The Problem Isn't Chromebooks
why do we send kids to mind-numbing schools?
Chromebooks have been a Thing in the classroom, starting in about 2010. ‘Cos Google pushed them and because they are cheap.
Google AI says that they are great because they are cheap and the data on the cloud follows students from school to school.
But Brittany Calavitta, a home-schooler, says they are ruining education. A schoolteacher friend told her that
the overuse of screens in the classroom is changing the way our children learn. It is stripping them of their innate creativity and causing fractured focus. At the same time, schools have become reliant on them.
What is needed? “I think that physical interaction with the real world matters much more than we know.” At her homeschool,
Every morning, we slowly saunter toward our dining room table, but the feast we await sits just beyond our bacon. We find it in the study of fractions in the kitchen and the careful examination of ant colonies in our backyard. It is in the gold rush stories that flutter between our fingertips and then settle beneath our feet on the dusty soil of our local ghost towns. It is in learning about supply and demand at the gas pump and skip-counting apples in the grocery store.
But I think that the problem is not Chromebooks but the very nature of the classroom, which strips children of “their innate creativity” and causes “fractured focus.” Or no focus at all, as children sit in classrooms passively listening to teachers lecturing them and boring them to death.
And yet education is clearly beneficial.
Why learn to read? Because, for a kid, you get access to wonderful stories — and humans are the animal species that tells itself stories. And then you can use your reading skills to acquire knowledge.
Why learn arithmetic? Because we use numbers with money, and money is the foundation of the social culture of the market economy. To function in the market economy you must know a bit more than counting on your fingers.
Why learn to write? Because writing has revolutionized human society, and if you want to communicate to other people it really helps to be able to write.
Apart from that, young people should get to work, doing things in the real world. Of course, Chromebooks are really useful when you need to search for knowledge about doing things in the real world.
And by the way, why do we send kids to school?
To teach them things?
To keep them busy?
To indoctrinate them in regime propaganda?
To prevent them from competing for jobs with adults?
To bore them to death?
To turn them into mind-numbed robots?
I wonder how much education is shaped by the needs of elite children. Elite children cannot be slotted into elite jobs: military, religious, business. Not yet. They need to grow up first and develop leadership credibility.
But does that apply to non-elite children? I don’t think so. At what age can a child help stack shelves in a market? At what age can a child help out on the farm? At what age can a child help out in a factory? At what age can a child help out in a restaurant?
Fact is that children are naturally curious, and naturally able to learn things on the job.
I say that if a child can learn to ride a balance bike at age two, and a real bike soon after, then maybe children have the ability to learn all kinds of economically useful skills, and not wait till their mid teens before getting a job.
After all, what is play but Nature’s way of learning to do things and developing useful and enjoyable mental and physical skills that are needed in the world of humans?