As a teacher, I already have to teach half the kids how to even use a computer because they only ever used phones and tablets. And I am not going to be able to teach them programming without laptops.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I think there was a Japanese study that shown that pen and paper is superior in terms of memorisation even to handwriting on a tablet (in addition to the well publicised fact that handwriting is far better than typing for that too)
I wish we had more info on the subject. Definitely got me to switch back to pen and paper from my iPad, and anecdotally I think it's worked out well for me.
Parents make some good points. AI chatbot integration is too much. Its something that can actively stall learning. You need to learn the skills at school yourself to better use tools like AI. We also should avoid over exposure from screens too. Useful skill for our world، but some pen and paper can help eye strain or over stimulation.
Get Google out of our schools
We have a county near me that has just committed to doing away with Chromebook’s and going back to pen and paper. The reason being that literacy scores in that area have dropped rather significantly. I worry that whether it is literacy or technological competency students are doomed to fall in one direction or another.
Computers have nothing to do with it. It's everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing. Other countries like China, Taiwan, and Finland have been able to adopt technology with no loss in reading literacy. It's because they have focused, thought out integration and not just slapdash by whatever corporation gives them the best deal.
I totally agree though. It seems like right now either kids are stuck in front of a computer with no prep or any other supplemental education, or they're completely unplugged and unprepared for interacting with technology outside of an iPhone.
I have a few family members that are teachers or work in education at some capacity and would absolutely agree the curriculum requirements and standardized testing have become a barrier. Though I am not an expert in education I was a student and can attest to the fact that these things stand in the way of educators being able to reach all students. These education programs are not designed to reach students that learn differently from the vast majority of students. When it comes to reducing exposure to technology in schools it would be foolhardy to double down on either direction. Technology and literacy should coincide and neither should replace the other. A little bit of moderation and balance goes a long way. Today’s society and politics focus on a nose to the grindstone, devil may care rate of progress which though fast and traditionally the American way is unfortunately full of holes and mistakes that are only noticed in hindsight.
Absolutely. My spouse is a teacher and I have many friends who are, too. I see it every day. The "good" teachers use technology to the benefit of themselves and the students, using it when appropriate and when best applicable. No doubt there are teachers and students out there who use it as a crutch. Like you said though, we need to be able to switch between analog and digital, figuring out when either is better suited.
I play RPGs. I do all of my characters and planning and stuff with pencil and paper. I do a lot of my GM work digitally. You need to be able to do both today, or else you're not going to be prepared for adulthood.
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It's also a BIG privacy issue.
Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it's because someone is making money off of it.
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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!
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.
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.
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" Luddite unite!" - These parents while shaking a fist at clouds.
Daily reminder that Luddites were not against the machines/technology, they were against unregulated industry.
Ludd was right. But the issue here is google putting out shitty products, not workers being replaced by machines the owner class has unrestricted access to... actually, if the purpose of those chatbots was to replace the critical thinking of students, maybe this is an issue the General would smash up.
Does the pen and paper include a cursive handwriting course?
it fucking better.
if it wasn't for cursive, my penmanship would be illegible.
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