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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

This makes about as much sense to me as banning all personal computers in the eighties from schools. You are putting these kids at a decided disadvantage.

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It's limited to "younger students", and keeping younger students away from computers also isn't a bad idea IMO.

Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb, but we do need to go back to the basic computer literacy classes of the early/mid 2000s, e.g. typing, basics of desktop operating systems like the filesystem, using word, powerpoint etc. It's appalling how lacking high schoolers seem to be in these kinds of skills.

> Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb

No. There's proven research that shows reading a book or writing with a pen or pencil is much more stimulating and beneficial compared to looking at a screen or tapping/typing on it.

But they also need to have computer skills if they're going to survive in this world... it's too late to teach them once they're old enough to have the safeguards removed.

If you let them develop critical thinking skills, it'll actually be easier to reach them.

Yeah, I suppose we should hold off on teaching them everything that isn't critical thinking, lest they develop skills other than what is deemed acceptable by people like you.

Maybe we should have them live in 15th century lifestyle towns! Wouldn't want them having any contact with this awful world!

I think young exposure to real computers (where you create, and have to figure things out; not consumption machines) provides access to a level of fluency that is otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve, just like many other skills (language, music...)

I'm pretty sure we ran these experiments in France in the late 80s/early 90s, it was pretty clear that exposure to real computers was useless in elementary school, and even in middle school technology teachers weren't a big fans of teaching computer skills before 14 (basically around the same time as they taught tin soldering).

I think that can be done without having them sit in front of a computer or even really using a computer, though. Lots of kids have stories about wandering over to a college campus when they were in middle school, wandering into a room with the keypunch machines, and learning about computers that way. Very few of those kids directly used a computer, but they learned it anyway.

How prevalent do you think are children that live within wandering distance of a college that lets random children enter and use their computers?

Colleges with key punches? Probably pretty close to zero.

My point was more that, I think it's incorrect to assert that it's necessary for kids to directly use a computer in order to effectively learn about them. We have tons of concrete evidence of kids learning to be excellent at programming and understanding computers without directly using one. It happened with the kids I described.

So give your kid an Apple-II or TRS-80 then?

Kids can play on slot machines when they’re older. An 8 year old doesn’t need Claude.

i wouldn't let my kid use a phone or a computer till a certain age. age 1 - 11 is about having strong foundations in basics and these basics haven't really changed in a couple of decades at least. Reading, critical thinking, math etc... all don't need computers to a certain age. I say this as someone who got on a pc at age 10 and have made a living off being interested in computers.

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