[Jimmc414]

Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.

Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.

There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.

(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)

[conception]

I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.

[willsmith72]

It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake

The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)

[Saline9515]

Every parent knows that the Ipad is awful for their kid's education, but it keeps them quiet, so they happily take it.

[jasonfarnon]

I certainly believe that, but why did school systems jump on board, especially to be such early adopters as the 2010s, when the iphone was just a few years old? We used to use TV to keep kids quiet, but schools always talked about how bad it was.

[tartoran]

For similar convenience as parents: less work on correcting homework and such

[Saline9515]

Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.

And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.

[Jimmc414]

By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.

[simonw]

I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also extremely demanding.

You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.

Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.

[QuadmasterXLII]

All of those skills have a half life of like 8 months.

[jimbokun]

> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.

Sounds like following the evidence.

[EA-3167]

It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1