Think of tech like chemistry class. We don't let kids carry around chemicals all day to use however they want. Instead, we have them do experiments in a special lab under close watch. Computers should be treated the same way. They shouldn't be something students can use anytime, anywhere without guidance. Just like we handle dangerous chemicals with care, we should also be careful with technology. It's powerful, and if not used correctly, it can be harmful. Let's make sure when kids use computers, it's in a controlled environment, where they can learn safely and responsibly. Treat tech with respect, just like we do with chemistry.

Not long ago (before the GWoT) you could just buy pretty damn good chemistry sets intended for children, that contained some pretty fun stuff.

Then due to fear of drug labs and terrorism, those largely became relics of a better past.

But it would still be frowned upon for Billy and Suzy to take one out in the middle of an English lesson and start doing experiments. You can still buy a computer for your kid, let them do experiments and mess around but like the chemistry set it probably shouldn't be used in the middle of class.

Chemistry is something that can explode and poison you. And a normal person cannot buy dangerous chemicals (that easily).

Computers are normal in everyday life and allmost every job. Whether it is research, or writing or programming - artificially seperating students from such a integral part of modern life seems not that practical. At least not, if the goal is to raise the general level of computer savviness - which I think is currently way too low. With the result of people not understanding that they are the product in social networks etc.

While the chemistry analogy is good, the problem is not with computers per se. Children who are so inclined should be allowed to have personal computers (like Raspberry Pi) for experimentation.

They should also be warned about the potential harms as part of their technological education. Children who are adept at typing should be allowed small laptops for note taking. These are just tools. Kids are not all the same, and choice is paramount here.

The issue is not the computers but the awful and toxic software that gets onto them. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram... and other edu-tech wares have absolutely no place in our schools.

They stifle curiosity and free-thinking, and impose meek compliance, and deference to authoritarian values. These are commercial concerns that intrude into places they have no right to, whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with education because they exploit, extract, distract, manipulate, spy, addict demotivate young minds.

Teaching kids about technology is essential, and should include teaching them proper scepticism and caution. Allowing children to be taught by technology is an abdication of responsibility by schools, teachers and parents.

Computers can and are being used to poison the mind. You can get distracted, you can play games, you can go on sites like chat roulette which are popular with the kids etc

Knives are used in everyday life and can't explode or poison you either, yet we don't let our kids run around with knives for example. So saying if something can or can't explode is not a useful metric.

Teaching them how to use a computer under guidance, is useful and so should be treated like a tool to be taught on how to use. Not just handed out willy nilly.

"yet we don't let our kids run around with knives for example."

Actually some do. Boy scouts traditionally for example do not think, that kids are generally to be treated as idiots.

So yes, you do not give a knive to someone who cannot handle it. There are 20 year olds who should not be given anything sharper than a plastic knive. But a ordinary child usually can handle dangerous stuff - you lead them there, step by step.

Same with computers, smartphones etc. If neccessary, you can provide a locked down environment at first, with only approved apps and sites (or no internet at all).

But one day, they need to handle it all, without someone holding their hands. And they cannot learn it, if they always only navigated a locked down safe space.

Sounds like we agree. Given the right instructions and environment, tools are useful.

Handing out knives/computers/chemistry sets without training and unsupervised does not help.

> Chemistry is something that can explode and poison you. And a normal person cannot buy dangerous chemicals (that easily).

???

I know of at least two distinct ways to make a toxic chemical using only things found in an entirely normal kitchen[0], and that's just using the things I was taught at school.

Both methods also produce an explosive gas as a side product.

[0] And that's not just a joke at the expense of British cuisine

The dirty secret is that a lot of teaching is being offloaded to proprietary education programs, at least in elementary school. So like it or not, computers are increasingly becoming not only a sideshow but a primary part of the fabric of education.

Part of me wants to see a program where students have to build everything from scratch before they can use it. Like each student gets something like a Rasberry Pi and they have to install an text based OS and then make the graphics stack work. If kids are smart enough to play Minecraft and legos they're smart enough to make something like that work. But basically no teacher would be qualified to teach it or troubleshoot, especially given how poorly we pay teachers currently.

We absolutely let kids carry around chemicals all day to use however they want. Children carry water, which is a chemical. Children carry foods which contain chemicals. Children may carry a rescue inhaler, which contains chemicals. Hand sanitizer. Art supplies. Personal care products. Makeup.

It appears schools are having a difficult enough time learning basic skills like reading, writing, comprehension, and basic math. There’s no reason they need the distraction of laptops in the classroom.

I struggled with ordinary school math. It was boring and apparently had no value to me - but once I used math in combination with programming, to draw beautiful art or make computer games, path finding algorithms, simple AI - suddenly it was fun. There is just so much potential of advanced learning with the help of computers.

Not to say that everything needs computers, of course not. But banning them seems a not that helpful overkill.

We didn't have any tech in school and yet we've turned out just fine, now sitting here and typing this on HN. I'm all for banning tech from schools. Allowing Google to enter the school system has been a crime against our children.

We are very much responsible for being on the wrong side in the war against general purpose computing.

The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop".

She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to some One Drive permission thing, then she uploads it to her teacher in Teams, and it gets automatically converted from docx to odt or something else, so what she sees is not what the teacher sees, and of course there were subtle differences in the order of the images and etc, so it affects her grade.

She got quite stressed until I just told her to make a pdf and upload it, but she was smart to double check and download the uploaded file and figure out its not right.

I just dont understand how did we end up here, but more importantly, I dont understand what to do to make it better, so I am just withdrawing, going into a world of riscv and 1.44 floppy drives and just live in a parallel tech universe.

> I just dont understand how did we end up here

The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple.

So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over.

> we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America.

Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

Without those Apple 2 donations, I would not be providing for my family in the way I am now.

Oh yeah, those kids don't understand the concept of a file, or where and how it is actually stored, or what the file format represents, or that they can even change anything. They don't care about storage, as everything is intangible in the cloud. Our children are dumbed down by the cloud and Google going out of its way to present everything the Google way.

We are decoupling our children from the actual underlying electrophysical reality by feeding them the Google version of computing, which is a lazy, stupid, point-and-click reduction of the actual processes.

None of this matters in real life.

Oh no, it does matter a lot. Would you want to grow up in a cartoon world with Google execs owning all they keys to your reality?

Believe me, it matters for Google and other big tech who create this layer of abstraction between the reality and their customers. Because it matters for their bottom line. Initially the motive may have been totally benign, like making things easier. But the fact that they are profit-oriented corporations incentivizes them to deepen the abstraction further.

The end result? Google execs owning your skills and your data - they pwn you. You don't know how reality works anymore. You want to find a job? Pay Google. You want to store a photo? Pay Google. Wanna call someone? Pay Google. Want to draw something? Pay Google. Want to develop an app so you could at least have this feeling that you could draw something without paying Google? Pay Google.

They are going to be your overlords.

My life is already owned by banks, insurance companies, my children, my spouse. What’s one more overlord?

Frankly knowing folks who work at Google, I do not have a lot of confidence that they will succeed at much of anything but selling ads and making money.

> My life is already owned by banks, insurance companies, my children, my spouse. What’s one more overlord?

Greater societal inequality.

> crime against our children.

Sounds a bit hyperbolic. How are kids being hurt by Google specifically?

Take a read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4

Not specifically related to Google, but we are making our kids write less, which literally dumbs them down: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriti... (You can find lots of research on this, there's no controversy here.)

Somewhat less of a profound problem is the extreme amount of pollution: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-hi...

My kid has brought his third Chromebook in just a few years from school. We are all going to pay for all this, while the big tech generates billions of profits and the whole planet is marching towards tech feudalism.

This case isn't about whether kids use keyboards or not. It's about whether they use Chromebooks.

I did have tech in school in the 80s. I also did fine. Maybe it’s the school district and the parents and the community not a single tool.

It doesn't particularly seem like kids are learning about computers by using computers in school. They just have a constant distraction in front of them.

Not my experience with two kids in elementary school.

Same way anyone over 30 did.

Although I say that knowing my grades in school wouldn't have been trash if I'd been able to use a computer and not get discriminated for my handwriting.

The world changes.

Only when the lesson for life is "how to get stuff done when you've got unlimited access to far more interesting things that nobody will reward you for".

For actually learning things? It's like pet food packaging.

What do I mean by that? The pets don't buy the food, their owners do; the result is the packaging is designed to appeal to the owners. Does a cat care about the bright colours their retinas can't see, the metaphors they don't have the language comprehension to process? Or do they seem like picky eaters because they're put off food when it has subtle odours that their owners can't perceive? Likewise, are dogs meat-obsessed like pop culture tells us, or are they omnivores that will eat just about anything and wait for their digestive tract to figure out afterwards if it needs to be rapidly expelled?

Parents and schools buy stuff to teach with; but it's sold to the parents, as the kids have neither the budget nor the judgement to decide what they ought to learn. But how good are those things at teaching? We only find out much later, at first when the kids take exams and we see how well they learned, and later when we look at the same people in the workforce and find out if that exam itself is representative of the skills we care about.

Learning as an adult, I get to see if online courses teach me; I've gone from being a heavy user of Duolingo, even paying for a subscription, to giving up on it entirely as it morphed from lessons into an annoying kids cartoon.

I'm worried that I'm seeing similar from Brilliant.org, too. The older courses on, say using Q# to program quantum computers is still good — hard, yes, but good, it's actually pushing me to learn more, and in this it reminds me of when I started learning programming on a Commodore 64 from the user manual when I was aged about 5 or 6 — but the newer course updates over the last year or so have focussed on unskippable "cute" cartoons and the absolute beginner level content that parents and teachers will pay for, not filling in the gaps with the hard stuff that brings in the most educational value.

While perhaps a bit hyperbolic, I agree. Though I will be more nuanced and say that ban all tech from classes that aren’t about the tech. I think computer literacy classes for children are more important than ever, and not every family has the means or knowledge to teach kids these skills.

When I was a teenager in the 2000s you could still go to the mall, walk into an store and fill out a paper application for jobs, though even then they looked at you a bit funny. I’m pretty sure that’s not possible anymore, so it’s effectively required to at least be able to access the internet to find a job and participate in society. You’ll also almost certainly need to know how to use computers, and depending on the work, understand files and file systems.

I’m follow some subreddits that tend to attract younger people who are interested in programming. Whatever you take for granted about basic computer knowledge, I suspect most people don’t have it. One recent example was someone concerned that if they saved more than one file in a folder, it would overwrite anything in there (like a video game save slot). I think for a lot of people their only computer knowledge comes from game consoles and phones.

Computer labs!