Much ink has been spilled in the comments already, but as a child of the 80s, computers were a class, and not a lifestyle. If I had gone through school with what's available today, I doubt I would have done as well as I did. Most things were handwritten, I learned cursive, and computer class was Oregon Trail and basic programming essentially.

Looking back, I don't think Chromebooks, iPads and the like would have been beneficial to my elementary/middle/high school education at all.

Our primary instrument of learning was the teacher and really thick textbooks that were passed down student to student, and you could see that journey inside the in front cover where you signed it out for the year.

As someone who would protest at learning long division when a calculator was around, in retrospect, the teacher was right.

Isn't the available learning material better than it has ever been?

As a 30-something, basic AI uses completely blow my mind. It has never been this easy to be curious, because there is a machine in my pocket that reduces the cost of finding answers to nearly zero. I can point my phone at a painting and dig as deep as I want into its subject, artist, movement and so on. It's a real world Pokédex.

Then there are countless well-made tutorials for every imaginable topic on YouTube, and more high-quality old-fashioned websites that Google cares to index.

Claude is really cool too. If you care to look at its output, you can see a fairly good translation of your thoughts into code. You can translate your projects from one language or framework to another. We used to read textbooks cover to cover. Now we get custom examples for any imaginable idea.

So why are these technologies failing our kids? Why are they so powerful in the hands of a curious person, yet making everyone dumber?

I don't know why I was so surprised when my kids told me there was nothing called a "computer lab" at their school... why would there be when each kid has their own device?

> Much ink has been spilled

Ironically...

And parents are equally distracted from their job of parenting by those same devices. Want to help your child with their education? Support their teachers when/if your child is making poor decisions at school.

Oh how I hated having to learn cursive when I was in school. What an utter waste of limited instructional time that could have been better spent on mathematics or science or touch typing or creative writing or literally any other subject. If some students really want to learn calligraphy then make it an art elective but don't torture the rest of us.

It's amazing how bad these things can be. My kids will sometimes get computerized homework which gets graded automatically, and if you don't format the answer the way it likes, zero points. They spend as much effort fighting with the formatting as they do understanding the material. And this is in one of the wealthiest, best run public school districts in the country.

"Technology" has been an education buzzword since I was in school and it needs to be taken out and shot.