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'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools' (nationalreview.com)
schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results. Take Facebook's efforts for an example. The company -- under fire for privacy breaches worldwide -- is peddling something called "Summit Learning," a web-based curriculum bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Last month, students in New York City schools walked out in protest of the program. "It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, told the New York Post. He spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. Teacher interaction is minimal. "You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained. No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning. What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies who are more easily distracted, less happy, less socially adept, and less physically fit. Standing up to the Silicon Valley Santas and asserting your family's "right to no" may well be the best long-term gift you can give your school-age children.
Michelle Malkin and National Review? Thanks msmash
The same author behind such enlightening articles as:
* The Authoritarianism of Silicon Valley’s Tech Titans ("Silicon Valley is imposing its own form of sharia.")
* Say No to Nanny Bloomberg ("Michael Bloomberg, the soda-taxing, gun-grabbing, snack-attacking control freak, should keep his nose out of our lives and out of the 2020 presidential race.")
* Look Who’s Back: Obama Crashes the Midterms ("Thanks, Obama, for reminding America of your miserable legacy.")
* How Google Co-opts Our Schools to Collect Kids’ Data ("Local school administrators have sold out vulnerable children to Silicon Valley.")
Not that I expected much from the National Review...
*Disclaimer: I used to be a technology director for a school district.
Throwing technology at a social / political problem isn't a panacea. Never has been and never will be. The tech adds very little benefit to the learning process unless the teachers actively incorporate it into their existing lessons. Where many get it wrong is using the tech as a replacement for textbooks and paperwork and nothing else. Yes it's less paperwork to manage, and that's good for the teacher in multiple ways, but it harms the student when done incorrectly. Case in point: Auto-graded assignments.
Yes, many teachers would be up in arms over the idea of taking away auto-graded assignments, but most of those assignments are poor quality by necessity of the auto-grading system. I.e. Most are Multiple Guess. There are a few systems that accept fill in the blank answers, but many of those are very specific about what answers they will accept, and often just encourage the teachers using them to move to Multiple Guess only as a time saving measure. As for why Multiple Guess is bad: If you know the answers will be on your test, why bother studying beyond being able to pick the answer out of a group? The answer is always given to you, and even if you don't have the slightest clue as to what it is when presented with the choices, the answer can be lucked upon by the simple roll of a six-sided dice. This is one of the reasons younger generations cannot deal with complex issues in the workforce. They expect to be told exactly what is expected of them, and if exact instructions are not given, they often cannot come up with an answer on their own due to lack of practice and / or knowledge.
Another problem is the funding that tech eats up. Many school districts have their own budget for IT that is separate from their general fund. In some cases a school may not be able to afford safety equipment for science classes, but has plenty of money for the latest iPad or Chromebook. In other cases, the school may choose to replace working tech with the new shiny, even though it will cost the school more in the long run to support and maintain it, for nothing more than trying to one-up or emulate neighboring districts.This encouragement of tech being a separate budget drives funds away from areas that need it. Causing deficiencies in other areas of teaching, and in some cases can be dangerous. Like not being able to afford having a nurse on staff during the day. Or failing to pay for proper security.
Worse is when said school cannot afford the more expensive new shiny and buys it by the truckload anyway. In some worse case scenarios a school may not have a technology instructor, but is inundated with tech and clueless teachers / leadership. In those cases the tech is always a waste of money, because the students gain very little from it due to the clueless teachers' / leadership's inability to integrate the tech correctly. This last bit also causes the students to pick up bad computing behaviors as security and proper use always gives way to making something work during class.
Finally, most of these efforts made by the various companies are designed to lock-in the students to their products at a young age. Most of these schools won't be teaching technology as a general subject. Most of the time a task or goal that must be completed on tech is explained to a student as a series of menus or button presses. If you've ever encountered a student that could not make a slideshow presentation with anything beyond obviously cut and pasted bullet points in no particular grouping, or a student that couldn't manage their own files, this is why. When students are trained to specific programs / devices, they are fundamentally challenged when moving into the real-world outside of the classroom. As they go from being "experts" to "novices" simply by choosing a company to work for that uses a competing tech vendor as their primary provider, or by the vendor's latest revamp changing too much for them
Not only did you pen one of the most opinionated pieces of "journalism" ever, but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
So much bias it's like all I have is a right speaker.
———
In short, go back to journalism school.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news. Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document.
...
[Disclamier: I'm a developer born in 70-something who doesn't think children need the internet in their pockets]
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day. This idea was based on how my wife and I were raised during the 80's and 90's where most of our childhood was spent outdoors with friends. I know it's quaint these days, but it seemed to work for us; our kids can hold a real conversation with adults while maintaining eye contact, and despite fighting amongst themselves like cats and dogs, we are always complimented on how engaging and polite they are. Not a brag, just context. Maybe they're just good kids and us limiting screen time has nothing to do with it.
...but...
Now that the school has them on Chromebooks 3-5 hours per day during instruction time, then an additional 30-minutes of them just watching Youtube during Resource/Study Hall, then doing "homework" on the Chromebook for an hour at night...screen time has exploded from 2 hours per day to 6.5 hours per day.
They don't have smartphones (yet), but they are literally in the 1% of kids in their schools that don't have smartphones. I think beyond a reasonable amount like 2 hours, time that children spend looking at a screen is time they are not learning how to interact with the world with their senses. Some of their peers can't string 3 sentences together in a single conversation without drifting into looking at their phone or talking about what they saw on their phone.
I may be a minority even here, but I think the school (and these organizations) are doing a huge disservice to these kids...and for what, automated learning with built-in KPIs and a fatter bottom line?
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
"After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results."
ITYM 40 years, because that's how long that story has been spun . Tech can be a useful adjunct, same as a library. But it does nothing to actually educate. Setting someone down in the Library of Congress doesn't educate them, despite the volume of knowledge present. Medium vs. content.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman
Welcome to your future job. The annoyance is slightly alleviated because you're paid to stare at a screen all day.
What school won't prepare you for is endless hours of pointless meetings, and political machinations that have no basis in reality.
The objective of these efforts isn't to enhance learning in any meaningful way, it's to create customers. Chromebooks, for example, are really only relevant because they gained a foothold in schools which has led to a user base raised on chromebooks continuing to use chromebooks. This is like the old tobacco and alcohol ads that appealed to children; target your customers early and create customers for life... kids that grew up on Joe Camel and Spuds Mackenzie became adults who smoked Camels and drank Bud Lite. Kids who grow up on iPads become Apple users, kids who grow up on Chromebooks become Google users... same early addiction model, only the product has changed.
I’m curious if you have children of your own if school age? I agree that being able to learn on your own is a valuable skill. I also agree that need for instant gratification can be a big problem with -ahem- kids these days. However, being able to learn for oneself generally assumes a grasp of the basics. The basics can be learned without outside help, but this is horribly inefficient. I have definitely seen a tendency in some of my own kid’s teachers to learn too heavily on computer-based education. I think this is sometimes because it’s assumed to be “cutting edge” and sometimes (as some of their teachers have confessed) because it is easier. Less prep, less fuss. But not necessarily better. I am not against computer/based education in general, but SOOOO much these days is done without any kind of research to prove effectiveness. It is often assumed it is better because it’s newer. My problem with this stuff is that we as a culture are not patient and methodical in our education research so instead we end up experimenting on a generation of kids. It’s rushed in because Chromebooks are shined and cool, but teachers aren’t taught how to guide kids to use them best. I think too much screen time is probably not great on its own. But my bigger issue is that the curriculum is far from well thought out and studied.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
Berkley ended the Vietnam war in similar fashion.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Seriously, get computers out of the classroom (except for computer science classes). They don't help with ANYTHING.
Use notebooks, pencils and textbooks instead. And a whiteboard/blackboard for instruction during the classes. It's the most effective way to actually train the mind.
How about some REAL life skills: like how to grow and prepare food, how to build and maintain machinery, how to build a house, how to drill a water well, how to build and maintain a sanitary sewage system, etc? Basic life skills have been completely left blank in favor of creating a helpless clone army of future tax paying mules that are 100% reliant on the system for all their essential needs.
You're looking for vocational education, which many schools still offer, but it's a different track than college level education. In my school, in 9th grade you could choose to go to the vo-tech program to learn what you call a "Real life skill". Though you still had to choose a specialty, the program wasn't designed to create a general renaissance man who can farm, fix machinery, build a house, drill a well, etc.
And it's not even clear why you think it's neccessary -- I spent summers from age 12 to 18 helping out on my uncle's farm, I can drive a tractor, run a combine, milk a cow, kill and butcher a hog, etc.... furthermore, while I haven't built a house myself, but helped my brother build his, I can set concrete, hang drywall, sweat a copper plumbing joint, install electrical, etc. And while some of the homebuilding skills have come in handy while remodeling, most of the skills I developed haven't really helped me.
There's an endless parade of 'tech solutions' for education, most of which are shameless cash grabs.
However, an educational system which encourages self-learning isn't inherently bad. For example, Sudbury schools use this model. In old schools that didn't use the 'grade' stratification of students, older students would help teach the younger students. It's said that you need to comprehend a topic three times as well in order to teach it rather than merely understand it, so encouraging students to teach one another would likely improve comprehension.
Furthermore, self-learning allows for an ideal version of the 'track' system used in Germany and elsewhere, where thinkers learn about more abstract subjects, whereas those who prefer to work with their hands learn more practical hands-on subjects. It's very easy for someone to say "all children should know X", and different people will have different opinions on what X is. Add those all together, and students end up with a bloated curriculum of stuff they really don't want or need to know in order to be effective and happy citizens and workers.
That said, there are so many models/ideas for education, that A/B testing and frequent reference to the What Works Clearinghouse should be utilized in order to determine efficacy, rather than ideologues saddling students with their pet system even if it never works.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
.... a conservative anti-government, anti-education, anti-intellectual rag is pushing the conservative motto of: "keep them stupid," and this is somehow news? It's always amazing to see conservatives undermine their own children's future by doing everything they can to make them completely unable to compete in the world.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
TFA is just a smear piece that doesn't even pretend to present a balanced view.
From TFA: What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies.
Yet NONE of these "studies" are cited, and TFA does not give any scientific criteria for what constitutes a "zombie".
I have no idea if Zuck's program works or not, but TFA is garbage journalism that sheds no light. The editors at National Review should be ashamed of themselves for publishing it. They are better than that.
Unadulterated code, best teacher.
[($)]
THOSE are your examples of "REAL life skills"?!? THOSE?
You could have said budgetting/banking, cooking, cleaning & tidying, critical thinking, running a business, taxes, knitting, job interviewing, public speaking, ethics, voting/government, life sciences (camping, fishing, etc), wood/metal/construction shop, electronics, etc.
All of which are far more useful and things most people run into everyday!
"You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained.
Being able to learn yourself is the most important skill you can have. Unfortunately, many people never acquire that skill (...)
I found out that school is not very efficient in transferring knowledge, at least not for me. What school was good for, was shaping my neural networks, learning to think, and actually being able to teach myself new things.
Unfortunately this insight only came to me when my educational years were in the past. I wish someone had told me that school is not for learning 'durch, fur, gegen, ohne, um, entlang, bis' or 'poteram, poteras, poterat, poteramus, poteratis, poterant', but for making your brain see structures, for enabling your brain to remember other things.
Ironically one of the few teachers that in retrospect seemed to grasp that, thought theology lessons. Maybe that is why I am an atheist: he triggered my critical thinking.
I doubt that putting kids of that age in front of screens for hours will educate or improve their self-learning skills. We have evolved while learning from each other. It would not surprise me if human-human interaction turns out to be the best way to learn. We are social animals.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
TFA was written by Michelle Malkin who is a Filipina-American clone of Ann Coulter.
Learning is rarely fun
Oh wow you had some shit teachers.
Your ways of spelling betray your statement.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Youbare so utterly out of touch with the needs of school age youth it is terrifying.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
In this and many other topics, people have become way too bi-partisan to be taken seriously. Either you're in one camp, or the opposite.
But truth be told, in most cases where there are two diametrically opposed camps, they are both full of shit.
What do Zuckerberg and Gates and other drop-outs know about education? Did they study it? Do they have teaching experience? Why do we assume that rich people know something about the world? The only skill we know they have is getting rich.
But likewise, there certainly is more that can be done about education. The success of Khan Academy shows that a different approach is possible and can be successful. Teachers are actually among those looking for better ways to teach all the time. But they suffer from both beaurocratic quagmire and the usual academic delay in everything (i.e. the teachers now were trained on average two decades ago. The current state of the art is taught in universities today, and will enter the schools in a few years, and in about a decade the first teachers from that cohort will be in positions to make decisions).
We can improve education. But not everything needs to be "disrupted" just because disruption is a successful Silicon Valley business model (and only if you ignore the many, many failed startups that didn't disrupt anything except themselves).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.
The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires, so called "education reform gurus," & most of the general public assume.
While it's quite feasible that computers can be used to aid learning, according to cognitive science, that isn't what's happening in classrooms. Additionally, learning management systems, digital documents, online testing, etc., all come with increases in cognitive load, which in turn reduces children's learning in measurable ways. In order for an EdTech intervention to produce positive results, it has to be so effective & efficient that it overcomes this increase in cognitive load. There are strategies & techniques for doing this, e.g. see the work of cognitive psychologist Dr Richard E. Mayer, but what I've seen from Silicon Valley seems oblivious to them.
Another thing the article gets right is that classes without a qualified, experienced teacher don't help children to learn very well, e.g. Sugata Mitra's bold claims about self-teaching children in India & elsewhere weren't borne out by independently gathered evidence & review.
Let's face it, the current "factory model" of education that we have is the least bad system that anyone's come up with for educating tens of millions of children at a time. It takes the hubris of billionaires to believe that they can do better with no background in education, epistemology, or cognitive science.
Then again, I don't think their actual intentions are about improving education.
If you'd like to learn more about learning, here's a good evidence-informed blog written by experts (Dr Paul Kirschner is a veteran education & training researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands & Mirjam Neelen is a highly qualified & experienced educational consultant & learning developer): https://3starlearningexperienc...
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
TFA was written by Michelle Malkin who is a Filipina-American clone of Ann Coulter.
National Review is an opinion journal, on the right. Think of an analog to something like Mother Jones or The Nation or CNN (ba dum ching) on the Left.
It's writers are no more whatever than similar writers on the left are. You just think that the ones on the left are justified in being that way.
In any case, NR has for quite awhile been thought by harder core conservatives to be a bit squishy and ivory tower (for just one thing, its current editor in chief is pro gay marriage). It's not monolithic in anything, that's for sure.
*You're
"Beware of Geeks bearing gifts", Virgil's Aeneid, circa 20 BC.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Beware of geeks bearing gifts
My kids are 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. We've felt that 2 hours of screen time (Netflix, computer/console gaming, tablet usage) was a healthy upper limit per day.
If your older ones end up taking up an interest in learning to program, do you plan to limit how much time they can spend on self-study of computer science on weekends and school vacations? When employers expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before finishing high school, such a move could limit your kids' careers.
What US prestigious universities have to do is send a message to all students.
Want to enter a prestigious university? Study hard, pass your exams and show you can study.
Want a job after completing a software engineering degree at a prestigious university so that you can pay off student loans incurred at a prestigious university? You'd better have had enough screen time to study programming before graduating from high school.
AI is going to solve everything and allow the new generations to be stupid.
The US has actually built a system for training people in everyday skills like these. You might have heard of it, it's called youtube.
Cheap storage VM.
Liberal tolerance and hypocrisy rolled into one.
How does supporting a corporate takeover of education make me a "liberal"?
The US has actually built a system for training people in everyday skills like these. You might have heard of it, it's called youtube.
You can't learn to lay brick (well) from a youtube video -- trust me, I've seen it attempted, and then he paid a real brick layer to tear it out and replace it with something servicable. The guy brought his son who was learning the trade.
Whose "REAL life"? Your list seems to be based on yours.
I long ago recognized that the real life of those born in the past 30ish years is vastly different than my real life as someone born in the 60s. Most in these younger generations cannot relate to my experiences when I describe them. Their world is different in the extreme.
Even the simplest things have changed. For example, I have no trouble with dogs running around fighting each other and have been bitten in a manner that caused puncture wounds several times in my life and thought little of it. I never went to a doctor or even put a bandaid over it. It was no different to me than the many times I've stepped on a nail and drove it through my foot. No dog was put to sleep. We learned how to handle such situations. Today, there is almost no area within 50 miles of me that a dog can legally be unleashed and running free to get in the daily dog fights I grew up with or chase the many kids riding bikes (on public streets without sidewalks and without supervision at the age of 5). There are many people that have no training about simple safety things like, "let them fight - never get between them". There are near universal calls to put a dog down when it bites someone or even when it bites another dog. Those dogs acting in very natural ways are considered bad and live in peril of their life. I can't personally relate to that at all and find it sad that we have caged them to the current degree. But I can understand why the new attitudes exist and not fight the right of the new generations to take their place and shape the coming world with their choices.
The young we are training in schools today will still be working 50-65 years from now - not today. We need to try to imagine what their REAL life will be like and attempt to prepare them for it. We're trying to imagine this during one of the most intensive periods of disruptive change in history, but the disruption itself is nothing new.
You mention agriculture first. US agriculture sans forestry employed 90% of the labor force in 1790, 69% in 1840, 64% in 1850, 58% in 1860, 53% in 1850, 49% in 1880, 43% in 1890, 38% in 1900, ... , 3.4% in 1980, 2.6% in 1990, and about 1.1% today. Efficiency has been increasing faster than population growth since about 1910 so that the real numbers, not just percentage, employed has been pretty steadily going down since then. There are a couple of flat areas on the curve in recent years that were belied by a huge one year drop in the 2009 time frame. The ability to achieve the drop that didn't recover while production remained good shows that the recent flats are an indication that we've somehow been forcing employment to remain that isn't needed. This is a problem to be solved.
One thing that should be noted in those numbers is that the rate of decrease as a percentage of those in agriculture has been accelerating as we approach zero. The change from 1890 to 1900 was about (1-38/43) or about -12%. The change from 1980 to 1990 was about (1-2.6/3.4) or about -24%.
I've glanced around at some of the other occupations that you mentioned and they've all seen similar declines. This is nothing new.
I've seen a team of three experienced carpenters frame a ranch home over a basement in 2 days. In the 1990s, one of the construction firms in the St. Louis area was achieving the construction of a 1200 sq ft plus basement ranch home in under 100 man-days without using modular type construction. This was achieved by having extremely specialized teams, such as that framing team, roving among large numbers of construction sites. All of the construction from the pouring of a basement to sodding the lawn took a total of about 20 working days usually spread over a six-week period with many days just spent waiting for the next team to hit it.
Note that there is already no need for people working construction in modern systems like that to know how to build a house. They just need to know how to perform one basic skill with extreme efficien
You can't learn by doing it once either. There's a big difference between a skilled craftsman, a acceptable craftsman, and an apprentice. Nobody thinks someone who took a class once is going to do a great job, but they can leverage the ability to learn.
Cheap storage VM.
You can't learn by doing it once either. There's a big difference between a skilled craftsman, a acceptable craftsman, and an apprentice. Nobody thinks someone who took a class once is going to do a great job, but they can leverage the ability to learn.
That's why in most high school vocational programs, it's not just a one semester program, it's a couple years of coursework and hands-on practical experience, then for something like masonry, you don't graduate as a mason, but you qualify for an apprenticeship where you get the real hands on experience.
You're not going to get the same experience out of a youtube video -- you might learn how to build a brick fireplace in your backyard that looks decent, but you're not going to lay a 40 foot chimney.
The USA and UK attempted generations of "screen time" to every community for decades.
The results are the same over generations. Tests show few improvements for average students for all the tax payers money used every decade.
A new computer lab cant teach everyone to a new IQ level.
More computers for all did not work.
Better teachers? New buildings? Same failed results every generation over average groups.
The "internet" for all in education did not give great results.
Robot kits with an advance GUI? A new computer code with a new code of conduct?
Lets try more money again? More computers again?
Screen time would have resulted the 1980's UK emerging as a 1990's tech super power. All the UK did was buy in US tech and play US computer games.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Arguably, if I was going to start a 10 year old out with programming, I wouldn't use an IDE. Start them with something simple and build up from there.
With that said, when I was 10 I was playing around in QBasic which is an IDE, though a simple one compared to what we have now.