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Parents opt kids out of school laptops, ask for pen-and-paper
(www.nbcnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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This may be the millennial in me talking but I've generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.
During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.
They were never used in lessons.
Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren't yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to "learn to use a computer and the internet." It's a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don't even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We're living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.
Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!
This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can't even do basic shit like this. Like, I've genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they're a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.
The only other group where I've personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.
My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I'm left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.
I think the trouble young people have with using desktop computers is overstated. It's a bit of a satanic panic situation. You can learn it pretty quickly. A common complaint is that "they don't know hierarchical file systems" because the mobile devices have only flat file systems presented to the user or something. A tree structure is not a challenging concept and the basic things you can do in a file system you can count on 2 hands. Open a file, save a file, rename a file, delete a file, move a file, copy a file, create a directory, enter a directory, move up a directory. The physical interface is the mouse with 2 buttons, a primary and a secondary for opening context menus; and the keyboard which has the characters printed on them. There's a bit more to it, but it can be explained in, like, a page of text. And the rest you can learn through experimentation. Touch typing is another thing entirely, though. That takes dedicated time to learn.
I wonder if ineptitude with tech shared between the young and old are different kinds. Maybe the old are just completely inept, but, for the young, it's just temporary. It's a shock when we find out they don't know something, but, after explaining it, they're productive within minutes. A 20-year-old still has plenty of mental plasticity. Having to teach somebody the desktop metaphors isn't a huge bottleneck.
I'll end by contending that I don't think schools should not be teaching computers. Rather, they should be teaching computers in more depth. Teach students basic programming and they will have to learn the desktop metaphors along that journey anyway. Computers are way too important to leave the future stewards of the Earth in the dark about how they work. I had to learn how the energy of a photon relates to its wavelength and I had to read and analyze the Canterbury Tales. Not entirely useful. But it's at least a little interesting. Kids are very capable. They won't all be programmers. They should learn it all anyway. Don't let Silicon Valley have it all to themselves.
Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.
I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That's when kids weren't coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.
I gave my high school teachers fits because I'd sit in the back of the class and read my dad's old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They'd be annoyed to see I wasn't grinding my way through "Crime and Punishment" or "Great Expectations", but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.
Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they're getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.
From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been
Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there's one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.
they are happy to spend money on technology and shiny new buildings.
they aren't spending money on teaching staff. teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.
the issue is the metricization of education. everything must be measured... and this creates a perverse system where everything is now about increasing the metrics, regardless of improving education.
not to mention the changing in parenting where ever parent things their child is a genius and it's the 'school system' that's failing their kid, instead of their kid being a dumbass jerk who refuses to learn or participate in their own education.
They're not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master's degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don't need a bachelor's in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don't need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don't need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.
Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It's the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.
Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.
Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don't look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson's latest "Number go down / Number go up" announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.
By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.
You can blame "parenting" for a single kid's mistakes.
Once you start blaming "parenting" in the aggregate, you're inevitably full of shit.
The common denominator in these school districts isn't "parents" and its absurd to pretend otherwise.
We didn't have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.
you did if you took calculus. but only 20% of students take calclus and only 40% take pre calc.
you don't need them for geo, tri, or algebra