On 2017-09-11 03:27:41 +0000, Mayayana said:

"Your Name" wrote

| It's just another of the ridiculous stupidities in the eduction system
| these days.
|
| In last week's newspaper they were complaining about kids becoming
| worse at the basics of reading, writing, mathematics ... it's these
| basic skills, taught properly and normally, that schools should be
| teaching, and teaching properly. Not playing around about on a laptop /
| tablet, not playing silly sports, and not sticking their noses into
| what kids have in their lunchboxes.
|

There was a fascinating and shocking article
last week in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/t...hers-tech.html

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Tech companies seducing teachers into being salespeople
for their stuff. What really surprises me (in addition to the
sheer arrogance and sleaze of MS/Apple/Facebook/Google/etc)
is that no one is overseeing these things. Why is a company
like Google able to deal directly with teachers? Why don't
their salespeople have to go through state-level administrators
to get gadgets into classrooms? Maybe those people are
all so hypnotized by tech that they just don't think about
what they're doing.

My ladyfriend is a retired kindergarten teacher. She used
to be forced to get Macs in order to use Federal funding to
get things like tables and shelving. The Macs just sat in
the corner, unsuitable for 5-6 year olds but assigned to
her classroom and thus not eligible to be put to use
elsewhere. I'm guessing it was Steve Jobs's lobbyists who
are to thank for that.

What happens here in New Zealand is that kids are given speficic
stationery lists, and the schools get a kick-back from the stationery
stores. The same happens with school uniforms and the parents buying
laptops / tablets.

In many cases the schools also say they "prefer" the kids to have
iPads, rather than a cheaper Android tablet.