Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.

Source: I have 10 Finnish kids

Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"

But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.

I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.

The part nobody talks about is textbook cost. Digital textbooks were supposed to make education cheaper but somehow the subscription model made it more expensive. At least a physical book you buy once and it sits on the shelf for the next kid.

I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.

And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.

What does that tell us?

This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.

Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.

When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.

Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.

Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.

There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.

I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)

It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.

This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.

Some info:

- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.

- Actual studies in this area are mixed.

- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.

- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]

- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]

- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]

- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]

- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]

- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]

1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous...

2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c...

3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...

4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag...

5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074

https://www.worldreader.org/

Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.