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Probably, see this picture of creimer's supervisor talking to him:
https://school.discoveryeducat...

Exterior of a computer skills classes, which are obviously important in their own right, all this tech does is increase student distraction. I'm a bit surprised they aren't tracking a DECLINE in test scores in all other areas of learning, really.

I'm sure having a laptop provides quite a bit more than distractions. I, for one, would have loved to have a 3lb laptop instead of hauling around 50lbs of dead tree edition school books when I was a kid. I have a permanent curvature in my right collar bone as a result of that crap. I also think their laptop's graphing calculators will be quite a bit more advanced than my old TI-81 ever was.

You're surprised by a lack of decline? I wonder how the kids in this country could get any dumber. US public education is in a state where a mid-19th century children's book is now considered 9-12th grade reading material. That is thanks, in no small part, to people who blame the best tech we can provide these kids for those kids failures.

I don't wonder why patent clerks can't come up with ground breaking physics like the Theory of Relativity anymore. It is no surprise to me that men like Tesla spoke eight languages and produced inventions in the early 1900s that today's brightest minds can't figure out.

The kids aren't distracted. They're fucking bored.

So believing in science and logic means being unwilling to allow for even the possibility of some non-physical thing "outside" of science?

No. Nothing is really "outside" of science. If things actually affect our world, as Astrology claims to, then science should be able to find the reason for it. The problem is that things like are simply ludicrous. Your very sign is based on the position of the sun when you were born. The problem is that the same chart we use now is no longer valid because of the wobble of the Earth. The sun no longer rises in Leo in August for example. Why do we believe them then? It's because they are so vague that we can find kernels of truth in them just like the bible. A group of people were handed sealed envelopes with personalized horoscopes created for their exact date of birth. When rating how closely the horoscopes matched them as a person, about 1/2 gave it a 3/4 match and the other half a perfect 4/4 match. They were fooled because despite having widely different dates of birth, they were given copies of the same horoscope.

If there's no "creator" "outside" of the universe, then, according to the principle of cause and effect that lies at the heart of so much of science and logic, not only should the universe not be there, not only should there be nothing, but even the nothing shouldn't be there. Doesn't believing in a universe which created itself require an even greater belief in miracles than any of the religious explanations?

What makes you think so? Who created the creator? Whatever answer you give can be applied to the Universe, there is no need to invoke a creator. Any creator theory I've heard seems ridiculous when looking at the actual Universe. Supposedly the whole thing was "created" for the benefit of humans. Humans don't appear for 13 billion years for one thing. Just think about that and look at "The Cosmic Calender". If one calendar represents the entire history of the universe, anatomically modern humans wouldn't appear until just six minutes before midnight on December 31. Writing wouldn't be discovered until 15 seconds before midnight, ergo no Bible before that.

Now imagine a 3,000 mile trip, about the distance from New York to L.A. Now walk along and pack that distance with human hairs small enough that you can pack 1,000 in every inch. When you're done you will have placed about 190 billion hairs, an approximation of the number of stars in our galaxy. Now on the trip back place another 1,000 hairs in every inch you pass. That'll be about 190 billion hairs also, which is a good approximation of the number of galaxies in the Universe. The same being that created all of that though only really cares about the one hair from the first trip, which is just 1/190,000,000,000th of one of the hairs in the return trip?

You might not like that, but there you have humanity's 'special' place in the Universe. One out of 190 billion stars in one out of 190 billion galaxies and only existing for six minutes if the history of the universe is an entire year.