Reminds me of when school districts would buy iPads or laptops or computer labs without any idea of how those machines would support their mission.
But the logic in Oslo is that our municipal government has a budget, and buying it at least shows what I have done as a civil servant.
I don’t know if you can get their “must do something” mentality.
That sounds reasonably similar to me. People keep buying iPads for classrooms because “it puts technology in the classroom” or something like that. Then they break and get sold for scrap.
Yes, figuring out how to teach and what to teach using computers was difficult, but students needs familiarity with computers and how to use them.
Saying that "they'll learn on their own in their spare time" is ridiculous and tantamount to saying schools shouldn't be teaching reading, because students will want to read on their own outside school and they already have access to books at home.
BTW a lot of corporations that have yearly IT budgets replace large portions of PC's and server goods and sell them to schools for a dollar (or Euro). I wish that my school growing up knew about this.
Someone coming in here and %s/computers/ChatGPT/g is going to make an argument that sounds equally reasonable—so if ChatGPT is truly, materially different and worse, then the argument against it is a different argument.
My complaint here is that schools are making educational decisions based on technological fads, without good plans for how to use these technologies in education. Yes, a stopped clock is right twice a day—sometimes, it will be the right decision. Sometimes it will be the wrong decision. The trick is knowing the difference.