alt Hacker News$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
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Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.
There is value in being able to automate things, but there is far more value in being able to first to learn how to do stuff yourself.
Bring back the indestructible Apple ][e and put let the kids program in logo (turtle graphics) for 1 or 2 hours per week max. The will not hurt them while society takes a few years to figure out how the introduction of technology in education went so catastrophically bad.
Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster.
I guess my buddies using laptops in electrical engineering 10 years ago also got dumber? Ought to have done programming and CAD with pen and paper.
I wish I had a laptop earlier - or even better, a tablet with a good pen and attachable keyboard. I’m struggling to think of a disadvantage vs dead tree [note]books. Doodle right on the pdf textbook, dump things to remember into some flashcards app, have notes as searchable files / the ability to share them with everybody, or just a calendar of what’s happening when so you’re not surprised by a test that was announced when you blew off school for a day to do stupid teenager things.
The only actual issue is that computers are excellent slaves but terrible masters, and it’s a lot easier to get distracted by doom or tiktok when you got a computer you’re actively using. Yet surely this is solvable? Given how annoyingly locked down the average company-given dev machine is, surely it’s possible to restrict it for students during school time? It should certainly be much easier than to control private smartphones.
It being the first time a generation scored worse surprises me because it has been pretty obvious in the UK at least that the syllabus for children has been systematically and progressively dumbed down for at least the last 30 years.
One concrete example I remember is in sixth form in the UK when I was there, in order to address poor example results in maths, they replaced Core Maths 1-6 with Pure Maths 1-6, the 6 modules of the latter only containing the material from the first 4 modules of the former
https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv
Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".
The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
I’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.
Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
By the time I was in high school, we had laptop carts that were rolled out for a few classes (as in a handful of times per year). This was 2004+. We also had computer labs since elementary school. Iirc laptops were used when labs were booked up.
I recall the experience being distracting. Computers are more fun than classes. No matter how much you lock down the machine, a kid will figure a way to make it more interesting than class. Computers can do so much. Children are curious.
I remember sneaking in flash games, ms paint/kidpix, browsing the web and whatever.
Anecdotal.. but i certainly wasn’t the only kid fooling around.
I don’t know what the “right amount” is, but I turned out ok. Though the iPhone was introduced after I graduated high school
We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...
Just wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it.
eg. See [1] which finds: "The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class."
and
"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."
There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...
Laptops didnt cause US schools to abandon traditional methods of teaching reading and writing. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Laptops also didn’t integrate special ed in mainstream classrooms. While it’s the right thing to do for other reasons, the net effect hasn’t been to make all kids experiences or learning better.
I went to school at what I realise was an unusual interregnum between computerisation. Too young for the BBC micro (there was one, in the library, at my secondary school, that was never turned on), too old for PCs or Archimedes or whatever came later in the 90s. In retrospect, not a bad thing.
I went to schools that had the latest tech for computer labs. Apple Macintosh computers…the colorful ones. Anyway, we had the latest but I did not learn what I wanted to; which was how a computer works. Instead class was just about browsing within the walled garden of the operating system and making videos and typing.
Just because one has the latest tech dos not mean they’ll learn. I learned more on my own with used computers then I did in school. I was able to break things and fix them.
Many many many people warned against this step, the same people that told you not to let the gov. into healthcare, but the same people didn't listen and we are left with degrading outcomes.
Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
I lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.
The best example of this are drivers who stop in traffic circles to check a map in their phone.
the article blames the laptops but conveniently ignores that the same generation was also raised by parents who handed them iPhones at age 3. isn't school screen time a rounding error compared to the 6+ hours of daily personal screen time happening at home?
It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
This is probably misleading information. Kids and their parents aren't responsible for their math performance. Teachers are. Especially the ones that demotivate their students.
This guy is a hack
Utter rubbish, designed as clickbait for older folks. Every generations dunks on the next one, right up until it's time to change the clock on the VCR and only the kids can do that.
Kids are growing up in a different world than we did. They need different skills, and probably a different cognition. Teaching them to deal with rapid attention shifts is probably going to equip them better for their actual lives than trying to make them focus on one subject for hours.
Imagine what it will be like for the generation who are currently using chatgpt to do their homework only for the teacher to use AI to mark it
Anecdotal evidence of specious claim.
But it did make a lot of rich guys richer.
Canonical article source: (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
Didn't OLPC spend 40 to 80 million in R&D, and then governments spent $1B+ deploying them? How did that work out?
I don’t know anyone in my life who, given enough time, could recite entire epics like Homer’s The Odyssey the way some of the Ancient Greeks could. But I wouldn’t say modern people are cognitively “less capable” than those Ancient Greeks. Organisms adapt to their environments or perish -- the mind is no different.
Given the current technological landscape, I think we may eventually have to admit that Gen Z and the ones after have adapted to their environments, too. Maybe retaining information is simply less valuable as a skill (like memorizing entire epics) when easy access to a modern Library of Alexandria is right at our fingertips? Yes, it's painful to think about and uncomfortable on some level. It's probably like how Socrates felt about reading and writing when he described it as, "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding" and that reliance on it will "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it."
Though, one caveat that is important to mention is that education is not valued on a mass cultural level in this country, comparatively speaking. But that is a discussion for a different time.
With the possibility of unintentionally sounding racist..
“ Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one”
The percentage of immigrants or non-native English speakers is also increasing in the US (and in the EU).
Since these groups historically also scored lower, one would expect the general scores at least partially lowered due to this.
Also add in Covid with two years of interrupted lessons and work-from-home, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame this solely on laptops.
Related:
Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance
Computers have gotten too good. In my time they broke all the time (sometimes your own fault for downloading those sketchy videogames) and they never did what you wanted them too. You had to actually learn stuff- including highly technical English.
Yeah, totally the laptops, not the immense bullshit we surround ourselves with
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Unrelated to the laptops. Also, please don't link low quality sources (Yahoo) on HN.
This article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.