The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
November 12th, 2024I’m not sure when I first posted about this scam, but I found one from 2011.
The tech elite who pushed this nonsense knew that it would result in disaster. Mission accomplished.
Via: After Babel:
When smartphones and social media platforms swept into teens’ lives in the early 2010s, schools experienced their own digital revolution, with 1-to-1 laptops, tablets, and iPads becoming staples in classrooms across the Western world. (1-to-1 means one device for every student.) A decade later, the revolutionary optimism is fading. A recent OECD review found that most educational technology (EdTech) has not delivered the academic benefits once promised. Meanwhile, global test scores in math, science, and reading have been plummeting, as you can see in Figure 1 below. These trends were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but they began in the early 2010s, just as digital devices were being placed on students’ desks.
Kevin, I’m confused by “this scam”. Which is the scam, ed tech in schools, or the article?
The scam is giving screens to children in school. The elite knew it was a bad idea and sent their own children to schools without screens.
Having observed kids in public schools working with computers when they were first introduced, I suspected it would come to this. But the scam was enabled by the pre-existing trend in schools to make everything a fun game and to make kids work in teams, so they developed no interest in intellectual challenges and they didn’t know how to work independently or to develop all the skills they had. They were groomed to seek shallow entertainment and to do only the thing they were best at and to ignore the rest of the knowledge/practice universe. I imagine that’s ongoing now, (Best Practice, to quote Marn’i).
IBM started it with packaged computer networks and software for classrooms iin the early 1990’s. Then they went into govt/military work. Now they are focusing on big business. “Supercharge sustainability with AI” is their motto. Do three buzzwords in a row amount to a word salad? Or just a word snack?
PS — Back then also, teachers were giving grades according to what the kid needed to move on in life, not the merits of his work. Online instructors passed everybody who managed to sign on the minimum number of times. I think the teachers were rated by their employers according to how well the kids did as shown by the grades they got and by whether any kids complained about the teacher. So of course…