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School should be preparing people for the “real world” after graduation.

Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders US (11 year olds are year 7 in UK) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable.

Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel free to sell Linux laptops, just understand schools don’t want to spend anything managing computers.

I think we all had no problem growing up being ready for IT, and my parents can do taxes online. Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of paper. Of course, unless by "real world" we mean an army of zombies training somebody's else AI and consuming reprocessed digital matter...

I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty much the whole homework process is now moving online. Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around. That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.

What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the task.

This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our generation.

> Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around.

This suggest that really thinking and planning can't happen while doing these things. I understand the concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.

It might lead to a good thing, internet access as a right. I hope this becomes the norm at some point, much like the right to have a bank account in the EU.

>>Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of paper.

Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper. There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant that children would not be so careful about their writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and one of my teachers complained about how Encarta made it too easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking around the library. And it the back of every arts collage sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of splicing film reals together onto platters.

Apple's stranglehold over the public school system where I'm at, in the 90s up until 2010 or so, was an absolute atrocity. Chromebooks are infinitely better.

For most Americans English is their native language and yet after 12 years of English classes most collages still have English classes. Spending that long teaching English is worthwhile because basic literacy isn’t enough.

The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.

You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.

Handwritten note taking is just better for retaining information. Why would you move to something inferior in sixth grade?

Doing calculations on paper is better for arithmetics. But a calculator is better than humans at that and at some point you need to move on from long division and box multiplication.

Same here.

Sure, we have machines to do arithmetic for us. It doesn’t matter if the machine takes that over. But handwritten notes are better for learning. I’d like to keep learning.

I think this vastly overestimates the difficulty in learning how to use a computer. How is it that entire generations of people were able to get through school with no computer classes whatsoever and still able to invent computers, the internet, the very software you're using to talk with us right now? Decades of research in interface design have gone into making computers easy to use, user friendly, and accessible.

Carpentry is a skill that needs to be trained. Using the tools safely and optimally isn't something that most raw beginners will be able to figure out on their own.

But computers: barring issues of socioeconomic status preventing access to them, the kids will do alright on their own.

I think the valuable part would be the soft skills of thinking and working while having 12 things blinking and beeping for attention a keystroke away. This is how I have to work -- need to be available on Slack, watch out for urgent email, keep an eye on some dashboard for a service that is acting strange but not in a way that anyone is calling an incident yet, watch for Outlook reminders of meetings coming up). You're right that pencil and notebook is probably a better way to /retain information/ but that might need to be a separate kind of lesson from one about /existing in a 21st century information environment/.

Learning how to use a computer is like learning how to use a pen. It’s not binary there is a huge difference between knowing how to say surf the web and actually know how to use it for research.

Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime mastering it. So, let’s not pretend the bare minimum of computer literacy is all there is to know.

Anti Vax people for example have fundamental issues with knowing how to utilize computer technology. They where ill prepared to separate fact from FUD and it’s causing real problems. Having 11 year olds writing papers that get graded is a great way to transition kids from basic literacy into mastery.

And in school they don't teach how to use them effectively… or they wouldn't be using locked down google stuff.

Learning is a multi stage process. The military doesn’t start 17 year old kids on F-35 fighter jets. It’s the same deal here, the vastly lower cost option is good enough to be useful training.

Chromebooks are the baking soda equivalent in middle school school chemistry experiments. Cheap and instructive is considered good enough.

LoL watching over-50s using computers is pretty painful...

The 'real world' is more than just sitting at a desk and working with computers...

and for a lot of us geeks let's be super clear: it's a happy accident that all that time networking, overclocking, and modding our computers to play quake (or whatever) paid off. A lot of the most 'prepared for the real world' hacker news crowd could have benefitted from greater offline / social / artistic endeavors, including myself.

That isn't to say kids shouldn't have access to computers in school, only that prepping a kid for an information economy is not, can not, and should not be the only purpose of education.

I believe the point is that if Google gave a @&#$ about not being evil, they could have sandboxed a shell, included basic unix tools and a compiler, and made this non-disableable.

Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en-G...

>> Important: If you use your Chromebook at work or school, you might not be able to use Linux. For more information, contact your administrator.

>> {enable developer mode}

If it were sandboxed, that's shouldn't be something it's possible for managed administrators to disable.

It definitely is sandboxed. I think the concern is that kids will get off task with it by installing games and stuff.

IMHO, a limited (read: CLI) but general-purpose computing environment is exactly what we should be providing our kids.

No one would play TI-83 games if they had other options... but it'd be hard to say writing and modifying them wasn't educational.

Yes but that's a decision for the administrators, they may well not want portscans etc happening on their network.

> It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate.

Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany.

The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...

> We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot.

Since then, though, multi-hundred-billion dollar corporations have arisen that employ vast quantities of employees (including psychologists) tasked with obtaining and keeping your attention on their content and the surrounding advertising empires.

It's not quite the same setup we had to deal with.

Yeah but "parental control" crap doesn't deal with any of that. It's all about preventing porn and LGBT content.

Modern "parental control" is highly customizable. We use it in our household to limit things like Reddit during homework time, set per-game limits so no one's sitting on Bejeweled for eight hours, etc. Not one of our restrictions covers LBGTQ+ content.

Time spent on screens is strongly correlated with worse mental health.

So limiting access is investing in mental health.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214874/

> After 1 h/day of use, more hours of daily screen time were associated with lower psychological well-being, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.

11 years old? Lucky you. My kid got the thing foisted on him at FIVE.

And even if all of those issues could be resolved, like somehow making a Linux tablet with handwriting recognition and only open-source software (or whatever, I don't actually think it would be anywhere close to sufficient)...

The educational software is just garbage. Math and reading games that allow way too much guessing. "Science" games that basically amount to a skinned version of Super Mario Bros, literally still just collecting coins, so you can then buy pictures of animals in the game. But it's got that Wild Kratz licensing! Don't forget to purchase the books!

And it's the same thing, over and over again.

A problem with handwriting Vs pc-note taking studies is that obviously computer-based teaching has not been fully adopted and integrated.

Maybe the problem is not the computer but the broader cultural and technological maturity. I bet with teaching methods directed at information technology (multimodal, interactive text books) and proper learning and attention management skills on the student's end, we could see an increase in learning capacity.

Agree 100% on the detriment of using proprietary, closed source software. As an educator you have a responsibility to not vendor-lock your students and strengthen monopolies. Proprietary software should be outlawed when FOSS alternatives are available. You should be teaching skills and concepts not specific tools anyway.

My 4 year old came back with a Windows laptop during Covid, but over the last year they have stopped using them, they only use the desktops they have in ICT.

> A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will mostly lack.

It's a dual-edged sword, IMHO. I fully agree that writing by hand feels very different both in terms of the ability to take notes while paying attention to someone else AND seems to promote better thought and recall.

Devices can have a benefit, though. My 15 year old w/ADHD has constantly struggled with note taking and test preparation. What he's recently found that works well is to create online quizzes based on study materials. It keeps him engaged since it's more active, plus the act of creating the quizzes themselves runs the information through his brain.

All that said, I agree on the dangers of the walled garden and that technical, privacy, or other issues will certainly lead to cases where the technology becomes a distraction, even when used as intended.

I think between school shootings and failing to do anything about Covid there's worse things happening to kids.

> Rich and powerful are all aware of that, so they deliberately put their own kids into private schools where screen exposure is more limited.

I bet both of these go the other way:

* While some rich and powerful people are anti-screen, I expect it's more common for them to want their kids using computers in school so they're better prepared.

* Private schools are more likely to have laptops and other tech, because they can afford it. While you get the occasional story about a fancy school that is trying to minimize tech, "poor school has no laptops because they're too expensive" doesn't make the news.

I am dyslexic, so I was allowed to use a laptop for class and exams while others had to handwrite on paper. It gave me an enormous advantage in both. I would do better than kids who were objectively better at the subject, simply because I could type so much faster and more accurately than they could write. Also typing requires way less focus, so you can devote your attention to the actual task.

I don't see why you would want to sabotage the next generation by denying them access to the tools which would be available to them in the workplace.

>Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully proprietary system that increasingly becomes a walled garden, run by an aggressive imperialist company with abysmal technical support, with a complete failure in parental control practices.

Yeah, we really exchanged one for the other. Previously it was all Microsoft Windows and Office, as a lonely IT enthusiast in a smaller city, I haven't even known about Linux or any other alternatives right until university. I wish free software was the standard, in education and government alike.

Thank you for this discussion. I’m generally in agreement with your sentiment.

This is something my wife and I have been discussing. We’re planning on homeschooling our children, which means we’ll get to dictate how much screen exposure they’ll get.

I’m convinced that these devices are only making us dumber — sure, on one hand, we (most folks in society today) can be more efficient, but on the other hand, we struggle with retaining even some of the most basic information due to our strong dependence on technology.

As a computer nerd, my home is obviously filled with computers and related devices, but I don’t want my children growing up in an environment where everyone around them is dependent on technology to survive.

I think you'll need to apply Hanlon's razor to your conjecture. Plenty of misinformed "good will" to go around that no malice is required to explain it.

It mostly prepares young people for another walled garden later on, the Mac ecosystem.

First off, Google is in no way a walled garden. Every Google product makes their data easily exportable to a variety of open source and commercial alternatives. Second, how does the Google system primarily prepare people for the Apple ecosystem? That makes zero sense.

When I grew up in the 90s, every school was dominated by Apple computers, and Apple's walled garden made it so if you didn't have an Apple computer at home to work on homework, you were basically fucked if you wanted to work on or print anything at school. Switching to Chromebooks is exactly what let kids escape from walled gardens, so then they could work on homework using any computer with a web browser.

Thank you for this.