Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeonB | Hacker News Reader

When the television first arrived any TV optimist would’ve said:

“clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down”

… and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.

View on HN

And yet the proliferation of screens capable of displaying information and graphics has been an absolute boon to education.

I’m not denying it, but the cost of educating 1 child - has that fallen or risen?

Well the thing with education is that there is always more to learn since knowledge keeps increasing. So arguably what you want to measure is productivity. Has television, say PBS increased educational productivity. I would say yes. I remember watching Nova shows in science class and so forth. So yes TV has reduced costs.

Books also increased productivity in the same way.

Would remote learning reduce costs? Yes.

Will AI systems reduce cost, yes.

> I remember watching Nova shows in science class and so forth. So yes TV has reduced costs.

What cost did the school save themselves here? The paid for televisions, so TV increased costs.

And they saved money in lesson plans and materials.

The cost of educating 1 child was never lower than when they were taught by their parents how to work the fields while doing said work. Education costs tell us very little about both quality and efficiency of education.

Do you mean education as in actually education? Then the cost has fallen to basically nothing. Or do you mean education as in credentialing, which is the way most people use the word? In that case it hasn't because, as the value of a credential rests entirely on other people not having it, it is in the interest of schools to restrict the supply.

Most of that is just babysitting / baby jailing cost.

It is not clear to me that is the case. Has the proliferation of screens actually improved learning outcomes?

It appears to me that e.g., HS graduate standards have been gradually lowered over time, particularly the further back you go. Maybe this is independent of the screens.

Unequivocally yes. Not every usage of a screen in education is beneficial.

But there are absolutely numerous use cases where being able to display graphics on a screen (or even better interactively) is a massive benefit. Think of any sort of science that's better shown with animation than just a static image on a page for example.

Sure, no doubt, a video can sometimes make things much clearer. A great example (to me) is this [1] for example. I had understood from the old illustrations that I was supposed to imagine something like that, but video makes it incredibly clear.

The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com