The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Personally I have bad experience with edTech because when a student is young, he is not disciplined enough to do hard things alone or even just annoying things, and studying can be both.

So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.

So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.

I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.

There is value in asking the question "when should an individual start studying anyway?" I don't have a link at hand for a discussion of studies comparing no pre-school to "play" pre-school" to "rigorous" pre-school -- and the studies find that the children who go through the rigorous pre-school -- usually 5.5 hours of instruction -- are ahead of their peers in the first grade, even out by third grade, and then fall behind. The study that followed kids into adulthood found that they had a higher rate of criminal activity.

I cannot help but think that we shouldn't be forcing kids to learn if they don't want to learn -- and rather than try to force every kid to be "grade level", we should go back to 1-room schoolhouses (for elementary levels, at least) and teach each student at their own pace.

To give more details on the story about my students.. At 14-15 years old, they were unable to perform subtraction correctly with single digit numbers.

All of which because they uniquely used tablets and qcm for all their work. This was a general issue with their capacity of concentration, memorization, and overall learning.

They were able to understand a simple concept, for example symmetries of objects, after a lot of work, but forget about it the following day. I helped them through some years. They are doing better now.. But they didn't catch up what they should be able to do as functioning adults.

If you don't teach to a child to study, he will never do it, studying is not fun per se, if it's not motivated, the random probability that one does it alone is extremely small, and even then. You fail him for not providing him a good education.

Now I hear you, you are talking about preschool and, clearly I think that prematurely forcing them to study has no purpose, they should start studying when they are ready to it, but we do not have a way to know when it is.

I'm on the camp of making study as fun as possible, not by creating random games around the work, but instead by providing lot of context and unexpected examples that motivate the creation of the theory. In this way, I think education can start pretty soon.

I like to have my student study because they are intrigued instead of having them study because they 'need to'. Which is counterproductive no matter the age.