Bring back the slate. Schools aren't getting all of that extra money, big tech is. And big tech already has too much money and too much power and way not enough seriousness.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Wait until we find out that the school-assigned devices are always listening, and everything is being scanned for keywords by the NSA, and they're taking action based on what they hear, arresting and deporting people.
It sounds insane, but this is MAGAmerica. If this was the top story tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised, at all. Think of this when the Administration says they are going to give a free laptop or tablet to every American schoolchild.
They give each kid in middle school and up a lenovo windows computer at mi kids' school. My daughter does her school work on her Fedora PC, transfers the files to the lenovo over FTP, and uses it only in school. The funny thing is that she came home complaining about that, and I quote, "garbage computer they gave me at school, I can't work on that thing", and decided to instead use that workflow. I'm so proud of her 😍
Iready and Progress Learning are trash.
A bigger problem is school sponsored spyware on the devices. Weird how they don't mention that:
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy
https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/19/schools-spied-on-students-webcams
I'm not sure how that's a surprise to anyone. Keep your personal stuff off hardware that doesn't belong to you.
They used the onboard cameras to take pictures of kids in their bedrooms.
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There should be 1 class for computer and tech. The rest of school can be done with pencil, paper, and a ruler.
Districts should stop playing the marketing game and spend money repairing buildings, buying up to date textbooks, and fucking paying teachers more.
I wholly agree. Bring Computer Labs back, ditch the chrombooks. Let kids actually learn to write and nottake, and fucking pay our trachers more.
I run the makerspace of a school, and totally agree with this!
Pay teachers more, free breakfast and lunch for every child. These two things are the only things that you can just throw money at to improve outcomes that can be replicated everywhere.
As a generalization, they don't need more money for textbooks, they don't need more tech, they don't need building upgrades, they don't need whatever the latest software scam is, etc.
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I saw somewhere that general tech in schools makes students worse overall by 2/3 of a standard deviation. A class on it is an great approach, and the constant live experimentation on our youth education needs to stop. The pain of learning isn’t optional, I say.
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One class seems too few. 75% of jobs in the US use computers regularly.
Even the plumber shows up with a tablet and such.
On top of that, what ever was the point in making us write the essay twice, rough draft, the final... and have to rewrite the whole damn thing if we made a mistake. When it comes to writing, computers are where it is done.
Math... yeah, pencil and paper, calculator for the high level stuff.
History/social studies... videos and articles are just easier to distribute via computer. Though initial presentation with follow up commentary is ideal.
I think computers are overused in school, but 1 class is too far in the other direction.
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Tech has a place in the classroom, but that place isn’t “everything everywhere all at once” and I think there is a good value in teaching kids when they’re young when and where to put their phones and tablets down.
Tech has a place yes, the problem is school admins have chosen to use it as a replacement for competent, well compensated teachers.
I think this is one of the biggest missed opportunities in education.
We put "technology" in front of students, but mostly in the form of locked-down devices, prescribed apps, and step-by-step workflows. That teaches compliance, not understanding.
There's a huge difference between using software and understanding how it works, how to break it, fix it, or build your own.
Basic exposure to things like Linux, hardware setup, networking, and programming would give kids agency instead of just familiarity. Even if they don't pursue tech careers, they'd come out far more capable of navigating (and questioning) the systems around them.
Digital safety is a big one. Not just "don’t click bad links" but actual operational awareness: privacy, tracking, permissions, data ownership. The stuff that matters in reality.
I get that there are constraints like funding, vendor lock-in, teacher workload, curriculum pressure. But the current model feels like it's optimised to produce competent consumer users of systems, not people who can shape them.
Feels like a massive wasted opportunity.
Na the kids need a basic ass machine with only a command line like we did growing up on apple IIs
My first computer ran DOS
"Sorry Billy, you need to get your X Windows environment up or you're just not getting YouTube on here. Look at your younger brother, he's already experimenting with Wayland. I'm very disappointed in you Billy."
Exactly!! -- kid is gonna go home cry and wake up at 1AM and figure out how to get wine running so he can play roblox with his friends
You’re partly right. Did you read the article? One of the chief complaints is that in fact the devices aren’t locked down and kids are using them for things like games and youtube.
You’re in a Lemmy echo-chamber for the rest of it. The average user isn’t us.
As for the rest, schools teach to the lowest common denominator. The article itself plainly shows that the people “in charge” haven’t a clue how to effectively monitor, limit, and control usage of these basic devices. So throwing more at them isn’t the solution when they can’t even manage what they’ve got.
How can one become a tech nerd without tinkering with things though?
Yes but modernOS are advanced enough you dont need to tinker at all, kids will just go to the "app store" install some gacha games and never learn s thing about how the computer actually works. Like that's kinda what i did growing up except my first computer was command line only so i was forced to do some tinkering.
The problem is they can't control Chromebooks. Give them a Linux laptop with a purposeful distro that doesn't allow them to play Minecraft. Boom, problem solved.
Chromebooks are basically designed to be easy to lock down and be remotely administrator controlled. It seems like schools in this article just... aren't doing that for some reason? Maybe they just don't have the time or technical knowledge.
Minecraft isn't the problem.
The problem is the 24/7 input of corporate right wing propaganda and brainwashing.
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Claude, please find a linux 0-day to root my school laptop so that I can play Minecraft.
That's fine, some kids will do that, and I hope they do. But they will be a minority.
It's a valuable part of the education....
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If a fifth grader uses copy.fail to gain root access on their Chromebook I say we let them have some extra Minecraft time.
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Another mother, Jenny Sullivan, said she has noticed her fourth grade son capitalizing random letters and not getting corrected
If it's good enough for the President...
Tech shouldn't be allowed in the classroom until high school.
Kids need to learn how to think, use their hands, eye hand coordination, basic reading and most importantly ... have a freakin ATTENTION SPAN!!!
The modern computer, internet culture and social media are all designed to shorten a person's attention span as much possible to turn their brain into pudding and market anything to them.
One of the greatest skills in life in being able to think for yourself, to wonder, to imagine and to question the world with just your own mind rather than in occupying every waking moment to a digital device.
Not sure if joking/trolling, but school computers don't generally ALLOW social media or chat apps like Discord and such, as well as harshly limit internet usage with guardrails. They're pretty locked down and even when at home monitor network usage.
I don't like laptops and such in schools, but kids ARE going to need to know how to use them to be successful and that's something a lot of parents can't teach.
When I was growing up, we had to learn how to type, how to use the Dewey Decimal System and library terminals to look up where books were for research and such. Later, we had Computer Labs to do this work and write reports and such... This is no different. Don't confuse a smartphone internet experience and its constant advertising and social aspects with what kids get on these laptops.
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Tech isn’t the problem. It’s teaching kids to think critically. It’s hard to do regardless of what device you are using and it’s next to impossible with large class sizes.
Writing things out by hand does give kids time to think in larger classes where they can’t help guide their own lesson, though.
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Good. My son's school is already tired of me.
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