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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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This is likely a hot take but, I don't think this was the fault of the in-class laptops. They thought removing phones were going to solve the issue, it didn't, they thought computers were going to solve the issue, they didn't.
The core issue is: School is fucking boring. As a kid/teen you spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk listening to a teacher yap about shit that at the time you don't believe is even important so you can regurgitate said useless information in tests that you then proceed to forget 2 weeks after taking. Hell even now I think I learned more actual life and useful skills in college. I have more engagement and entertainment working a full time job, than I did in a classroom, and at least I was making money with the job.
The school districts are shocked that upon providing a tool that could be used to lessen the tedium and lifelessness that school shoves down kids throats they then misused said tool. I don't understand it.
Make learning fun and engaging, add actual life skills to classrooms like how to read an analog clock, or how to write a check. Talk about how to survive in the real world, how interest works, how your credit score is really important, maybe how the government works cause I know I never had a civics class. Stuff that kids in middle/high school would actually care about, instead of how to solve 3 unknowns in an equation, or how to find an angle of a triangle when you know the 2 angles, or learning about colonization for the 8th time. Make it so it isn't just "read this board, repeat on the test".
If you solve the underlying issues at play, instead of trying to remove the tools that kids are misusing in order to fix the issue that the school system as a whole created, I think it would be found that computers would be a net positive. I know having a computer in class significantly improved my scores and learning capability, as I could use it for legible note taking, and I could record sessions if I needed to. Yes I definitely accessed coolmathgames at times but, I can tell you right now, the ability to do that helped remove the monotony of the classroom, and if I didn't have that tool at my disposal, I would have simply zoned out and gained nothing out of the day, instead of what I did. My scores definitely wouldn't have gone up like the article seems to be alluding to.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.
So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.
But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.
To some extent yes, I do agree with you, but if your student at least understands why they are needing to, or shows reasonable expectation that it will actually improve their life later on, you stop fighting the kid the entire way and learning becomes a whole lot easier.
I do agree that teachers shouldn't enable it, but I don't believe the proper response is to throw the blame strictly on the kids and remove a resource to them. Removing said resource isn't going to make them want to be there, or make them learn anything. You need to address that issue first, otherwise it's just going to move to the next distraction (like talking to your peers or just skipping class altogether)
Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn't particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.
In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn't keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.
The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn't positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.
I am not going to pretend that boredom can't factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?
I think you’re probably right actually. I suspect I read about the importance of repetition in learning which seems to be a real thing, and then either over interpreted it or read it from a source with an agenda. It’s true that repetition is critical to learning, but the idea that it’s fundamentally opposed to “fun” might have been layered on top without justification. Though I do maintain that the require practice is tough to keep fun, and is important, so I think there’s some practical truth to it even if it’s not a requirement as such.
You’re definitely correct that boredom isn’t a goal in itself, plenty of ways to be boring and teach nothing, I’ve definitely suffered through that!
The trick is to let teachers teach what they are passionate about
I do agree that passion is a huge thing. I also think that explaining why something is important and how it will effect life is equally important. If the student has no reason to care, why would they want to be there, why would they be entertained and why would they actually gain something.
seeing my teachers get excited about stuff? those are the lessons i remember now, 30, 40 years later.
I was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.
I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn't want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that's enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.
How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?
Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.
Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.
Personally, if AI wasn't so destructive, or blatantly stolen as it was, and they changed basically everything about it to make it more reliable and stuff, I agree. I do think eventually something that is called AI will do that, but it won't be the LLM tech we have today that's for sure, it will be some other form of tech.
I would love if they had something like you see in the futuristic movies where theres a hologram teacher, could have every kid have their own. I just don't forsee it happening reliably with our current tech.
Reliable teaching would be straightforward, but not cheap to set up. You wouldn't want the models used to have the entire sum of the internet trained. Just verified clean data.
You could start with textbooks, peer-reviewed studies, IC data from teachers, then add 20% reviewed, distilled content from a fully trained LLM. Set the whole thing up on rails. Curriculum, pacing, and testing would all be classical programming, architected by people, using a more widely trained LLM to sort out language and edge cases. New edge cases get human review. Set up a quorum of models that get hit on every request to sus-out errors. Backend is the source of truth, front end is not allowed to countermand the backend, and that's tracked by another quorum.
I think the biggest problem isn't doing it, the biggest problem is not destroying society to get it done and not allowing society to take it over with an agenda. We can't have the teachers disappear. It's ripe for corpo/government manipulation. For something like this to work, you can't have capitalism driving profits. You can't have cults indoctrinating. It would all need to be very post Bell Riots Star Trek, and we KNOW that'll never happen.
I assure you that children find classes on budgeting and civics to be dreadfully boring
I don't agree, as a kid I would have loved understanding how to write a check. ~~It's~~ was at the time a required life skill that I would have been able to understand without much explanation, unlike a lot of stuff they throw into the subjects.
A class on how to budget step by step? Yes I would have hated that, but a class based on real life skills that you would use daily to help gain independence? Back as a teenager wanting independence, I would have jumped on that even if it was an elective.