thoughts -- or to cover the lack thereof.
___
[1]: i.e. more or less "everybody", at the time of writing, under the age of... Idunno, ~50?
[2]: Or muzak, as Dad may have put it.
This is a good point, but I would say that while one is fairly necessary for the other, it is far from sufficient. In the kind of context we were describing, it's certainly possible for people to pursue creative endeavors, but in most cases not in a way that opens up many avenues to break out of that environment.
Yes I think that positive feedback cycle is already well established.
> Depends on what's the alternative for all that screen time. I'm pretty convinced that the extra presence of screen time at the lower socioeconomic scale is a consequence of parents' lack of time,
What is "lack of time"? A careless reader would assume you meant they are busy working [1]. No. The parents are on their phones. From birth all these kids see is mum's face lit from below with a blue light.
To start with, the kids try to break through neglect and inattention by calling "mum" mum!" and trying ever more naughty things to get attention. Eventually they are given a phone of their own (aged 2 is the youngest I have seen) as a pacifier. The parents give their kids the same digital drugs to be free of their "disruption" so they can indulge their own addictions.
> So, the actual alternatives to screen time might likely be worse .... early exposure to adult world
I know what you meant (sex, violence, alcohol...), but the stark reality is that the "adult world" is staring into a 6 inch screen for 12 hours. Adults don't have time for anything else nowadays. These pacifiers work for all ages. It's natural that children want to copy what they see adults doing.
[1] It's actually when the parents are working that these digital orphans get better childcare, as they're usually at school or with an adult caregiver who has them in mind.
Sure, that may exist. But your generalisation is so sweeping as to be in effect just a slur against the poor.
> I know what you meant (sex, violence, alcohol...), but the stark reality is that the "adult world" is staring into a 6 inch screen for 12 hours. Adults don't have time for anything else nowadays. These pacifiers work for all ages.
Ah, OK, so it's a slur against everybody? I suppose that's better... Somehow.
Or are you still talking mainly about the less-well-off? Then my point above remains.
The cultural meme is, “these techies don’t give their kids phones or other tech, period,” which I think is unlikely to be a widespread phenomenon. I mean sure, some techie parents do that, no doubt, but I’m guessing it’s far from the majority.
Also, hearing "learn to code" on Twitter pissed them off.
Also, people might well be better suited to very different activities. Would we be richer, as a society, if Van Gogh had decided to drop this "paintings" business and start a boring but profitable civil-servant career instead?
Last but not least, the value of each individual programmer, in a capitalistic society, inevitably decreases as the labor pool increases, with obvious consequences in the long run for the profitability of the profession. Car mechanics used to be respected and expensive professionals too.
Prices and movements in prices indicate where supply is needed (or not needed). I have not yet seen a better mechanism.
I am not opposed to a universal basic income, given that all other subsidies are ceased.
How would society increase the number of surgeons, who require a decade of intense study and risk to become one? How would society incentivize people to live 2 hours from the nearest hospital in order to farm the land and create food for the country? What would society have to do to incentivize people to work jobs where they have to commute somewhere to work, or many places for work, rather than work from their own home?
Elite politicians and journalists were the first to happily bark "learn to code" at freshly-unemployed blue collar workers with all of the apparent condescension you described.
Others flinging the phrase back at later-unemployed journalists are merely returning proverbial fire, with subsequent Twitter bans meted out by those that can't take what they dish out.
Having it thrown back in their face is what irritates them.
IIRC, the phrase "learn to code" was either coined or quickly co-opted by right-wing trolls to use to taunt journalists and others.
It was in response to them telling other the same thing. It was never pointed at the blue collar people who lost their jobs, but instead pointed at elite people who had no compassion for those that had the world they grew up working in, being ripped from them.
Oddly I see this as a "for the worker" phrase. Don't tell my 60 year old welder dad that just lost his 40 year job, that he should learn to code, and get a better job. Empathise with him, and come up with real plans.
It was used to taunt journalists, and others who spouted the platitude.
It was right wing trolls: /pol/ was involved [1].
> It was in response to them telling other the same thing. It was never pointed at the blue collar people who lost their jobs, but instead pointed at elite people who had no compassion for those that had the world they grew up working in, being ripped from them....
> It was used to taunt journalists, and others who spouted the platitude.
No it wasn't. It was used to taunt journalists generally [1]. Your justification, frankly, is just bullshit meant to help justify acting like an asshole. The most charitable interpretation requires the taunters relying on sloppy stereotypes akin to someone who generalizes that all black people are criminals based on seeing one black guy mug someone. Except in this case, the taunters didn't even see someone get mugged, they just misinterpreted someone loaning someone some money. Look at the origin timeline: it was Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Bloomberg who were being condescending and aloof, and the journalists where just investigated the questions that condescension raised (e.g. Mike Bloomberg says they're not capable, but he's wrong).
That was confirmed to me the last time someone tried to justify this taunting, and the only "example" they could provide of the supposed condescension of journalists was a sympathetic profile of some coal miners who did, in fact, learn to code, which the taunter-apologist thoroughly misinterpreted through their bias.
I do not disagree with you, but Heidegger makes some very important points about how “just executing” does not imply guilt but it does not imply innocence either. It’s complicated.
https://philtech.michaelreno.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/...
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Morgan G. Ames
Morgan G. Ames's book, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), chronicles the history and effects of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why - despite its failures - the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to "disrupt" education and development. Ames is on the faculty of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Then you are likely part of the problem. :)
Steve Jobs, Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Alexis Ohanian, Mark Cuban, and Evan Spiegel to name a few.
What I don't personally understand is that this isn't news per-say. Many of the "tech elite" don't get high on their own supply. It's not hard to see why. Tech is addictive. Even the WHO declared screentime for kids under 4 shouldn't exceed an hour right before the pandemic...Montessori schools definitely have been on the rise for awhile too.
I don't know enough to comment on whether or not their educational outcomes are 'better', or what definition of 'better' we should use.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20843076
I'm not sure the frustration is any different than when my teachers would pop in a movie rather than teaching me about a subject
If Yahoo went up in value by a significant amount, he'd have actually been better off (he'd have lost value on his options but regained all of it and then some on the value of his stock).
He attributes a lot of his success to reading software manuals. That opened doors for him that he never expected (including his first real success in business).
He may not be an engineer, but I'd say he's a high-tech individual.
I had a complete misconception about him. Glad I got to know his ideas better.
Besides, the jury is still out about the outcome of said low-tech upbringings. Steve Jobs' kids are now adults (the oldest is older than 30), and while it's already an accomplishment for somebody in that income & privilege stratum to be leading an entirely scandal free life (as far as I can tell), it's not like any of them seem to have done anything truly impactful with their lives either.
So maybe the reason for that low tech upbringing was that they were not really expected to have to do anything major, but were being raised, essentially, to be modern gentry, to clean up nicely, sit on the board of family foundations, keep a clean nose, and remain somewhat detached from the grubby details of the actual running of the world. Nice work if you can get it, to be sure, but necessarily a line of work available to non-billionaires.
But then I know this stuff can be really scary, it was for me when for a short moment there was the possibility cancer was back. So I'm not judging him, not by a long shot, even if it sounds that way. Fear can really blind you and throw your normal reasoning into chaos.
Just to add something more meaningful to the discussion. From the book, Steve struck me as a guy who liked to have an almost simple life. Maybe to have some balance for the Apple high tech environment. Maybe people in the tech world not having that tech in their private lives that much is the same as cooks not regularly cooking at home.
This is a strawman argument. The point is that the people closest to the genesis, application, development, and conversations around tech, are in a particularly unique position to understand its effects (the very effects that were designed to happen). It's not that we think developers are superhuman and have secret knowledge. It's that the ones in question have designed platforms to specifically addict its users, and if these same people are not allowing their kids to use the technology, that speaks volumes.
OTOH I think it's fair to say that something like an e-reader or a dumb watch has low-addictive qualities, and have screens.
My kids can spend hours and hours glued to it.
And god help me I'm so over the moon happy.
Both my kids have old school Casio's, and kindle e-readers. Totally agree with ya.
So yes, "screens" as a pars pro toto for digital learning is inherently distracting. It's only when you reduce it so far as to be meaningless, - "a screen is just some LED-lights organized in a square, how's that different from paper," - that you can say they're not.
in my fantasy world classes are setting up & adminhing their own clusters, are playing with userscripts & social web protocols, are creating nodebots.
im not really sure where to look, where the vanguard forces might be. huge respect to projects like the first robotics competiton but that still feels like a narrow course, one where the digital has some co-incident, but feels extra-curricular & dominated by other mechatronics concerns.
There's a picture of me outside as a boy wearing shorts, and my shins were bruised from ankle to knee. Obviously, I'd been out having fun :-)
I remember wanting badly to watch "Green Acres", but my parents put their foot down and said it was garbage and I couldn't watch it.
When Netflix rolled around, I finally had an opportunity to watch it. About 10 minutes in, I concluded my parents were right and that was the end of that.
I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me.
Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves.
Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us.
Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible.
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...
see https://www.aao.org/editors-choice/sunlight-exposure-reduces...
For their health.
> If they become adult white collar workers they will be indoors most of the time, interacting with technology.
Which is bad enough. But if they've led an active life as children, their base health profile will be vastly better than if they'd been sedentary since they were toddlers, and many of them might even carry the habit of physical exercise with them into adulthood. This will vastly improve their quality of life from as early as their late twenties, and definitely by their forties.
(Source: I was a bookworm from [before?] first grade, never took an interest in sports, and obese from my teens... And I was still probably more active as a child than many children today. Basic military training was Hell, and the metabolic syndrome I was diagnosed with in my mid-late forties blossomed into full-on type II diabetes in my early fifties. Not super fun.)
> I loved being outside as a kid and teen, but is it really deleterious if the new generations don't get exposed to that?
Not for us perhaps, but for them.
"We should teach our children about technology, not allow them to be taught _by_ technology."
The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent.
Even the apps and websites which have been optimised for engagement can be valuable. The value is what we make of it, just like how the websites make value out of us.
Advocating for quitting technology unfortunately becomes more and more of an impractical advice, as technology is further ingrained into our lifestyle.
What matters the most is being mindful and honest with ourselves. The moment we lose sight of how we use something, it starts using us.
It seems like your book focuses on a similar mindset. I've stumbled upon it before, but now I'll definitely be giving it a read! :)
I agree strongly on logical, emotional, & spiritual levels with this assessment. Ursala Franklin's lectures on Holistic enabling technologies versus Prescriptive directing technologies[1], or her Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective to assess by, to view tech by. They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly, very sharply, & very smartly, & are essential readings for socio-technology today in my view.
It is all very complicated right now. Technologies like Instagram or Tiktok are both highly creative & enabling, presenting a rich ability to craft, but extremely limiting & process/control oriented in terms of distribution/viewing/engagement, as fixed as can be. Understanding how walled & limited we are on some fronts while enabled on other fronts presents a serious challenge of understanding, and this challenge is far heightened by the severely limited alternatives and options we have in the world today. Even if someone can set up or gain access to a good PeerTube instance, they'll have less creative tools available & face a myriad of other distribution/engagement challenges. The tech may be less limiting, especially if they run their own instance, but at other great costs.
Genuinely trying to create a technology which can be engaged in & learned of requires not just good teaching intent, but a software ecosystem which is learnable & explorable. We need technology which is capable of being engaged in. The web, here, is remarkably strong & powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions. There's a big-ball-of-mud/complexity under the covers, in a variety of different programming languages/libraries as we travel about, & almost none of it is designed for external use. I like to imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well. This idea of making the technology open & exposed & engageable is a precondition for a society capable of growing a healthy, non-poisonous, non-treacherous, resillient relationship with technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
> They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly
I often couch this struggle as the relation between IA (intelligence amplification) and AI (artificial intelligence). I am not the first to draw the lines that way, and I don't literally mean AI (machine learning) in the sense that most of us techies would understand. But I think it's a good demarcation to show the way computing is splitting/polarising along socio-political lines. For BigTech, it's a means of control, not discovery.
> Ursala Franklin's lectures
Thanks for this. I've heard of her I think, but obviously have some more reading to do.
> Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective
In Digital Vegan I talk some about the transformation of digital technologies from enabling tools to instruments of enforcement.
> The web, here, is remarkably strong powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions.
Ted Nelson (and some of the other WWW pioneers) had similar visions of a "lisp machine-like" queryable distributed structure.
> imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well.
Web1.0 carried that hope but failed. Web2.0 tried (at least brought interactive participation) but was usurped by commerce. Is Web3.0 trying again? Is the arc of web history on the side of your vision? I hope so.
LOL, this didn't age well. See for example Facebook's attempt to suppress reports on how their technology is harmful to teen girls.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
In my view, it's quite positive that Facebook is studying the impact of their platform on teens. I don't think that's a standard that major media companies, e.g. The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, live up to. I also think it's commendable that Facebook internally confronts problems with their product in terms of impact on teens. I have some concerns that the media's hysterics will disincentivize companies from studying this kind of thing for fear that it will exploited by the media.
Pretty sure that was confirmed as sensational reporting at best almost immediately. Though the major news organization didn't let facts get in the way of dunking on Facebook.