Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders (11 year olds) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable.

Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel free to sell Linux laptops, just understand schools don’t want to spend anything managing computers.

I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty much the whole homework process is now moving online. Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around. That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.

What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the task.

This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our generation.

The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.

You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.

Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper. There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant that children would not be so careful about their writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and one of my teachers complained about how Encarta made it too easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking around the library. And it the back of every arts collage sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of splicing film reals together onto platters.

This suggest that really thinking and planning can't happen while doing these things. I understand the concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.

Same here.

Carpentry is a skill that needs to be trained. Using the tools safely and optimally isn't something that most raw beginners will be able to figure out on their own.

But computers: barring issues of socioeconomic status preventing access to them, the kids will do alright on their own.

Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime mastering it. So, let’s not pretend the bare minimum of computer literacy is all there is to know.

Anti Vax people for example have fundamental issues with knowing how to utilize computer technology. They where ill prepared to separate fact from FUD and it’s causing real problems. Having 11 year olds writing papers that get graded is a great way to transition kids from basic literacy into mastery.

Chromebooks are the baking soda equivalent in middle school school chemistry experiments. Cheap and instructive is considered good enough.

and for a lot of us geeks let's be super clear: it's a happy accident that all that time networking, overclocking, and modding our computers to play quake (or whatever) paid off. A lot of the most 'prepared for the real world' hacker news crowd could have benefitted from greater offline / social / artistic endeavors, including myself.

That isn't to say kids shouldn't have access to computers in school, only that prepping a kid for an information economy is not, can not, and should not be the only purpose of education.

Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.

>> {enable developer mode}

If it were sandboxed, that's shouldn't be something it's possible for managed administrators to disable.

No one would play TI-83 games if they had other options... but it'd be hard to say writing and modifying them wasn't educational.

Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany.

The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...

Since then, though, multi-hundred-billion dollar corporations have arisen that employ vast quantities of employees (including psychologists) tasked with obtaining and keeping your attention on their content and the surrounding advertising empires.

It's not quite the same setup we had to deal with.

So limiting access is investing in mental health.

> After 1 h/day of use, more hours of daily screen time were associated with lower psychological well-being, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.

And even if all of those issues could be resolved, like somehow making a Linux tablet with handwriting recognition and only open-source software (or whatever, I don't actually think it would be anywhere close to sufficient)...

The educational software is just garbage. Math and reading games that allow way too much guessing. "Science" games that basically amount to a skinned version of Super Mario Bros, literally still just collecting coins, so you can then buy pictures of animals in the game. But it's got that Wild Kratz licensing! Don't forget to purchase the books!

And it's the same thing, over and over again.

Maybe the problem is not the computer but the broader cultural and technological maturity. I bet with teaching methods directed at information technology (multimodal, interactive text books) and proper learning and attention management skills on the student's end, we could see an increase in learning capacity.

Agree 100% on the detriment of using proprietary, closed source software. As an educator you have a responsibility to not vendor-lock your students and strengthen monopolies. Proprietary software should be outlawed when FOSS alternatives are available. You should be teaching skills and concepts not specific tools anyway.

I bet both of these go the other way:

* While some rich and powerful people are anti-screen, I expect it's more common for them to want their kids using computers in school so they're better prepared.

* Private schools are more likely to have laptops and other tech, because they can afford it. While you get the occasional story about a fancy school that is trying to minimize tech, "poor school has no laptops because they're too expensive" doesn't make the news.

When I grew up in the 90s, every school was dominated by Apple computers, and Apple's walled garden made it so if you didn't have an Apple computer at home to work on homework, you were basically fucked if you wanted to work on or print anything at school. Switching to Chromebooks is exactly what let kids escape from walled gardens, so then they could work on homework using any computer with a web browser.

It's a dual-edged sword, IMHO. I fully agree that writing by hand feels very different both in terms of the ability to take notes while paying attention to someone else AND seems to promote better thought and recall.

Devices can have a benefit, though. My 15 year old w/ADHD has constantly struggled with note taking and test preparation. What he's recently found that works well is to create online quizzes based on study materials. It keeps him engaged since it's more active, plus the act of creating the quizzes themselves runs the information through his brain.

All that said, I agree on the dangers of the walled garden and that technical, privacy, or other issues will certainly lead to cases where the technology becomes a distraction, even when used as intended.

This is something my wife and I have been discussing. We’re planning on homeschooling our children, which means we’ll get to dictate how much screen exposure they’ll get.

I’m convinced that these devices are only making us dumber — sure, on one hand, we (most folks in society today) can be more efficient, but on the other hand, we struggle with retaining even some of the most basic information due to our strong dependence on technology.

As a computer nerd, my home is obviously filled with computers and related devices, but I don’t want my children growing up in an environment where everyone around them is dependent on technology to survive.

I don't see why you would want to sabotage the next generation by denying them access to the tools which would be available to them in the workplace.

Yeah, we really exchanged one for the other. Previously it was all Microsoft Windows and Office, as a lonely IT enthusiast in a smaller city, I haven't even known about Linux or any other alternatives right until university. I wish free software was the standard, in education and government alike.