alt Hacker News> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
First hand from a couple of ~16 year olds I know. Definitely not a representative sample. Some know how to type at an acceptable speed. They're awful at shortcuts (alt-tab, many of the browser shortcuts that also present in many other programs (ctrl-w,-t,-s,-q) and most text-selection and movement shortcuts (ctrl-a,-x,-c,-v and (ctrl-)shift-left,-right)) so they navigate clumsily compared to us. They feel awkward when performing simple tasks but they do it faster than on a smartphone. They don't understand some of the terms and abstractions, likely because the smartphones keep that away from them.
Seeing them navigate things like homework or spreadsheets or multiple tabs in a browser from a smartphone is like watching a caveman trying to use a piece of brittle rock as a hammer. It will work in the end, but it's slow. I haven't looked at them closely enough, but I doubt they can comfortably keep more than 10 tabs open and navigate between them with the same speed as on a laptop or a desktop. I assume their browsing habits are qualitatively different than ours because of that. You can't really do adequate research on a smartphone.
My partner is a therapist and so I wind up in a lot of therapist groups and support groups for therapists. Many of them are youth therapists. I also coach kids and help coordinate youth athletics. My best friend is also a middle school teacher, along with his partner. So I think I have a decent grasp on where kids are at nowadays. At least in my area.
Most people I know who work with kids agree that the majority of children nowadays lack basic skills that will really handicap them in life. From a lack of basic reading/writing/typing/math skills to an ability to handle any kind of confrontation. The anti-social stuff is really, really bad and it compounds as life goes on, where kids never learn skills as they need to. Avoidance is really prevalent in people nowadays and this leads to never learning or atrophying basic skill sets. Then it also leads to not learning how to learn, or asking for help, etc.
Kids also lack the basic ability to put a series of tasks together to accomplish a larger goal. Critical thinking is severely lacking. Kids have grown up being able to ask a search engine a question or have an AI do tasks for them. The ability to understand how things work, then manipulate those things to meet a goal is just not there for a large amount of kids. I think we really need to bring back things like shop class, home ec, etc to get kids using their hands more. Kids need to be able to have an idea and then implement it in the real world. This is a skill I rarely see in kids nowadays. Way too often kids are told to avoid making mistakes and to get someone/something else to do things for them. The agency is just not there.
I really feel terrible for a lot of kids nowadays. Luckily, since I work with athletics and STEM kids, most of my tribe are eager to learn and move about. This is definitely not the norm nowadays though. My teacher friends are really struggling to feel like they're making a difference or benefitting these kids. It's sad because the problems are mostly related to their parents, not really the school system.