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Teachers Union: Computers Can Negatively Impact Children's Ability To Learn
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "A teacher's union in Northern Ireland is asserting that children spending too much time on computers are impairing their ability to learn. The asserted excessive computer use is being blamed for an inability to concentrate or socialize. As one teacher puts it, '... these gadgets are really destroying their ability to learn.'" This has been a topic of debate for as long as kids have had computers.
And sitting in a boring classroom for hours on end enhances their ability to learn?
There, done. Making assertions is easy. Hell, linking to pseudo-scientific psychology studies (Read: Almost all of them.) that reach conclusions you like is easy. What it isn't, though, is proof.
re-worded this is some old fudy dudy teacher saying, "those damn kids never listen just sit there playing on their computers ignoring the world around them"
Is are kids learnding?
Computers are the new primary conduit of communication and learning for this generation.
Adapt or make room for someone who can deal.
Computers are devastating for rote learning for the same reason calculators are: why memorize something when a computer can find it for you in seconds?
... learning is trapped in the 19th century. I'd love to take this game and get a developer to polish it to AAA level graphics.
http://immuneattack.org/
We learn from things we do repeatedly, so it would make sense to discover how to take advantage of our pleasure centers to make certain kinds of learning addictive in and of themselves. Now this is NOT to say that traditional learning is all bullshit but there is definitely a severe dearth of talent and intelligence when concerning how data is displayed, interpreted, thought about and engaged with. Ideally you should take things that are complex and break them down into things that are both interesting and easy to understand to build bridges to higher order understanding of concepts. I think one of education's greatest downfalls is not realizing that presentation, aesthetics, etc, are just as important because they HOOK the interest of kids. If you can't hook kids curiousity and just say 'here grind through all this boring work for no particular reason' I don't think we're doing them any favors. How many adults really remember anything from school if we're honest? I bet most of us could embarass our political leaders by just flipping open a highschool textbook and asking some basic questions.
I look back on my own education and I see how limited in imagination the current system really is on a whole host of things, schools tend to kill kids curiosity if we're honest with ourselves. Many of us didn't enjoy learning until we got out of school/university completely because of the nature of schools structure itself.
I think there is still plenty left to learn about learning and things we don't yet understand that the old guard has trouble dealing with.
The summary makes it sound like computers in the classroom are the problem. That's not what the article says at all. The teachers' union is accusing out-of-school exposure to "instant gratification" digital devices and games for ruining attention-spans before kids are old enough to go to school. The article claims youngsters are aggressive and inattentive due to past conditioning by games and always-on entertainment. It doesn't even mention computers or tablets in school. Misleading title & summary.
"We're finding that, for many children, when they begin school, it's the first time they've been told what they can't do - as opposed to simply being left to do what they like," she said."-- So the kids are coming from home and they do not like school? When? When they are 5? This is because they have computers at home? What?
I think Ireland just received a stack of bad test scores, and they are putting the smackdown on the teachers.
Show the research. Show the data. So a correlation. Show anything.
Yeah, they're all about pimping the US Common Core standards in Northern Ireland.
Schools do not know how to use computers for primary school students. They simply don't have the curriculum and they're unwilling to take general-purpose PCs and turn them into specific-purpose PCs that don't let one get off-task. They're also addicting and kids that aren't using PCs but see PCs in front of them are jonesing for their next fix.
I grew up in the tail-end of the era of the Apple II in schools, and the beginning of the Macintoshes, before wide-spread TCP/IP networks and before Internet connectivity. The Apple II was well-suited to educational use, as the student could only run the program that they were given the disk for. They couldn't distract themselves from the educational goal. They had one program and one program only, so they could either use that program or do nothing. PCs running DOS had a similar situation, though that was usually more because of DOS being hard enough to use that if one exited the game one generally didn't know how to go about distracting one's self.
Then the Macintosh and early Windows came around. Now they could do some other things in addition to the assigned program, but admittedly there weren't a whole lot of other things to do, so it was fairly easy to keep students on-task.
Then the local area computer networks came about, and if a campus had multiple tasks on their computers, then the students could often figure out how to do those other tasks not for the curriculum for the current class, and suddenly it became that much hard to keep on-task. It became possible to share things with other kids without the teachers catching on, or possible to mess with other kids. Proto cyberbullying if you will.
Then the Internet came along with the browser and general-purpose computers with hundreds of preloaded programs and at least tens of thousands available through the Internet, and now it's almost impossible to keep kids on-task. They can do anything, and with 9,999 wrong choices but only one right choice, that one right choice simply gets drowned out.
Primary school kids need to learn how to read, write, perform basic mathematics, and to learn how to find information the old-fashioned way. They need to learn what an index is, and how information can be sorted and archived, and how to sort the information that they want to present. Learning these skills manually will teach them how these skills work when they can do them electronically or with some other form of automation. Technology as classroom aids in elementary grades needs to be limited to special-purpose machines, like things that help present curriculum, or help in classroom discussion to let the teacher or the students aid their point, or if they're used for things like testing to make grading easier, they need to be locked down so that they only do the function that they're called upon to do at that time.
Once the kids get to secondary school, then start introducing the general-purpose machine. Let them learn how to use a productivity suite, or how to do research electronically, or how to use programs to aid in science education. At least at that point it's possible for the skill to actually still apply to the person's life once they reach adulthood where it might have to be applied.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Comic book
Dancing
Movies/Cinema
TV, cartoon/anime etc...
So yeah. Pretty much anything which might interrest a kid and is not school related is seen as a distraction. Call me back when tehy have a peer reviweed article showing it is worst than any other distraction source. Until then : BFD.
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visit randi.org
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My thoughts exactly.
This sounds like round 36 of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music." Teachers indulging in future-shock is just plain trite. Boring classes have always been boring. Kids like me have always had trouble slogging through them. If the kids have trouble paying attention to something that isn't exciting, then, for the love of all that is good, be more engaging. The only way to stop boring people is to stop being boring.
If computers actually impeded the ability to learn, I'd still be coding in BASIC.
What is really important here is:
us /. nerds, being geeks who are almost always involved with computer technology of some sort, in capacities professional, hobbyist, or both, immediately become defensive and insulting toward anyone who talks about technological devices in a negative way.
Never mind the claim, immediately condescend and attack anyone suggesting that electronic devices may not be the optimal solution for every situation!
Bonus: the teacher's union angle! The few right-wing of us (which is me, actually) can immediately jump on that one too. These fucks don't care about kids! There's no way professional teachers know anything about teaching kids! Because they are a teacher's union, they must be speaking on behalf of the anti-ipad wing of the Kremlin!
There is no way that parking a kid in front of a screen for several hours a day can have any ill affects, you socialist pinko union teacher!
THL phish sticks
FTA:
Is the Teachers Union's claim based on science, or formed by rumour and through projecting their own development without computers onto the current youth's?
... to the tune of Pink Floyd:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Anybody who uses the phrase "these gadgets" when referring to desktop computers is a bit out of touch, and probably shouldn't be trusted to provide an unbiased, open-minded opinion about them.
Secondary reasons to not take this opinion seriously is that it comes from "the teacher's union" which prioritizes member employment over education. It's akin to the UAW saying "these robot gadgets make poor quality products because they don't have the flexibility of a human assembly line worker" - just because they make some idiotic statement without a connection to reality, doesn't make it true. Unions are, by definition, very self-serving of its members, often to the detriment of the employers (the theory being, push them until the start to bleed, to make sure we get the most we can).
Wait, wait, are you saying that slashdot editors are dramatizing news just because it's related to computers?!
Surely that can't be. Next thing you know, I won't have to insert html to make a new paragraph.
The summary makes it sound like computers in the classroom are the problem. That's not what the article says at all. The teachers' union is accusing out-of-school exposure to "instant gratification" digital devices and games for ruining attention-spans before kids are old enough to go to school.
It is entirely possible that computers both help kids learn (with the right software) and they ruin their attention-spans.
I was about to delete the last half of that sentence, thinking maybe it isn't true that computers ruin attention spans, but then I got distracted by two other tabs at the top of my browser before later in the day realizing I had this comment half done.
Click submit quick before I get distracted again!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Maybe the reason those kids aren't paying attention is because they are learning stuff elsewhere and feel you're just wasting their time.
Or maybe it is, as the union suggests, because they realize how lame school is by comparison.
Or maybe kids are paying better attention now then they have in the past, and the union is falling for the golden age fallacy.
From http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/10_02_05.pdf
The limited evidence available also indicates that home computer use is linked to slightly better academic performance.
I'll take that limited evidence over the "no evidence" supplied by the teachers union.
Ther was this kid in Helsinki, always on his computer. Lindus Thornwalds or something. I dont know what became of him, but i saw him on youtube recently svearing, and flipping off both the guy filming him, and also somone called Vidia that was not in the screen (strange names they got in Finland). He clearly never got anywhere due to his obsessive computer use...
"Us here illiterate teachers are scared that we will be replaced by them their highly literate robots."
Anything used improperly can inhibit learning. Such as books. Hit someone with a book hard enough... and they will have trouble learning.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Computers and teachers unions are probably about equally bad for a child's education.
Same can be said with TV. TV makes people stupid but a tiny bit of it is informative and constructive... so it's good! We need that 1% so we can excuse something we like. McDonalds has healthy food! I got a yogurt with my big mac, fries, and sugar water.
Didn't we just have something on /. about how it is harder to READ in a linear normal fashion because people are skimming online all the time and it's impacting how our brains work to the point of diminishing reading skills (that is, conventional reading skills.)
There is plenty about delayed gratification problems and it's trends. Then if you get into video editing, they have reduced the attention span down to 2.5 seconds when it used to be higher (just watch an old film and count the cuts and transitions vs a new film.)
It's a Brave New World.
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We dont want to have to learn how to teach in a modern environment, all kids need is a chalkboard and a switch.
Its the teachers unions that could be damaging to a child's education when they protect under-preforming, under-trained, riding it until retirement, lazy bums.
That being said not all teachers are like that most I had to deal with were a pleasant help to education.
Slashdot was about what caught he eye, what made you think, now's its about what may make the community read and comment. Fuck you I'm out.
...destroying their ability to learn *without them*.
Whether or not that's a bad thing is a totally different discussion. Do you think the future of learning is with or without computers?
Welcome to focus and opportunity cost.
The basic idea was expressed brilliantly in 1957 along with a great way to combat it.
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Best post ever!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Computers aren't the problem. The problem is buying a bunch of computers and thinking your job is done. Before computers we didn't just throw a bunch of kids in a room with text books and lab equipment and expect them to emerge 6 months later with a deep understanding of Biology. Why do we essentially do that with computers and expect any meaningful result?
Plus, the general comment seems to be that the children are used to getting their own way, and have become used to immediate gratification of their wishes. Doesn't sound like it's got a whole lot to do with computers to me. It's certainly easier to leave pre-school kids in front of iPads that it would have been to leave them in front of the TV - they have more fun with the iPad than the TV. But it doesn't change the fact that this is simply bad parenting, and not a problem with technology per se.
That's the first thing that came to mind there. The idea that maybe this guys lesson plans are stone boring and can't keep his pupils attention. I certainly know that was the problem when I was a kid. And I'm of an 80s/90s vintage. So I was around right when computers started to filter into the classroom. And i had some of the same problems in both classes with and without computers. Either a teacher that just couldn't give me a good explanation or one that was going so slow that I was bored to tears.
Heh. I even had this one female world history teacher that spoke in the EXACT general tone and cadence of Ben Stein. She also had a real penchant for writing detention slips for people that fell asleep. Save for ONE guy she gave everyone in that class detention at least once. Not only did she get me three times it was the only three times I got detention.
to see this, just look in any cafe. Several people around a table all checking their phones. Social interaction has definitely changed, in some ways for the worse. As for learning, other posters have mentioned engagement. The top students will not need to see "exciting" stuff to learn because they love learning and being challenged. The middle to low students will need to be entertained because that is what they are used to - TV, facebook, youtube, etc etc. Unfortunately this is the way of the new world. At the school where I work, the Phys Ed teachers tell me about children who have never climbed trees or chased/kicked a ball, and have terrible gross and fine motor skills - another symptom of technology not doing them a favour I suspect.
This is an obvious troll, but I'll bite.
From TFA: "They're so used to the instant buzz which you can get with these games and gadgets that they find it really hard to focus on anything which isn't exciting."
So make the fucking school exciting. And no, using computers in the classroom isn't the answer. Inspiring kids to learn is a very demanding task and you can't hide your incompetence as a teacher by blaming the kids and their tablets/phones/laptops. Inability to concentrate, you say? Have you actually *seen* a kid play Unreal Tournament (or whatever it is kids play these days)? Also, in my day, D&D, Magick the Gathering and similarly complicated games would be the grand examples that your "inability to learn" statement is full of shit.
Lastly, fuck you and your sociallizing. If you don't address issues like bullying, the kids will burry their faces even deeper in their screens in an effort to get away from it all.
Leave me alone! I'm working on something very important you phillistines!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think I can somehow understand what they are trying to say. :)
When I was young I was playing games like Monkey Island for several months. And I would say that is the trend with all computer games (dumbing down, easy rewards etc.)
I very much doubt that kids today in the same age would be able to spend that much time on playing one game. (I might be mistaken though, my kids are too small yet
Teachers Union is afraid of being replaced by computers.
Me: Teachers Unions Can Negatively Impact Children's Ability To Learn
>>This has been a topic of debate for as long as kids have had computers.
1980s --> This has been a topic of debate for as long as kids have had access to TVs.
And going back much further.......This has been a topic of debate for as long as..............
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars :-|
Because technology has made to solve problem more easier. A simple example is calculator without it most of the children cant do the calculation. So technology has both Good And Little bad affects now its depend on teacher how they grow their students. It is one of the most rising statement not only for teachers but also for parents. I also write for beginners about c++ programming
I have worked in 4 schools as a tech coordinator. What is actually happening is teachers are realizing that sending the kids to the labs is making them more comfortable with learning from computers than humans. Teacher unions are starting to realize this also and are getting scared of being replaced. Where I am now, 50% of the senior class and 50% of the junior class are taking multiple online courses (by their choice rather than being forced to) and it is starting to get the teachers to wake up to the fact that the students just dont see any reason to be stuck in their classroom anymore everyday.
Students are watching netflix and youtube in classrooms and they know they could be doing that when they are at home instead of being stuck in a class doing it.
Giving a kid a locked down i-pad and a credit card is rather different than a raspberry pi and a phython book. Both would be counted as computer use in the statistics but guess which one would have statistically better performance at school
First, a big percentage of people are not made to learn. They don't give a crap about it and live just fine. This was no different at any point in time. Only a fraction of humans go after education and care, others just want to watch football, drink beer and reproduce.
Then, many teachers are seperated from reality. They regurgitate over and over on small things. Ask them a question? Get an unrelated answer.
Lastly, without computer and internet I wouldn't have learned anything. I come from Egypt and education here is designed to keep people ignorant. Education system is a huge disaster, where misspelling a word could earn a beating til hands are swollen. It isn't made to learn, it's made to break people.
That "teacher union" is telling the world that children spending too much time on computer can impair their ability to learn
Vitamin A is good. Too much Vitamin A can become bad for yer health
Sex is great. But for people who have too much sex, the act of sexing itself is no longer considered "enjoyable"
Music can be relaxing. Too much of it can end up hurting your ears
Money ? Who doesn't want money ? But too much money can attract thieves, robbers, or even kidnappers, ask Bill Gates and see if he dare to go anywhere without his team of bodyguards
Computers cant impact a childs learning as much as a bad teacher, The teachers union does more to keep bad teachers employed than anything else.
I'll take the risks of my child using computers more than a completely worthless teacher that should have been fired years ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
bad grammar and misspelled words are not a side effect of bad education, it's that they are just incredibly lazy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The only thing the Teacher's Unions are terrified of.. is that they're going to be replaced.
..don't panic
High Tech Heretic by Clifford Stoll is an excellent book on the topic of computers and education.
There are a lot of obvious typos on /.
Which I carefully ignore. Doesn't bother me when someone swaps letters in a word because they were typing too fast.
On the other hand, there's the endemic problem of people not knowing the difference between "there", "they're", and "their". Or "its" and "it's". Or "where" and "wear". Or "your" and "you're"
That's not laziness, that's just ignorance.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Too much computer time hampers children's learning....
Too much TV time...
Too much social time...
Too much couch time...
Too much in home conflict...
Too much alcohol...
Too much time working an after school job.....
Too much.....of anything....can cause ill effects with anyone. Just ask drug addicts.
When I was a small child, from as early as I can remember, my family had a Nintendo Entertainment System and a family computer. I learned to use the computer when I was just four years old, and had been using the NES as far back as I can remember. As a child, when I had good teachers, I was one of the best students in the class. When I had lazy teachers, they hated me, because I quickly became bored of things I already understood and knew, and would move on to something interesting on my own, like reading a schedule or book, trying to help other kids learn, or daydreaming.
Exposure to screens does not cause short attention spans. Bad parenting and teaching does. It's the job of the parents and teachers to drive the kids to focus on a goal and stick with it, not just immediately give up when it's no longer fun. It's also the job of the parents and teachers to progress to something new when the child has learned something, otherwise they become tired of wasting their time redoing the same exercises and lessons they already know.
"Bad teachers really destroying their ability to learn"
Many (not all) kids these days don't WANT to learn from a teacher because they've decided that 'if and when I need to know something, my phone/tablet/device will just tell me the answer'. This leads to them effectively having 0 memorized facts or baseline knowledge. Facts that are a foundation to do more complex things. Imagine not knowing your basic multiplication tables. I've personally tutored several (non Learning Disabled) Grade 8s that can't do basic addition in their heads; oh, but they can sure use a calculator app on their iPod like a boss. And then they promptly forget said thing they looked up. To them, if the fact can't be looked up quickly, it's not worth knowing about. If the fact can be looked up quickly, it's not worth remembering. End result, kids know nothing and can't do complex problems where several concepts need to be used at once.
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
I don't think that computers "ruin" attention spans - anyone who has spent a few hours lost in Photoshop or playing The Sims can attest to the ability of some programs to keep us enthralled for long periods of time. I think it's social media specifically that makes us a little ADD. Also, there are fewer activities besides computer games or art programs that can engage flow concentration on the computer, compared to the hundreds of offline things (anything from playing sports to playing D&D to building hobby models.)
Is engaging flow concentration something that can be taught? I don't know. But that is clearly what is missing from the curriculum if kids can't concentrate in school.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I want my son to be a douchebag tech startup CEO by the time he is 25. Sounds like he needs more computer time.
"... these gadgets are really destroying their ability to learn." Or maybe kids just learn differently with these "gadgets".
Schools are eliminating teachers' jobs already and using computers in their place. Obviously teachers won't feel good about computers. Classes in Spanish or French are now often without teachers. Imagine one computer program teaching every eight grade US history course in the nation. To a bean counter there is no better way to go. And we will see brick and mortar schools start to become a lot less common as a very real option of home schooling by computer emerges. Social chaos may result. Stable homes are required for a child to do well in home learning. One parent or at least one caretaker need be present to assure the child stays in place and does their work. Poor folks have man and wife working and divorced or single parent homes have no way to get this done. Yet those who are in a more stable lifestyle will deeply resent and fail to properly fund traditional schools for what they see as losers. Sadly greed and crime have held up home learning with the various pseudo schools and colleges offering defective diplomas at high prices causing a distrust of online education. A remedy is governmental control and oversight of commercial education offerings and strict accreditation requirements by one approved accrediting body.
I'm the IT director for a school that teaches kids with dyslexia and non-verbal learning disabilities (Asperger Syndrome). Technology is a hugely beneficial tool for these types of kids.
Language based learning disabilities make it hard for kids to learn other subjects. A student that can not read at grade level is hindered in all other subjects. Text to speech and speech to text technologies can help a student complete history and science classes while they remediate their reading and writing skills in other classes.
Google Apps has a ton of educational apps that are reducing our need for textbooks. Stuff like Geogebra and Plotly are free online and have almost eliminated math textbooks for our school.
Show me a teacher that says technology is a worthless teaching tool, and I'll show you a lazy teacher.
Computers much like books alone can not teach a child. These things must be integrated into the curriculum and it is the teacher's responsibility to guide the instruction and keep kids on track.
Technology isn't the problem - lazy teachers are the problem.
However from my person experience, the computer can provide better answers, solutions and instruction then the teacher.
Yes, but the Slashdot "re-write" is actually interesting. That kids are listening to too much rock n' roll and don't pay attention in class....
oh sorry, got my decades mixed up.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Computers are tools. They are becoming more and more a part of our life. To use them well, don't use them as replacements for teachers, use them to learn about the computers; to control them. The problem isn't the computers, it's how we use them. I know I don't learn as well from a program as from a live teacher who reacts and responds, sees if you get it, and answers your questions. The point is that good teachers are better than machines at teaching, but computers are an important tool.
Except schools(especially high school) are teaching jeopardy stuff(like biology and history more useful in college, for example) that no one will ever utilize in the real world after you turn 18. Schools should be teaching skills such as computer programming, computer networking, computer graphics design, web design, A/C and Automotive mechanic, electrician, construction, welding, carpentry, etc.... stuff like this that will land you a job at 16 or 18 and if you want to be a biologist, historian, doctor, etc...well, go to college.
Books have negatively impacted children's ability to memorize.
Maybe the teachers need reform in regards to their methods. You have to evolve with the society and raise children to do so, not teach them the way you were taught.
If there's one thing we can be sure has hurt children's ability to learn, it's teachers unions. So I find this a bit ironic to say the least.
It is common in lower income households for children to be babysat by TV and now an Xbox or PlayStation. These kids are probably fed a daily diet of junk food and their parents are probably young, immature, poorly educated and lack parenting and cooking skills. These kids wouldn't get the all the proper intellectual stimulation, discipline, proper nutrition and boundaries set like kids from higher income homes with more intelligent, better educated, older more mature parents. It is sad to see but to blame a toy is stupid. They should be actively discouraging people from having children before they have finished their schooling and have a proper job that can support a family. By that time hopefully the person as grown up and is ready to be a parent.
The teachers union is the one thats negatively impacting childrens ability to learn.
Teachers are not allowed to teach what they know, they must teach the exact line of bullshit that is fed to them from the top.
Monoculture is not a good thing, they are manipulating education so as to gain control over people, not teach them.
True, we should distinguish between computers and the applications to which they are put to use.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I am in the tech industry and my 2 sons spend a lot of time on the computer and the are smart as hell. In fact the watch Baby Einstein on YouTube as baby's rocking back and forth in the swing.
Its not the teachers job to teach your children how to learn; its the parents! I repeat and repeat until they get it and don't give up at all. I read to my kids and my 4 and 5 year old can read already because of this and the computer as they are forced to read the screen!!
When they are in class then they are not on computers and its teacher time!
This topic is ridiculous!! The parents are to blame, not the tools!!!!!!
Depends on what the teachers are trying to teach. I can see computers having a huge impact on rote memorization. Learning the dates when of WW2, or learning your multiplication tables are somewhat less impactful in the days of smart phones. I not only have a calculator handy at all times, but access to google, Wikipedia and the entire Internet.
However I don't really see this as a bad thing. Going forward, computers are only going to get smaller, faster, easier to access and more ubiquitous. Having students memorize facts will be a much less important skill than having students learn to gather data.
Beyond that, we will be able to spend more time analyzing data, instead of just memorizing the facts. Of course, this will probably upset teachers though, particularly lazy ones. It's a lot easier to grade homework that consists of a couple dozen math problems, or fact checks. Much harder will be grading a child's actual understanding of a subject matter and ability to convey information.
This signature is false.
You'd be afraid too, if your highly professionalized job was being turned into something slightly less expendable than a burger flipper, that your due process and bargaining rights were being torpedoed, and for being judged on student performance when the #1 factor in said performance is what kind of a home the kid goes home to at the end of the day.
Something you have no control over. And all so the Mitt Romney's can turn public education into a profit center.
As has been pointed out many times, these people are complaining about computers outside the classroom lowering the attention span of kids. Not much of a story there, so the Union part was emphasized, since samzenpus knows that triggers a PTSD reaction amongst conservatives, libertarians, and birchers. Because Michael Moore ran over their dog when they were five, or something.
Unions do nothing to prevent workers from being fired for cause. Do you hate your own right to democracy and due process, or just people who work for a living?
My greatest regret is attending high school. If I had fully indulged my obsession with computers at age 13 (in 1989) and forgone my high school "education" I would be in Bill Gates' shoes by now, throwing money at schools like it grew on trees. There's nothing wrong with using computers, but there's a big difference between playing Angry Birds and learning to program and reading Wikipedia. Computers are a tool; you can build a bridge or poke yourself in the eye.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
It matters what we define as "computer". A whole generation who grew up on bootstraping Free Unix OSes and reading code from the various IBM PC magazines of the 80s literally build the INTERNET and the companies around it. It was a virtue of necessity, but a still a point to consider. Kids today are not exposed to these sorts of things without outside intervention.
I think as long as kids can focus and trust their environment learning won't be impacted. I mean think about how we first learn a language, we simply match patterns that we think are related, then we test them and record the results. If one cannot trust their environment they will stop pattern matching, if one is discouraged from making mistakes while testing, the will to learn will be broken. One thing I would say would be to let kids also watch long movies, the 5 minute YouTube attention span really spreads the knowledge tree into smaller chunks which then makes it harder to relate, again effecting learning. So yea, love, focus and trust oughta do the trick everytime.
But it doesn't change the fact that this is simply bad parenting, and not a problem with technology per se.
It is true that technology is not intrinsically bad. Even if the "device" is a book, only being allowed to sit in the relative safety of a chair (or on the floor) isn't good, either.
And while there is poor parenting, the situation is not as simple as many experts seem to think.
There are several things going on. Our current social environment demands that parents not allow children to be exposed to risk. My childhood was full of risks. My friends and I survived. Indeed, we thrived.
These days, children can get taken away from parents who allow their kids to do any of what my friends and I were allowed. Example, a few years ago, a friend of my daughter was taken from her parents because she stumbled, bruising her arm, while practicing cheerleading routines in the back yard of her home. Her parents were out there with her, so she was being supervised. Child Protective Services declared her parents were allowing her to practice in an unsafe location with out expert supervision. (It was a flat, grassy lawn, similar to the grassy football field at school. No idea what they (CPS) would have considered safer.)
At the same time, parents, today, have less time to supervise their children than my - and my friends' - parents did.
So, what are parents to do? We were lucky enough to be able to stagger our work schedules so that when our daughter wasn't in school, at least one of us was with her. Very few parents have (or had) that option. And there is still cooking, cleaning, etc, at home. So, the safest things for today's parents to do is to put their children in front of entertainment devices while they do everything they have to do to keep the family fed and housed.
Some people might say that those people shouldn't be parents. If that's the case, then who can be parents?
I think that most parents are afraid to let their children do anything besides school, professionally organized activities (like Little League) and sit in front of an entertainment device. And often, parents either can't afford, or are afraid of, the professionally organized activities.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
The local high school here only has 4 classes during a day, and I'm pretty sure the teachers get a free class period. They at least got them when I attended. The teachers I know are some of the few great teachers you don't want to miss out on having. Such employees are almost always underpaid.
Lets stop talking about anecdotes, and look at some hard facts. The median compensation package for public teachers is $75k/yr (source) and they have a median of around 3 (maybe 4) years of experience (source). The BLS states that teachers are paid 11% higher than other professionals (source). At 53 hours/wk (source, it sounds like a lot of work, but it is 3 hours fewer than most professionals, even without considering vacation time (source). Considering vacation time, teachers who use all of their days of leave work an average of 171.5 days/yr vs 220 days/yr for private sector professionals with 10 years of experience (source), which isn't quite a fair comparison because professionals with 10 years of experience get more vacation than people with 3-4 years of experience.
If you multiply this out, most professionals are working over 1/3 more hours than teachers for 10% less pay. They generally get off of work early enough to make a dentist appointment, avoiding the need to shift hours around like other professionals, and their extra hours outside of the school day are free for scheduling as they see fit. Really good teachers might be working long hours for their money. However, when they're getting paid 50% more per hr, it's clear that most are not.
If you want to argue the difficulty and stress of a job, then that would be a different matter than I've discussed. It won't be fixed by reducing hours or increasing pay, but fixing polity.
But it doesn't change the fact that this is simply bad parenting, and not a problem with technology per se.
Not simply. It is more complex than many experts seem to think.
My childhood was full of risks. My friends and I not only survived, we thrived. Today, our social environment demands parents protect children from nearly all risk. Example: A few years ago, a friend of our daughter was taken from her parents after she stumbled and bruised her arm while practicing cheerleading routines on her home's back lawn. Her parents were out there with her, so she was supervised. Child Protective Services declared that her parents were allowing her to practice in an unsafe area with out expert supervision. (Seems to me that a flat, grassy lawn would be safer than a crowded (and grassy) football field. And even at official practice under the cheer-coach's supervision, the cheerleaders still stumbled and still got bruised.)
Also, today's parents have less time to supervise their children than when I was a child. Besides cooking, keeping the home clean and other necessities, both parents have to work full time and frequently, one or both will have a second job.
How many parents are actually able to constantly supervise even 1 child? Some parents are able to enroll their kids in professionally supervised activities like Little League. Others can't afford it or are afraid to allow their children to participate in such activities. And even when the kids do participate, they are still not getting unstructured socialization time with their friends like my friends and I (and many of you /.ers) did as children.
While there are some lazy/bad parents, the main problem is that, as a society, we have become afraid to let our children be children. Instead we protect our children from nearly everything, then blame the schools - and teachers, technology, etc - when they aren't ready to be adults at age 18.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."
And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""
Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Computers are essentially living encyclopaedias. But it teaches seach, click, cut and paste. In this way, a child picks up a lot of knowledge about his/her assignment. But the kid has lost the ability to concentrate for more than a few seconds. His brain has become wired to 30 seconds of knowledge absorption.
Can he read a novel ? No, unless it is a very short story. A 2 hour novel would be a torture for a child. His grandparents generation would find a 4 hour novel as torture. So, we substitute one way of gaining knowledge to a short very superficial way to learn where to visit sites for cut-and-paste assignments.
My grandkids did a complete assignment on a cockroach by googling, cutting images, pasting and putting down a few words. There was no gain in vocabulary that will persist. He could not remember what the belly of the roach was called, though it was important for his presentation (grade 4-5)
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada