This is an important observation. We've had 50 years of personal computing, but is there any evidence that computers in any form ever improved the academic performance of students?

AI certainly seems to be making students much less competent.

I don't see why it would. It might make education more efficient like a factory in some ways, but I simply don't see why it would aid in learning. At least, from my experience as a student, here are some observations:

1. Computers have allowed me to gather more information, access more journals, more results from around the world, but what really seems to matter in learning is just sitting down with a tiny bit of material like one book and REALLY understanding it.

2. Computers make things more distracting because while they make typing up reports, proofs, and assignments more efficient, there's actually just too much information. What really seems to help is having LESS information so there's some space to just think and work things out.

The fact is, what computers do is help you keep up with other people in the field, so they might accelerate progress at the research level, but what they don't do is help you become a rigorous, independent thinker.

Academia in fact has always been an uneasy tension between the two: building capable individuals and getting results and money for progress. Computers help with the latter - they certainly impede the former.

No, we know that when technology (particularly: Internet connected laptops) is introduced into classrooms competency declines. This has been shown to be true internationally

Why would a technology that makes the mind work less, have benefits for a process, that works by making the mind work hard?

You still need to calculate calculus yourself long after you could buy books where the result is written in. That supposed "paradoxon" is not even specific to electronic tools. It's just that the point of education has never been to get results, but to exercise in as much as side paths as possible and memorable while following the path to the results. The result mostly get thrown away immediately.

I gave my son CRPGs for his GBA that required reading what the characters were saying. His reaction to finding out his three and four year old friends didn't read was interesting.