Where Educational Technology Fails: A seventh-grader's perspective
99 comments
·November 16, 2025BobbyTables2
Teaching has gotten lazy.
In my day, tests were on paper and collected at the end of class.
Now they’re online and kids exchange answers by taking the cell phone to the bathroom.
Or they will exploit the online nature and compare answers during the passing period AFTER the class a submit it before the next class starts. Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
Instead of being 25-50% short response, tests are all multiple choice so they can be automatically graded.
To think my teachers recorded grades in a ledger and computed averages by hand for classes of 35+ students…
SiempreViernes
> Back in my day there was nothing wrong with how testing happened, I know because I succeeded in that system.
The above is maybe not an entirely fair summary, but I think it captures the spirit of Bobby's comment in vivid detail.
jeffjeffbear
> Teachers can’t be bothered to close the test when class ends!
What about students who need extra time, which can be part of an IEP, and other issues, I don't think that part is lazy. Also a decent amount of the usage of Canvas or similar LMS's is subject to school or district wide rules.
Edit: I taught highschool CS during the pandemic to try to help out with issues in my district.
empressplay
Project-based learning / assessment is much more common now.
Students have to explain their process when they present their projects, and answer questions, which ensures they did the work.
These projects make up most of their grades.
singpolyma3
It's depressing that anyone would call internet censorship "educational technology"
armchairhacker
I think laws/regulations are very similar. "Obvious" ones are good (e.g. violence, food safety), analogous to "of course they should block actually inappropriate content". But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations, and fine-grained laws and regulations don't work, because of loopholes.
To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.
BolexNOLA
> But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations
I guess I’m not really following where this logic is going. Are you saying “therefore we should not have laws and regulations”? I highly doubt that’s what you actually mean, but I am unsure how to parse what you do mean if not that.
armchairhacker
We should have laws and regulations for things that are important and (relatively) easy to define and enforce. But laws and regulations aren't enough, because people find loopholes, and trying to patch these loopholes with more laws and regulations doesn't work.
Examples of "obvious" laws and regulations: physical violence should be policed, companies should have to pay salaries and have basic restrictions on work hours, safety, sanitation, etc. Examples of things that can't really be regulated: "gambling" and "harmful social media". When does a game become "gambling"? When does a site become "social media" and "harmful"? Various countries have legal definitions for these, but they're very long, so companies find loopholes (e.g. sports betting, loot-boxes); or they straight-up break the laws, but the government doesn't bother to enforce them, because it's too difficult and the general population doesn't notice or care enough. Complex and ineffective laws and regulations also tend to have unintended consequences, like Balatro being considered "gambling" in Australia, and the UK's "Online Safety Act" affecting small forums.
Part of the reason is that the people writing and enforcing laws and regulations themselves are corrupt. But this goes back to the source: you can't police those people with more laws, because their enforcers are also corrupt, and so on. A society is controlled and its morality is defined by its people, so to some extent, a society must teach its people to be moral and give them the leeway to still behave immoral.
riedel
This reminds me of the times playing snake on our TI 84 calculators.
drivebyhooting
That was exceptionally well written for a 7th grader.
anonymouskimmer
I plugged it into a couple of free readability analyzers and got 10th - 12th grade reading levels.
https://charactercalculator.com/readability-checker/
- Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade
- Reading Score: 59.00
- Reading Note: Fairly difficult to read
https://hemingwayapp.com/readability-checker
- Readability checker: Grade 10; OK. Aim for 9.
- 5 of 19 sentences are very hard to read.
- 6 of 19 sentences are hard to read.
There are some poor word choices[1], but yes, all in all this 7th grader is definitely writing above grade level. Hopefully his English teachers give him feedback pertinent to his demonstrated ability.
[1] - E.g. "That’s not to say a school’s system is necessarily completely ineffective. Last year, my school had left unblocked the spammy-sounding Unblocked Games 66."
would be easier to understand if re-written as:
"That’s not to say a school’s system is completely ineffective. Last year, my school failed to block the spammy-sounding "Unblocked Games 66.""
650
There are multiple em dashes present. I strongly suspect AI help.
aerostable_slug
I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — everyone thinks I'm using AI when I'm not.
gampleman
Where has educational technology not been failing?
mjevans
Maybe work should be put into make the curriculum more engaging so that it's less drudgery and boring work and more rewarding.
A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.
analog31
Just have overworked teachers with minimal tech savvy compete for engagement with trillion dollar companies that employ armies of psychologists and programmers, and who have popular momentum on their side. Have them do this without turning into the industry they're competing with.
I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
aleph_minus_one
> I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
Even without knowing anything about your music, I'm 98 % certain that I would prefer to go to your concert than to a Taylor Swift concert. :-)
antonvs
The key part that wasn't mentioned is "...more engaging to a mass audience."
giantg2
They already have tons interesting and gamified stuff in schools. Part of learning should also include how to tackle subjects you find boring. Discipline and perseverance are useful life skills that I think are increasingly disappearing.
clickety_clack
The tough thing is probably trying to make it Type 2 fun, where hard work leads to rewards rather than Type 1 fun that’s basically just entertainment. Ultimately, learning something new is always kind of painful, and learning to push through that pain is in itself a key lesson you have to learn for adult life.
card_zero
No. Fun is learning. You've just internalized an ugly perspective.
graemep
I agree, Learning is fun. It becomes something you need to push through because a bad educational system destroyed the fun.
Its sometimes necessary to learn some thing that are not fun, buts is exceptional, especially for children.
clickety_clack
First of all, you are saying I think learning should not be fun at all, when I am actually saying that learning is type 2 fun, and people need to learn how to do that to be happy, fulfilled adults.
Second, in refuting me, it seems you are stating that learning should be Type 1 fun, which I totally disagree with. You are severely limiting your potential if you only do things that are entertaining. And not just in an accidental way: you are also setting yourself up for a life in which you follow the things that are made to be entertaining for you, by advertisers or whoever else thinks they can gain by leading you along.
I enjoy learning new things, I’ve learned new languages, musical instruments, and I’ve switched careers a couple of times which has led to all kinds of new things I had to learn to do. The fact is, that the real fun happens after mastery, and after a brief ”this is cool” bump where you bang a drum for a couple of minutes on the beach or whatever, there is a long period of practice where you pretty much have to put in the work before you can get to that fun flow state of mastery.
mindslight
So are you saying that binge watching a TV series is just as educational as learning a new programming language?
card_zero
Less drudgery and boring work? How about not drudgery and not boring. To accomplish this the thing has to be optional, and it has to be freely chosen. No amount of window dressing on a thing you're forced to do makes it truly fun. But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated, and so we get endless "make learning fun!" crap on top of compulsory drudgery.
foobarian
> But that's not possible, allowing kids the choice to possibly not be educated
It's not not possible, but the problem is you'd end up with a majority uneducated populous who would decide that sacrificing goats and watering crops with Gatorade is the thing to do, and they would hang you if you disagreed
card_zero
I don't know. I'd like Mike Judge's opinion on this point. Does trapping people in a building and forcing them to stack up academic KPIs really make them less stupid? I suppose it keeps them away from superstition and hoaxes and scams. Maybe. Does it even help with that? It's probably the socialization that matters.
graemep
Its not that hard to balance, but it takes individual attention. Learning is intrinsically fun and you need to avoid turning it into drudgery.
I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.
I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.
You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.
jacknews
Life is not all fun. You need to learn how to buckle up and just get it done.
hereme888
But school is 13 years of mostly boring, stressful and irrelevant learning. What adult on earth would willingly take up that sort of work? None except the small percent of academically-oriented personalities.
Teacher: "today we're going to learn about the three types of rocks, and the quadratic equation."
Student: "what for? I've never seen an adult discuss or use that in real life."
Teacher: "you might need it some day, and its part of the curriculum."
card_zero
"Life" seems to be a codeword for other people being obstructive. It's sadly true, you end up learning to be pragmatic and defeated.
Razengan
Early school should be like a game onboarding tutorial for this world:
"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
giantg2
"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.
LoFiSamurai
Do you have kids? You’re going straight to planets huh.
Razengan
No but I think I can still think like one and I can remember what would have gotten my interest back then before dropping out because video games were so much more interesting :')
Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.
onionisafruit
“This is what the world is like” is a full education in itself.
Razengan
Again, it doesn't have to be an info dump, like how education is now and has forever been, just reciting rote explanations to questions nobody (at that age) asks.
Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.
analog31
"You are a human."
"Here's the refrigerator."
"Here's a cell phone."
Razengan
Of course, actually yes: Expose new humans to the latest technology right away, WHILE it's still awe-inspiring to them, before it become as routine as breathing, and explain how it's made, how we got there, and how life was before then.
That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.
You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?
You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.
jayd16
Grammar and reading comprehension are important and can be enjoyable or at least unlock the enjoyment of understanding literature ...but I seriously doubt a 10 year old is going to think to take a class in it on their own.
wakawaka28
>and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.
pessimizer
There isn't any educational technology. There are (and have been, for decades, accomplishing nothing) a bunch of companies trying to come up with ways to exploit educational institutions to create revolving income streams and failing. Letting kids access the internet at school is just an admission of complete failure, being bad at blocking bad sites doesn't make that failure any worse.
No phones, no internet at school. If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless. Leave the screens to their software and programming classes.
I'd say it will be a blessing when this debacle is replaced with AI, except the AI will also come from the revolving income stream guys, and will also have children's well-being as an afterthought. It will be the same failure, but with 4x the margin going to 1/100 the previous number of vendors, just like every "tech advance" in the past decade.
Scubabear68
This. Exactly this.
The answer isn’t some fancy security software or screening, it is much simpler: no software, period. The bulk of school should be learning in a classroom, computers are not required.
They can and should be allowed in limited doses early on, and can build over time, particularly as courses either obviously require it or the computers truly facilitate the learning.
We had her public school teachers trying to tell us the answer to our daughter’s reading issues was more screen time. We ended up sending her to a private religious school with very limited screen time, and she is now an A and B student.
This is a huge problem in public schools because state and federal governments are complicit in burying kids (and parents!) in unnecessary technology. During Covid, the feds flooded schools with literal billions of dollars that did not go to better teachers, it went to smart boards and MacBook pros and iPads and dozens of “School as a Service” providers who existed only to extract money from clueless superintendents who have a seemingly endless supply of tax money to draw from.
anonymouskimmer
> If you can't bring enough material into the building within books and teacher's brains to teach, you're terrible and pointless.
The numbers are smaller and smaller, but there will still be kids whose only access to the internet is their parents' smartphones. When I personally mentored a couple of pretty bright high school student interns, one of whom scored above 1500 SATs and a 36 ACT, they both found it really helpful to look at Khan Academy / YouTube clips to better understand what I was explaining.
If the poorer kids don't have access to these explanatory videos, except when their parents are done with their phones, they will fall further behind than they otherwise would have.
Perhaps a compromise would be to limit internet access to the school library?
Wowfunhappy
I teach a 5th grade computer science class at my school. We just finished our "chatbot" project. I thought the kids some very simple Python syntax--assigning variables, concatenating strings, input, print, if, elif, else--and they made programs that could have a conversation with the user.
I suppose I could have done this without internet on air-gapped laptops. They do need laptops though, and the internet makes it much easier for them to submit their work for me to review after class.
I realize that a bounded computer science class probably isn't what you're talking about. However, my school has in fact really been trying to clamp down on technology use this year, and it has been challenging for the computer science department!
28304283409234
Parent of two teenagers. Came here to say exactly this.
jacknews
"teach kids how to use technology responsibly"
OK
I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.
But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.
It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.
SoftTalker
This is now going on in college. I was just hearing from a professor the other day that it's impossible to keep students off of social media. They cannot sit for a 50 minute lecture without pulling out their phones (that's if they even physically come to class; if they're online, they are half-listening at best).
These are now the COVID lockdown and post-pandemic kids. They come in to college unprepared/lacking mastery of prerequisites, don't listen in class, they don't come to office hours, they don't do their homework (or try to have ChatGPT do it) and get upset when they fail.
ramon156
Offline-first teaching! Let them only be able to read docs available to them
card_zero
This is because they like playing Roblox, and are getting something out of playing Roblox, and are not persuaded that your thing is more rewarding for them, and unless you can pull a miracle of engaging enthusiasm out of the bag they're right.
jacknews
So if they take crack cocaine instead of literature class, they're right too?
Sorry, but learning is actually a slog. The best we can do is get them addicted to learning, instead of gaming, but let's help them on the way by removing the gaming temptation while they are in class.
card_zero
Learning is not a slog. Cramming for exams, that's a slog, but only tenuously relates to learning.
OK, so sometimes a person may get all fired up about a project and slog through reams of - effort - in order to get some stage done, out of a deep desire to see what happens next. And from an external perspective that seems very worthy because it seems deeper than something that's just constantly rewarding. But is it necessary, proper, that any given person be doing such a deep and onerous thing all the time? Or even very often? Is it for the external observer, who knows nothing of the person's internal processes and feelings, to decide these things? Mind your own beeswax.
Crack doesn't count, IMO, because it games the system. Probably now you'll say something to compare Roblox unironically to crack "because dopamine". Did you know, we get dopamine released when doing anything we enjoy? But there's always a lot of people ready to claim that electronic devices are literally addictive, because it's a trendy thing to say, and the pressure of this opinion is like a physical force, a great gaseous mass of idiots. I shouldn't have got involved with this conversation, I have important video games to play.
kkfx
You can't force people to learn, you must interest them, and FLOSS desktops would help much, if well presented. Otherwise you only create dysfunctional dictatorship who only exalt conformism and mediocrity.
petermcneeley
The word your looking for is Discipline. The way to control babies and animals it to simply take it away from them. This is not the way to control twelve year olds.
Retric
That’s a strategy doomed to failure.
12 year old kids are still developing the brain structures to be able to handle discipline. Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
When you look around and everyone is suddenly overweight and addicted to their phones humans didn’t suddenly lose willpower, their environment changed.
gf000
> Meanwhile a large fraction of adults are failing to do what you’re expecting a 12 year old to get right.
Is it not because they failed to learn it in there teenage years?
My mother is a teacher and she noticed that kids that regularly do some kind of competitive sports tend to be much more hardworking in school, and it does extend to their university studies as well. Meanwhile "former gifted children" often experience the first year of university as a giant slap on the face, because they never learnt how to study, how to work hard for something, and being smart is often not enough at this level. Many can't even stand up from that hit.
So this is absolutely a huge disservice to not teach children some sort of self-discipline, motivation is never enough, there will always be days when you don't have enough of the latter, and only the former could push you forward then.
Retric
I agree learning should happen, but you don’t learn to drive a car by someone handing you the keys on day 1.
Learning just about anything looks very different than handling the full responsibility of doing the thing correctly in your own. ‘How to teach someone to use a cellphone’ is a much better question than ‘is 12 years old enough to be given one.’
petermcneeley
Sure but in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult. You must give them the gift of Adult discipline in that short period of time.
Without that you will get the result in your final sentence.
jv22222
> in less than 6 years your 12 year old is a complete adult
They really aren't. Brains are not close to being fully developed until the age of 25.
The gift of "adult discipline" is quite a flawed idea. Depending on how far you take it, that's exactly the kind of thing that can create trauma, depression, low self esteem and perhaps worst can affect creativity self expression and just wanting to play.
Play, undiscipline, rebelliousness, is exactly where the Apple Macintosh came from and so many other amazing technologies and ideas came from in the world.
I'd say exactly the opposite, we need to find ways of removing discipline and conformity and extending play and self-expression into adult life for as long as possible as it is the foundation of so much goodness.
That said, if your idea of "Adult discipline" is chock-o-block full of play and self-expression then I'm all ears.
Retric
The drinking age is 21 in the US 18 is not quite full adulthood, so 12 is still quite young. Even just 1 year is a big deal for kids, 6 years is a huge jump look at 0 vs 6 vs 12 vs 18 and these are very different people.
You see my last sentence when you don’t change how our parents were raised. A 12 year old isn’t ready to handle the full responsibility of a smartphone or grocery shopping etc, but that doesn’t mean you can’t introduce aspects of a smartphone.
TeaDrunk
I would argue that 18 is not a complete adult just one defined legally as an adult by our legal system. I would argue that the definition of complete adult is relatively arbitrary and mostly cultural.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
Before I lodge my criticism: the kid's right. DNS blocking has always been a non-solution to the "kids screwing around on school computers" problem. When I was his age, we'd pull up breadfish.co.uk on all the computers in a single pod in the library, then un-mute all of them at once. They blocked breadfish, but then we just started pulling it up on youtube.
1:1 ed tech (e.g. chromebooks) probably exacerbates the problem because kids have a single machine that's their own. They can customize it as they please, for better and worse.
When I was his age, my school's thin clients would wipe most of your customizations every time you logged out. For the handful of standalone desktops, you'd still have to set stuff up on each machine individually. This limited the effectiveness of the various tricks we played to get past IT guardrails.
I think the title is a little misleading, though. The essay details why DNS-level blocking doesn't work in educational environments. The title suggests it'd talk about why ed-tech fails in a more general case. Remember, projectors, document cameras, VHS players, and Smart boards were all red-hot tech at some point. Even today, ed-tech is more than just computers assigned to kids.