This article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.<p>Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.<p>Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.
> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class<p>I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.<p>I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
What would be better policy, in your opinion?
I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.<p>It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.
And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.<p>Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.<p>And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.<p>Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.<p>We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staffing-battles-can-four-day-school-weeks-save-the-day/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/" rel="nofollow">https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_States_(2021%E2%80%93present)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-supplies-debt-crowdfunding/" rel="nofollow">https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/number-of-homeless-students-jumps/87620804007/" rel="nofollow">https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...</a>
>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class<p>you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.<p>>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.<p>before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"<p>if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.
> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier<p>No stats, but it’s extremely real.<p>I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts <i>while in class</i> are common. Parents who <i>call their kids in class</i> just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.<p>The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.
Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?<p>The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.
I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of <i>students</i> are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".<p>A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.<p>I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.
">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."<p>I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.
No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.<p>However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.<p>> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"<p>I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.
All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.
real Free Laptops has never been tried.
We should treat phones on kids the same we treat alchohol. "What the fuck, is that a phone? Give me that!" The only other solution involves evaporating our privacy. Fuk 'em kids. I guess they don't get to use phones, we survived, why can't they?<p>In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.
This is an insane take.<p>We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.<p>The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.
If we're spouting off unsubstantiated claims. I'll add teachers unions and the mandatory spend of tax money on their near monopolies versus a voucher system that allows parents to choose the best education the money can buy. (To be clear I do think we should fund educating our children, I disagree with forcing the purchase to go to a specific solution / system)
Even with vouchers, there are specific solutions and systems you're allowed to use.
The entire point is that parents make poor choices (phones in class, etc) and that's why an entire generation has been dumbed down.<p>Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.
Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.<p>There is value in being able to automate things, but there is <i>far</i> more value in being able to first to learn how to do stuff yourself.
> Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.<p>That'll do something, but making maximally-capable individuals probably ain't it. There's a balance to be struck here.
I don't agree with them but many people now say that in 10-20 years computers will become magical thinking machines that can do pretty nearly any cognitive task. At that point I wonder what the point of learning technology will be? Perhaps it would be best to learn about logic and how the world works so you can interact with these magical machines more effectively, and not learn much about how the machines actually work - you won't be tinkering with their insides anyway.<p>So yeah, if that comes to pass why not go back to paper. Have the kids study science, logic, history, etc and forget about technology, except for the few weird ones who just can't keep away from it.
What percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?
This only works if you can isolate your society from having to compete with others. Like American kids will have to compete with Chinese kids who are learning AI in middle school, and not just “I can write a prompt” AI. But then those kids are also starting to learn calculus while our middle schools claim algebra is too advanced for 8th graders. Sigh.
Isn't learning to use AI just learning how to talk, read, and think coherently? Unless you mean learning to build AI or how it actually works?
The kids with the pencil and paper will outcompete the kids taught with AI.
All tech out is too drastic but I agree it must be severely curtailed. There need to be computer labs and an emphasis on research which shouldn’t go back to asking the librarian for printed material in a library. Research online is supercharged and should not be done away with.<p>Other than that though, paper textbooks, paper notes, written on premises examinations should all be bought back.
Bring back the indestructible Apple ][e and put let the kids program in logo (turtle graphics) for 1 or 2 hours per week max. The will not hurt them while society takes a few years to figure out how the introduction of technology in education went so catastrophically bad.
Related:<p><i>Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424</a>
We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...
Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be.<p>Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools<p>these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
Yeah, it seems really odd to be blaming laptops.
I’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.<p>Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?<p>Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.<p>The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".<p>Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.<p><a href="https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69-4193-A676-430CF0C83DC2" rel="nofollow">https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69...</a>
Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...<p>People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.
What specifically is wrong with Common Core math? I've seen a lot of vague complaints about it but the materials my children brought home seem fine. It's different from the way I learned but I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's worse.
Those are bad but they do not penalize the more competent half of students. Use of laptops as an educational tool penalize everyone equally.
People are graduating from high school functionally illiterate so yeah definitely not just the US.<p>Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.
Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U</a>
> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time<p>All of this is <i>so far</i> from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff'<p>It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing <i>among children</i>. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
"we evolved to talk not to write and read"<p>"we evolved to remember what happened to us, not to learn history of countries on the opposite side of the planet"<p>this argument doesn't work. if you want to claim harm - talk about the harm directly. stop hiding behind "evolution" and "biological"
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
I'm not sure anybody disputes that immersive language learning is the best path to picking up a language. It just isn't very practical for most people.
For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
Many many many people warned against this step, the same people that told you not to let the gov. into healthcare, but the same people didn't listen and we are left with degrading outcomes.<p>Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
<a href="https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv</a><p>Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".<p>The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
Just wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it.<p>eg. See [1] which finds:
"<i>The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class.</i>"<p>and<p>"<i>high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation.</i>"<p>There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-san-diego-finds-one-in-eight-freshmen-lack-high-school-math-skills/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...</a>
Totally. We can't really measure the effect on people graduating from college right now but I'm pretty sure the value of the average college education is down since the advent of AI due to mass cheating and professors having to tailor their classes away from things AI can take advantage of. The students who love to learn will still be doing just fine, but the others - I doubt it.
The best example of this are drivers who stop in traffic circles to check a map in their phone.
I lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.
the article blames the laptops but conveniently ignores that the same generation was also raised by parents who handed them iPhones at age 3. isn't school screen time a rounding error compared to the 6+ hours of daily personal screen time happening at home?
It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
I don’t know anyone in my life who, given enough time, could recite entire epics like Homer’s <i>The Odyssey</i> the way some of the Ancient Greeks could. But I wouldn’t say modern people are cognitively “less capable” than those Ancient Greeks. Organisms adapt to their environments or perish -- the mind is no different.<p>Given the current technological landscape, I think we may eventually have to admit that Gen Z and the ones after have adapted to their environments, too. Maybe retaining information is simply less valuable as a skill (like memorizing entire epics) when easy access to a modern Library of Alexandria is right at our fingertips? Yes, it's painful to think about and uncomfortable on some level. It's probably like how Socrates felt about reading and writing when he described it as, "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding" and that reliance on it will "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it."<p>Though, one caveat that is important to mention is that education is not valued on a mass cultural level in this country, comparatively speaking. But that is a discussion for a different time.
But it did make a lot of rich guys richer.
Utter rubbish, designed as clickbait for older folks. Every generations dunks on the next one, right up until it's time to change the clock on the VCR and only the kids can do that.<p>Kids are growing up in a different world than we did. They need different skills, and probably a different cognition. Teaching them to deal with rapid attention shifts is probably going to equip them better for their actual lives than trying to make them focus on one subject for hours.
Didn't OLPC spend 40 to 80 million in R&D, and then governments spent $1B+ deploying them? How did that work out?
Computers have gotten too good. In my time they broke all the time (sometimes your own fault for downloading those sketchy videogames) and they never did what you wanted them too. You had to actually learn stuff- including highly technical English.
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brainrot, they know
Unrelated to the laptops. Also, please don't link low quality sources (Yahoo) on HN.
<i>> Unrelated to the laptops</i><p>From the article:<p><pre><code> In written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology.. Horvath blamed.. tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.
</code></pre>
<i>> low quality sources</i><p>Fortune Magazine? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)</a><p><pre><code> The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles.</code></pre>
Original source is <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z-less-cognitively-capable-parents-first-time-cellphone-bans-standardized-test-scores/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...</a>
laptops are to cognitive capabilities as syringes are to heroin overdoses.<p>It's just one of the many delivery mechanisms for brainrot in the 21st century.
Yahoo is a common, accepted source: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com</a>