> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier

No stats, but it’s extremely real.

I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.

The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.

">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."

I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.

I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".

A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.

I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.

Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?

The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.

> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.

That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.

And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!

"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier. For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently. ---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special. ---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents. ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.

No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.

However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.

> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"

I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.

All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.