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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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

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.

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