[blackhaz]

I think we all had no problem growing up being ready for IT, and my parents can do taxes online. Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of paper. Of course, unless by "real world" we mean an army of zombies training somebody's else AI and consuming reprocessed digital matter...

I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty much the whole homework process is now moving online. Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around. That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.

What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the task.

This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our generation.

[sandworm101]

>>Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of paper.

Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper. There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant that children would not be so careful about their writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and one of my teachers complained about how Encarta made it too easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking around the library. And it the back of every arts collage sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of splicing film reals together onto platters.

[Retric]

For most Americans English is their native language and yet after 12 years of English classes most collages still have English classes. Spending that long teaching English is worthwhile because basic literacy isn’t enough.

The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.

You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.

[michaelmior]

> Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around.

This suggest that really thinking and planning can't happen while doing these things. I understand the concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.

[px43]

Apple's stranglehold over the public school system where I'm at, in the 90s up until 2010 or so, was an absolute atrocity. Chromebooks are infinitely better.

[ricardobayes]

It might lead to a good thing, internet access as a right. I hope this becomes the norm at some point, much like the right to have a bank account in the EU.