alt Hacker NewsSweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
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I worked in EdTech about a decade ago and our education/pedagogy experts were already talking about this. They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left.
In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.
https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...
A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.
Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
The same goes for college.
I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.
When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you.
The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive!
Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
What does that tell us?
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
I don’t teach in a public school but we use tech to a very limited extent in my k-9 school grades 7-9 will be taking a computer skills course next year. We currently teach touch typing to grades 8 and 9. Everything else is pencil and paper. I think present day children are exposed to tech in non productive way ie mobile devices.
The number of kids who don’t know how to operate a mouse and keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult for some. It’s quite interesting honestly.
I support this, up to the point where a second-grader has to carry four textbooks and four exercise books around on their walk to school; from the rucksack weight to body weight ratio they might as well be training for the marines.
Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom.
e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet).
My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.
It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
Anecdotally talking to teacher friends they have significant app fatigue. Multiple apps, crappy chrome books in the class room, they are basically a low grade system admin and IT support on top of trying to teach. Everything is benchmarked and thus gamed.
The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.
Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
They forgot the ballpoint pen. In 1950 Sweden flowing ink and cursive was the mark of a civilized man. I remember teacher using magnifier to detect cheaters as evil ballpoint technology advanced.
It's the same in Norway, and news paper chronicles are going as far as saying things like "Now that we learned that we went to far, what do we do with the generation of kids we experimented on?". Food for thought.
A few years ago I went back to school. Hoping to manage some sort of Internet addiction, I bought a reMarkable 1 tablet. It did help me, but in retrospect I should've bought a black and white laser printer and a few boxes of paper. The ergonomy of paper is excellent after all, especially for a brain like mine that grew up without computers.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
I don’t know why the headline was changed for the link, but the headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are slippery things.
The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
> whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based
There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
Related:
Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841)
I support this. Having a boundary around tech is a great asset for a growing mind.
At the same time, get your kids a computer early so they can learn the basics. Maybe even keep it off the internet.
Skip phones and tablets altogether for as long as possible.
I think it's better to use books and not have so many distractions in the classroom.
But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
absolutely the right move, use books for learning. i would still use computers for building ie coding, but absolutely not entertainment, not "learning to use microsoft word"
yes, the distraction is real. How many times i was busy with my day job on some task when for some reason i had to wait for something (coworker reply, build to complete, approval to be granted) and automatically opened HN on in a new tab... 10 minutes of blackout and i'm on some random wikipedia page for no obvious reason related to my day job task... And i'm 40+ year old adult. Im scared to think what this level of distraction means for undeveloped brain.
I think Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet said once about an iPad for reading that : it would be terrible to read on a device where it was so easy to get distracted with the internet on your fingers.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
It sounds good on paper (pun intended) but policy strikes again, "Can my kid bring home her math book so we can work on the parts she's struggling with?" No of course not it lives in a cupboard at school 90% of the time might get some screen shares from it.
Was always a stupid idea to bring screens into schools.
One very important aspect is that we learn through haptics and precise arm movements required to write/draw things down.
An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.
classic pendulum swing. we went all-in on screens without checking if they actually helped, now we're overcorrecting the other way. the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle but that doesn't make for a good headline.
Impossible for a Vocational Tech teacher in the networking field. How can I teach computers without computers?
100% support this. Computers in school -- except at specific times for specific purposes -- are a distraction. My teen told me he and his friends were watching Hulu in class on their Chromebooks because while the school district had locked down access to Netflix, Disney, etc., they forgot Hulu :/ The students also figured out ways to share links to game sites by using shared Google docs and using URLs that bypassed the school's controls.
The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in classroom education is essential at the lower grades in particular.
Buying a book made of trees is very often much more expensive than reading on a screen. Worldreader provides books for free for schools in Africa where they only need to pay for a $40 phone once instead of spending money on books.
look up what you need - print physical pages - use pen | pencil - have a legal pad / notebook at hand - scribble down shit.
unfortunately now printing is expensive
Good.
This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.
Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
It's interesting that the Swedish government isn't completely rejecting digital tools but rather seeking a balanced approach, introducing them when students are ready for them
I can't understand why any person at any point in time would ever think that computers make sense in a classroom unless the class is specifically about using computers.
On this and Video Assistant Refereeing in football/soccer, the Swedes seem to have just the right approach. We'll use it, but only if it's good, and if it isn't good any more, we'll stop. How simple!
I look forward to the (hopefully) positive results and what it will mean for most EdTech snake oil.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
My daughter is in 5th grade and absolutely despises iReady assessments. She complains how much she doesn't like the screen and prefers paper tests. Her scores reflect it too. She does terribly on iReady assessments which is used for a TON of metrics (I think unfairly..?) but give her the same test on paper and she'd do remarkably better.
Good for Sweden. Education really ought to be protected from fad-following "pedagogues" and rapacious businesses looking to cash in selling gimmicks. The great historical educational traditions of the past are as relevant today as they ever were. It is a kind of irrational technological big-P Progressive compulsion to think that technology is magical, that x-done-with-latest-tech is better than x-done-without-latest-tech. Technology for technology's sake. It makes an idol out of technology.
computers are good learning tools for adults that learned how to learn with books.
Screens and computers are incredibly useful in education when they are used for some concrete purpose. Just think about how incredibly useful it is to use Desmos or Manim to explain certain mathematical concepts, as opposed to chalk on blackboard or print on paper.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when reading a hardcopy book.
Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.
It’s sad to see HN take this at face value and parrot the “screens bad” view without understanding it.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous...
2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c...
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...
4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag...
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
I grew up in a post-Soviet country where schools had zero tech budget, so it was all books and chalkboards by default. Looking back that was probably fine for learning fundamentals. The kids who went on to competitive math and CS didn't need tablets in 3rd grade to get there.
The part nobody talks about is textbook cost. Digital textbooks were supposed to make education cheaper but somehow the subscription model made it more expensive. At least a physical book you buy once and it sits on the shelf for the next kid.
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Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty obvious that screens, such as iPads, are bad for kids' education. The homework on apps like i-Ready is mostly just crappy multiple-choice questions. I fail to see how that actually helps students. They should be challenged and kept in their discomfort zones. They need to experience problem-solving in all its forms and get feedback from teachers on how they solve a problem. They need to practice writing and long-form analysis, and get detailed feedbacks from teachers - things i-Ready just can’t provide. The funny thing is, so many Americans blame the system for inequality while embracing Jo Boalers' nonsense. Yet they flock to screens like moths to a flame, not realizing that wealthy families will just pay for private tutors while the kids without those resources get left behind, when enforcing hgher education standards could be arguably the cheapest thing to do[1]. How's that working out for equality, let alone equity?
[1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.