11 ms·

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

• Rodmine 6mo ago
  Sweden (or one of these loser countries) should go Amish for computers.
• marysminefnuf 6mo ago
  It bothers me as a teacher why so few people care what i have to say. Why are we being lectured about techs role in my classroom. That should be a decision between me and the students and their parents.
• hackerbeat 6mo ago
  Was always a stupid idea to bring screens into schools.
• smatti 6mo ago
  A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies. Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results. Source: I have 10 Finnish kids Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
  • oschvr 6mo ago
    Wait you have 10 kids !!?!? Much respect
  • Gigachad 6mo ago
    As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.
    • BostonFern 6mo ago
      That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.
      • Gigachad 6mo ago
        You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
        • cindyllm 6mo ago
          [dead]
        • BostonFern 6mo ago
          Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children? My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age). Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies. It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success. To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
  • gritspants 6mo ago
    I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.
    • Gigachad 6mo ago
      I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers. No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
      • brobdingnagians 6mo ago
        Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at using computers: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
        • Gigachad 6mo ago
          I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response. It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
          • Ekaros 6mo ago
            I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating such exercise would take and what should be the tools or sources to verify the output but that might be helpful excersise.
  • kzrdude 6mo ago
    About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age actually.
    • SiempreViernes 6mo ago
      Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
      • brabel 6mo ago
        Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
      • tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
        Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to go for most.
  • supersaw 6mo ago
    The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-for-de-yngste/id3152323/ https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
  • graemep 6mo ago
    "screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online. The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing. Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children. I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
    • teekert 6mo ago
      Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
      • jasonmp85 6mo ago
        This is written with what feels like the peak understanding of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!" An allowlist might be a good place to start.
        • kbelder 6mo ago
          That might slow them down. Could any of the IT professionals, here, think of a way around it? Then likely the kids could.
          • ziml77 6mo ago
            They don't even have to think of a way around any of it. They just need to search online to find someone who has found a way around it. Or prompt AI to come up with a solution. And even if someone is so dull that they don't think about that, it will probably make it to them as the info spreads by word of mouth.
  • mentalgear 6mo ago
    ~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
    • gambiting 6mo ago
      But think of all the shareholder value that was created, surely that makes it worth it /s
    • zigman1 6mo ago
      That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation. I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
  • rimliu 6mo ago
    if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.
    • lucb1e 6mo ago
      Could say the same about language, driving, and writing systems? Steve Jobs popularized among startup/HN audiences that intuitive interfaces are the best interfaces, but I have yet to see evidence for that. Are systems that work without education truly better than those where you might be a lot more effective with some amount of study? Probably there's an optimal point, like a year of full-time education to use your OS won't pay off at median longevity, but whether <5 minutes of learning is the optimum... It's great for onboarding people to your tech product, though. Incentives may be misaligned between what's best for the users and what's best for the cashflow
  • KurSix 6mo ago
    It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time
  • szmarczak 6mo ago
    > The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature. The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
    • SSLy 6mo ago
      remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)
      • szmarczak 6mo ago
        Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)
    • darkwater 6mo ago
      It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
    • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
      See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading. Lots to think about there. https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scrolling-did-to-reading https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
    • tzs 6mo ago
      I have personally found it is often easier to find things in a physical book. Say I want to look up an equation that I remember learning about from a particular book. If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation. I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot. With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book. I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.
  • duskdozer 6mo ago
    >Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
  • something765478 6mo ago
    Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.
    • ziml77 6mo ago
      That was my experience as well. I did best in the classes where I didn't have a laptop out. I had no temptations to be distracted and simply writing down the notes by hand was a huge benefit. I suspect the people I see saying they were able to not get distracted when using a laptop in class are either outliers or liars.
  • eviks 6mo ago
    > You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!
    • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
      Even with books, stuff happens, you can skip ahead a chapter, consult the index, follow a footnote... or put another book on the table.
  • luqtas 6mo ago
    there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
    • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
      You assert a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials: Screen readers take longer. Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source... Another https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut... Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.987964/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here: https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scrolling-did-to-reading https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
      • luqtas 6mo ago
        you managed to gather with all the research you cited minus the blog post, less than 100 participants. if you think this is enough to conclude anything i may warn you are tripping balls i suggest you do some read, specially of effect sizes found in many studies showing "better performance" (minuscule effect size). there's a plethora of political things you'll ignore by thinking books are better. i gathered you some stuff (there are more than 200,000 people studied on the links i'm sending to you) and i truly hope you don't try to counter-argument by pointing some meta-analysis i linked concluding the analog is better. they admit the effect is minimal to negligent and if you actually consider studies done on text that user doesn't have to "scroll" but rather advance the page with a tap/pgDN and the user don't have their social media hooked on their device (muted or absent), there literally NO EVEDIENCE of any difference between paper and digital learning [0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001 [1] https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0-S1747938X18300101-main.pdf https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/ [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8 [4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772503024000288 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277250302...
  • hk__2 6mo ago
    > Source: I have 10 Finnish kids Wait what?
    • Izikiel43 6mo ago
      This guy alone is trying to raise Finland's birth rate.
  • postscapes1 6mo ago
    That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad of 3
  • mlsu 6mo ago
    At what point do we stop and admit that paper books are superior in all cases. It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.
  • thatwasunusual 6mo ago
    > A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)
• walthamstow 6mo ago
  On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
• schnitzelstoat 6mo ago
  I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom. But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'. I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
  • nalekberov 6mo ago
    > But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'. Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high confidence and believe it?
    • schnitzelstoat 6mo ago
      It's quite rare that it gives a wrong answer nowadays. Even more so if you ask it to use the internet etc. But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself. It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
      • Gigachad 6mo ago
        Only if you are asking surface level questions. There are also certain topics that seem to be worse than others. For asking about how to do things in software guis modern LLMs seem to have a high rate of making up features or paths to reach them. For asking advice in games I've seen an extremely high rate of hallucinations. Asking why something is broken in my codebase has about a 95% hallucination rate. If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
• artakulov 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dmd 6mo ago
    > sits on the shelf for the next kid. Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.
    • zigman1 6mo ago
      What? Are you serious?? :o Sorry, this is the saddest sentence I have read in a long time.
      • dmd 6mo ago
        Yep. A public school in NY suburbs in the early 1990s.
        • zigman1 6mo ago
          Well... I am sure someone made good money out of that. In Slovenia, a post-Yugoslavian country, the school library coordinated a textbook borrowing scheme, where they would own all the material and lend it to students each year. Parents would pay a small "subscription", so each year or two one subject would get new books.
          • lstodd 6mo ago
            That's how it worked in USSR in 80s. The school supplied the books and they were the ones that the previous grade used. If they got busted beyond all repair only then they'd be replaced with new.
    • graemep 6mo ago
      Why did they do that?
• mentalgear 6mo ago
  I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads. I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media. And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots. What does that tell us?
  • gadflyinyoureye 6mo ago
    That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However, especially the US, few people will parent their children in a way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools, which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the children. The community with do nothing since they view the parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children. So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.
    • econ 6mo ago
      >Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children. I had never even realized. As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
  • rvz 6mo ago
    He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely addictive to kids who are none the wiser. > What does that tell us? It tells us three things: 1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature. 2. Get them to read books as an alternative. 3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.
• rvz 6mo ago
  Good. This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops. Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
• macNchz 6mo ago
  It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them. When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
• greenbit 6mo ago
  Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
  • argee 6mo ago
    If you open any of my middle school notebooks you'll find around 5-10x more doodles than notes, by surface area.
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      It could be that the inability to doodle is actually cramping current students - it might be important to management of boredom? Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.
  • amonith 6mo ago
    Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason. Procrastination is hell of a drug. I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.
    • andrepd 6mo ago
      To be fair, I did entertain myself by drawing comics on my notebook or playing with my pencil and rubber as if they were toy cars.
      • amonith 6mo ago
        I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
• goldylochness 6mo ago
  absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
• amadeuspagel 6mo ago
  > Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose. Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
  • eigenspace 6mo ago
    Is the instant feedback actually beneficial for learning though? I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.
  • HPsquared 6mo ago
    Tbh the same applies to a lot of subjects if you discuss them with a sufficiently good LLM. (Socratic method)
    • eimrine 6mo ago
      LLM is fundamentally not prone to the Socratic method. Socratic method requires both parts to learn something while the discourse. LLM will forget some shit often.
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
  • nalekberov 6mo ago
    > With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher. Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
  • nimonian 6mo ago
    I still believe looking up the answer in the back of the book is completely fine. It creates a moment of tension. It invites you to justify in your own head that the answer is right before checking. The cognitive dissonance when you see your answer is wrong and really have to challenge yourself, or ask your neighbour, to see why - is all really valuable. I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits. I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when reading a hardcopy book. Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.
• abyssin 6mo ago
  A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers. There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
  • snkline 6mo ago
    I really like the reMarkable tablets, but they are still not quite the replacement for a paper notebook that I would like. I think the main problem is that the refresh-rate/software is slow enough that trying to "page through your notebook" to find specific notes is a grueling experience. The alternative is to just make lots of one page notes, but things still become difficult to find (not to mention you add a lot of stress coming up with good names for stuff...)
• brookst 6mo ago
  It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it. I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?) It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions. This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim. Some info: - The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science. - Actual studies in this area are mixed. - A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold. - There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1] - One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2] - Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3] - A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4] - The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5] - One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6] 1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous-or-is-the-reading-of-the-evidence/ https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous... 2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-comprehension-leads-to-overconfidence-new-meta-analysis-concludes/2019/04 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c... 3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2070216 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2... 4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-page-what-research-indicates-about-print-vs-digital-reading https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag... 5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131519302908 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601... 6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
• fifilura 6mo ago
  Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books. https://www.worldreader.org/ https://www.worldreader.org/
  • rsolva 6mo ago
    Laptops and tables are, as it turns out, not so cheap either. They need to be fixed or replaced at an alarming rate, and they lay claim to a much larger part of a school budget than books ever did. That is part of the reason that we revert back to pen, paper and books in Norway. First for 1-4 grade, but it will be push further up the grades as we go, I think.
    • fifilura 6mo ago
      Yeah this is for extremely poor schools where children share one phone between them. But compared to buying books for every subject that very soon wear out and become obsolete, this has basically no cost.
• fedeb95 6mo ago
  computers are good learning tools for adults that learned how to learn with books.
• johanneskanybal 6mo ago
  It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
  • kleiba 6mo ago
    Interesting. Where we currently live, kids carry all books back and forth between home and school every day in giant backpacks.
    • galdauts 6mo ago
      Back when I went to school in Germany, we had a locker at school, but I just took the books I needed for assignments home with me. I haven't heard of schools that don't let you take (loaned) books home.
  • elminjo 6mo ago
    this is a problem. we make photos of the pages. i think there should be always a digital option when you have a physical book.
    • MSFT_Edging 6mo ago
      It sounds like the major issue here is the access to information. It's not the fault of the medium but rather the IP rights around it. Books are expensive because the text book industry needs their cut. Schools need to protect the expensive books because children can and will impulsively throw one off a bridge on their walk home. The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds. We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness? This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
• andrepd 6mo ago
  Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper. Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
  • knowaveragejoe 6mo ago
    This is all downstream of the backlash against social media and AI, and it's attacking the symptom rather than treating it IMO. You don't need to abandon digital tools entirely, you need to control how they're used in the classroom. Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts. Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.
• tomaskafka 6mo ago
  One very important aspect is that we learn through haptics and precise arm movements required to write/draw things down.
• compounding_it 6mo ago
  I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers. E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
• KurSix 6mo ago
  It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
• filiphillesland 6mo ago
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• lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
  Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
• dzonga 6mo ago
  look up what you need - print physical pages - use pen | pencil - have a legal pad / notebook at hand - scribble down shit. unfortunately now printing is expensive
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    Dot-matrix impact printers are still being sold and still have the lowest cost per printed page. The quality sucks, but for draft-only content (like LLM answers) that you're scribbling on it's not an issue. B/W laser printers are not too far behind though, just avoid brands like HP that gouge you on toner cartridges.
• natehouk 6mo ago
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• bjourne 6mo ago
  I hate articles like these. They get 10% right and the remaining 90% is just some random filler. I don't have time to write a lengthy comment but do note the LACK of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. There is no evidence that jacking kids cell phones and swapping digital articles for physical books improves anything. It's part of the perennial right-wing message: "Kids are so unruly these days! We need to discipline them harder!"
• arafeq 6mo ago
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• 3yr-i-frew-up 6mo ago
  My city, the 2nd richest in our state (And our county is the 3rd richest in the United States)... is considering banning AI in schools. I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world. I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home. AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
  • timcobb 6mo ago
    don't worry, they'll have plenty of opportunity to mess with AI. Fun thing about AI is that you just use it and helps you, I don't know that there's much to learn there in terms of end user experience. On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence) is not something you can skip learning and expect a good outcome.
  • theappsecguy 6mo ago
    Man, this is such an odd take. I don't need to imagine, I grew up in a country where math teachers would laugh you out of the classroom if you asked to use a calculator. Guess what? We did everything manually. I then moved to North America for my last year of high school, and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical black box.
  • krapht 6mo ago
    which city is that? I want to move there with my children. If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as original work, feel free to move to Virginia.
• mcculley 6mo ago
  An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
  • dylanowen 6mo ago
    That sounds very dystopian. The ai teacher part, not the no devices part
    • hombre_fatal 6mo ago
      That would have sadly be an improvement for the majority of teachers I've had in my life, even university classes because they were taught by a TA phd student I couldn't understand.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
      It sounds distopian, but AI has been a big boost to learning at least for me personally. Of course the problem is when it's wrong.
    • mcculley 6mo ago
      I never said that AI should replace all teachers. AI can help provide more teaching labor (more teaching capacity). Every child can have a personalized tutor in addition to human teachers. See Bloom's 2 sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
• slibhb 6mo ago
  The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning. If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
  • scandox 6mo ago
    Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad. For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
  • buellerbueller 6mo ago
    >The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning. Allegations without evidence.
  • whizzter 6mo ago
    Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences. That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding. The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting. And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders. Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with. Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books. To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
• vincnetas 6mo ago
  yes, the distraction is real. How many times i was busy with my day job on some task when for some reason i had to wait for something (coworker reply, build to complete, approval to be granted) and automatically opened HN on in a new tab... 10 minutes of blackout and i'm on some random wikipedia page for no obvious reason related to my day job task... And i'm 40+ year old adult. Im scared to think what this level of distraction means for undeveloped brain.
• pier25 6mo ago
  I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development. After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left. In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine. https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutch-famine-birth-cohort https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...
  • fasterik 6mo ago
    >I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home. The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.
    • ajsnigrutin 6mo ago
      > It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home. Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports, channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that every generation will know more and be "better" than the previous generation. A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and have no idea where to change their instagram password. So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids, who can't use computers anymore.
• pclowes 6mo ago
  Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed. The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers. Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
• dimxasnewfrozen 6mo ago
  My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and she'd do remarkably better.
• red_admiral 6mo ago
  I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines. Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom. e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet). My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.
  • SJMG 6mo ago
    Anecdotal, but I do not think e-ink displays are as good for reading or benefiting from handwriting as an actual purely physical medium. They just don't have the affordances of durably occupying physical space. I say this as someone who has done quite a bit of review of the literature and has a kindle and a Supernote.
  • Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo ago
    Ereaders (Kindle scribe specifically) has been a huge discovery! I cannot make any claims, but my daughter draws on it, writes on it, does homeworks on it and reads so many books on it (she is 7). She liked it as soon as she saw it. I decided to gave her my Scribe,which I deeply miss. It's essentially a notebook and a book reader. You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs can only have notes on the side). I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets please.
  • cogman10 6mo ago
    Yeah, I think eink displays are the happy medium for tech for kids. And even then, you should limit the capabilities to be effectively the same as working with paper. Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give internet access. Let the device sync at school with required books and assignments. Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's the extent of what they should have.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• timonoko 6mo ago
  They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.
  • lstodd 6mo ago
    Evil ballpoint is evil. I remember everyone chewing up plastic ballpoint pens into unusablily and also using them as blowguns with chewed paper, whereas nothing of the sort was possible before their introduction. (however, flowing ink also had its uses :) )
• Caum 6mo ago
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• petterroea 6mo ago
  It's the same in Norway, and news paper chronicles are going as far as saying things like "Now that we learned that we went to far, what do we do with the generation of kids we experimented on?". Food for thought.
  • lucb1e 6mo ago
    Considering how many old people hold on to beliefs like women belonging at home doing the household and/or that people of color are violent, I'm not sure such a conversation is going to lead anywhere. We let them vote until they die, or authorize someone else to get a second vote (like my 90yo grandma does for my 65yo conservative/racist dad), as though they still have an understanding of society. A good understanding of climate change is barely 40 years old, if the news didn't tell them then they just go no education on the world's biggest ongoing challenge. People have just been letting the old generation be because we can't figure out anything better (I'm also not sure what a good system would look like)
• eviks 6mo ago
  > whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
  • fastasucan 6mo ago
    Usually you have to prove the effect of introducing something new.
    • lucb1e 6mo ago
      Seems strange to me, a bit like the evidence required for new foodstuffs without judging the old ones by the same criteria. People have been winging it and now new options would have to be scrutinized before use whereas the old 'wisdom' can just stay in place? Then again, by comparing new techniques against old ones, presumably the old ones get studied indirectly as well. Guess the glass could be half full with this approach
    • eviks 6mo ago
      which, in this case, is a paper book
• bentt 6mo ago
  I support this. Having a boundary around tech is a great asset for a growing mind. At the same time, get your kids a computer early so they can learn the basics. Maybe even keep it off the internet. Skip phones and tablets altogether for as long as possible.
• picsao 6mo ago
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• redbell 6mo ago
  Related: Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841)
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  I look forward to the (hopefully) positive results and what it will mean for most EdTech snake oil. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-is-profitable-it-is-also-mostly-useless https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
• ffsoftboiled 6mo ago
  Impossible for a Vocational Tech teacher in the networking field. How can I teach computers without computers?
  • lysace 6mo ago
    (Maybe use some of those skills to figure out a way to read more than the headline.) I recommend reading at least the closing line: This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.
    • dathinab 6mo ago
      Which shifts things from "before high school" to "in primary school and then gradual introduce aspects on it".
• nathan_compton 6mo ago
  I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class is specifically about using computers.
  • stodor89 6mo ago
    Cause there's money to be made.
• dhosek 6mo ago
  I don’t know why the headline was changed for the link, but the headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are slippery things.
• insane_dreamer 6mo ago
  100% support this. Computers in school -- except at specific times for specific purposes -- are a distraction. My teen told me he and his friends were watching Hulu in class on their Chromebooks because while the school district had locked down access to Netflix, Disney, etc., they forgot Hulu :/ The students also figured out ways to share links to game sites by using shared Google docs and using URLs that bypassed the school's controls. The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in classroom education is essential at the lower grades in particular.
• WalterBright 6mo ago
  The same goes for college. I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard. When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head. Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you. The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive! Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.
  • emil-lp 6mo ago
    I'm teaching programming and algorithms at uni. Only blackboard.
    • osmsucks 6mo ago
      In my university, probably because the CS department at the time was an underfunded offshoot of the faculty of Mathematics, we basically didn't have access to computers (and I didn't have a laptop of my own). We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had taken "shortcuts".
      • WalterBright 6mo ago
        I used to write code in a spiral notebook when I didn't have access to a computer. It was also hard to code on a computer in those days when the output device was an ASR-33, or a screen was 24x80.
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• Jbird2k 6mo ago
  I don’t teach in a public school but we use tech to a very limited extent in my k-9 school grades 7-9 will be taking a computer skills course next year. We currently teach touch typing to grades 8 and 9. Everything else is pencil and paper. I think present day children are exposed to tech in non productive way ie mobile devices. The number of kids who don’t know how to operate a mouse and keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult for some. It’s quite interesting honestly.
• hintymad 6mo ago
  Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty obvious that screens, such as iPads, are bad for kids' education. The homework on apps like i-Ready is mostly just crappy multiple-choice questions. I fail to see how that actually helps students. They should be challenged and kept in their discomfort zones. They need to experience problem-solving in all its forms and get feedback from teachers on how they solve a problem. They need to practice writing and long-form analysis, and get detailed feedbacks from teachers - things i-Ready just can’t provide. The funny thing is, so many Americans blame the system for inequality while embracing Jo Boalers' nonsense. Yet they flock to screens like moths to a flame, not realizing that wealthy families will just pay for private tutors while the kids without those resources get left behind, when enforcing hgher education standards could be arguably the cheapest thing to do[1]. How's that working out for equality, let alone equity? [1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.
  • verteu 6mo ago
    What does the evidence say? AFAICT, meta-analyses tend to find a positive effect of tech in education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131516302172 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601... https://i.imgur.com/IYJLiA1.png https://i.imgur.com/IYJLiA1.png
• tsoukase 6mo ago
  The luckiest were us that got into adulthood during the 90's. Traditional studying at school and full digital afterwards. The last generation. That's the cause of the reverse Flynn effect: diminishing IQ of 18-yo's after 1995.
• Temporary_31337 6mo ago
  I know it's brutal, but my kids were raised with iPads, PS3-5, computers, age inappropriate Minecraft and youtube, all kids of gadgets and turned out ok, already earning money (in tech of course) - one is in UX / product building, another more on the core math/theorem side. Protecting kids from tech is like raising your kids in a glass house, yes they are fine while inside but then what?
  • saint_fiasco 6mo ago
    Your kids were raised on those before predatory people and unscrupulous corporations learned how to take advantage of them at scale. To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so they are not targeted.
  • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
    It's great that your kids had none of the issues reported. Others have had lives disrupted by addiction.
• amai 6mo ago
  Handwriting is important. But this could also be learned with digital pens. Unfortunately most schools don't have these and instead do just multiple choice on touchscreens. But have a look at https://dynamilis.com/ https://dynamilis.com/ for s good app to improve hand writing.
• tomasGiden 6mo ago
  Guy here with kids in Swedish school. In general I support the direction of learning basic analogue skills and detoxing from the constant dopamine hits of the digital world. BUT one of my kids has Asperger’s and it is extremely hard for him to muster up the energy to do something ”boring”. So gamified learning on an iPad works very well for him. Also doing math on an iPad where, instead of seeing full pages of equations to solve, he sees only one equation makes it much easier for him to get started. With these kids you learn to not focus on parenting/teaching principles and instead focus on the goals. I’ll do whatever to get him to go to school and learn, no matter if I’ll have to drive him the 700 m to school while he is watching YouTube or having him to math on an iPad. So as long as the push for more analogue tools is just a direction and not without individual exceptions I’m all for it. Sadly today’s Swedish government seems more focused on being seen as hard on kids, crime, immigrants etc (basically everything except environmental protections) than actually following scientific principles.
• bmitc 6mo ago
  I hope to god this comes into vogue in the U.S.
• selectively 6mo ago
  Idiotic. Absolute dumbness.
• cpuguy83 6mo ago
  Giving kids the worst machines money can buy paired with absolutely terrible "education" software which is little more than bubble sheets on a screen was obviously going to fail. The problem isn't that kids can't learn on tech, it's that the whole thing was done in the worst way possible.
• 0xis 6mo ago
  [dead]
• casey2 6mo ago
  The value of a shared reference frame decreases every year, while simultaneously the cost of translating between distinct reference frames has collapsed. Of course books are better, but for what? Serving a reference frame that doesn't value technology?
• SarahC_ 6mo ago
  I love how entire cohorts of students across a country are used in education experiments! America dropped the "phoneme, sound it out" of decades past and taught students to recognise word "shapes" and learn what they said. It was a complete, and total failure. Children did not learn to read. What never comes up in the news is the absolutely crazy approach to rolling this out..... "Amazing new education idea is here! We're all doing it!"...... 8 years later, school graduates fail at X, Y, Z BECAUSE of that amazing idea. There's no accountability, no recompense. Just a news article saying "5% graduate this year! Oh no! Education is terrible!".. papering over the accountability.
  • Valodim 6mo ago
    You make it sound like there is an obvious solution to this. So what is it? No changes ever? Make 20 year experiments before rolling out any change at scale? Hold decision makers personally accountable for billions of GDP loss? Compensate the cohort monetarily for the generational inconvenience? For some things there just is no easy way.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • hju22_-3 6mo ago
      Err, no, it's actually really easy. Just give them a choice in the matter first. You do realize you're arguing for toying with people's futures based merely on effectively unproven methods because you just feel like doing it? Futures that have inherent value because the people being toyed with are inherently valuable too. But no, it's totally fine to not be held accountable for your actions. I mean, what's the real damage done here? Think about how expensive it'd be, or, or, how long it'd take if not! That surely justifies just going to town on people, right? :/ That's essentially what you're arguing. Perhaps not what you intended, but it is what it becomes given the context, and more importantly, the people involved that you disregard so callously. If it's so darned expensive to do, have you considered that you have the free will and intellectual sophistication required to just . . . not do it? If it'd be so expensive to recuperate a group of people, either your methods have too high a probability of requiring it or your method is just perhaps not ready yet if the potential end result are that disastrously bad. Either way, it points towards going back to the drawing board instead of to town. But if it's oh so difficult to get these studies done, you know what you can do? You can do it over longer periods of time, just like you bemoan, because that larger time scale will stop you from ruining other people for your own curiosity of will x work in y. You could give people the choice to join the study, you could have smaller cohorts every time and refine the process as you go, you could keep each cohort limited to a year or two to avoid long-term damage, and you could test in different age ranges to get more data. The list goes on and on and on. Almost like studies on people require larger caution than just testing to see what works without any precautions and going from there. When learning about the scientific method, the idea that people are, you know, people and not test subjects is pushed constantly. Because certain people sadly need that reinforced to avoid being callous researchers. It's oh so easy to forget the numbers you toy with are real lives with real value regardless of what is done with those lives. We trade immediate results and dubiously better efficiency for larger time spans exactly so that we can ensure the people in them remain protected. Giving people choice in the matter, and letting guardians weigh the value proposition (like other studies have done successfully) by giving them the prerequisite information required to make those decisions, allows for a higher likelyhood of avoiding disasterous effects on those very same people. It's not "generational inconvenience" when lives are affected for multitudes of years; it's callous impatience. It's not "no change ever," is respect for the people involved in attempting those changes and respect for the potential ramifications of those changes. It's borderline evil to disregard people because you, and I do mean you here, don't have the patience to ensure people's safety because, oh no, it'll take a while, or cost a lot if you're held accountable. Rather, it's okay that things take time, it's wanted that we don't make haste. Because haste makes waste. Because we don't need immediate results. Because we're not working with machines, we're working with the single most valuable thing we have on this earth; a human life. Have some compassion for those people, and you'll find that change doesn't take so long after all.
• shellkr 6mo ago
  I think people are forgetting that handwriting is also a technology. It is kinda a similar shift from using a stick to make fire and a lighter. The more work you put into something the more cognition you are using... so I am not sure those studies are of that much value.. We will not need to write in the future.. we will have AI for that. People are always looking for convenience and it will win in the end.