In general I think being forced to learn things with no clear application is part of why the school system fails so many people.
"It puts Google, and the tech economy, at the center of one of the great debates that has raged in American education for more than a century: whether the purpose of public schools is to turn out knowledgeable citizens or skilled workers."
I guess over time I've started leaning more toward "knowledgeable citizens," but I don't know why they need to be mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartic_function#General_formu...
Continuation of that quote is no better. You wont even recognize utility of quadratic equation in more complicated equation (exercise) if you do not understand and remember it - much less google it. You will simply fail at solving it. There is also big difference between people who know history enough to see something suspicious when they see bad history and people who believe everything they read on random discussion forums.
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I think that changing tech school to use because new tech is more convenient to administer is perfectly good reason on itself. I don't know why everyone needs to bs about "transforming education" each time. However, I would much rather have education transformed by people who a.) value learning b.) can explain what quadratic formula is useful for c.) have knowledge of education theory (they dont need to agree with most of it, but they should know what it is they disagree with).
Ok, but there are plenty of aspects of using tech that transcend the lifetime of the actually device you are using. Coding, of course, is timeless, but even the basic idea of experimenting/discovery within a UI is something that many older adults lack from not having tech when they were younger.
Do we really think that 20 years from now students will look back fondly and remember their old Lenovo Chromebook? Or will they remember the teacher that took the time out to make an impact in their lives?
Technology changes, it's impossible to keep up. Human interaction is a constant over all these years and advances.
Ideally you pay attention to the people who have done some teaching and know something about tech like Sal Khan. He understood what tools kids need only after spending a bunch of time teaching kids.
Tech is not magic just like information access is not magic. Libraries have existed for a longer time than schools have but we don't send our kids to libraries cause a good guide makes more of a diff in where kids end up in life than just access and tools.
This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I'm sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is.
My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a classroom priority, for many reasons. One of those reasons is that there is no guarantee that whatever tech you learn will stick around. I had a high school teacher insist that we use Ask Jeeves rather than Google because she "liked it better."
It feels as if the adoption of Google products is driven much more by convenience for the school system than by a strong belief that it improves learning. I'm not an expert, but I remember reading more than once that technology doesn't seem to have a meaningful main effect on learning (though perhaps has a mild interaction effect with the teacher.)
The article itself barely addresses the question of learning outcomes, and focuses so much more on privacy.