- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.
To Wit
Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes
People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.
If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.
Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.