Tag: schools

The AI Threat To Critical Thinking In Our Classrooms

I’ve always believed in teaching Critical Thinking over raising robots to fit into the system. I’m hoping Bocopro comments on this one because he taught a long time and saw this firsthand.

Technology has no place in kindergarten through eighth grade (K-8). Evidence abounds that learning through books, pencil and paper, and dialogue with real people builds the strongest foundation for learning and provides cognitive, emotional and practical benefits.

The expensive private Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the Silicon Valley, where technology executives send their kids, has ZERO technology in grades K-8. Their website says, “Brain research tells us that media exposure can result in changes in the actual nerve network in the brain, which affects such things as eye tracking (a necessary skill for successful reading), neurotransmitter levels, and how readily students receive the imaginative pictures that are foundational for learning.”

Antero Garcia, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, explains why he has grown skeptical about digital tools in the classroom: “Despite their purported and transformational value, I’ve been wondering if our investment in educational technology might in fact be making our schools worse.”

States like Ohio are now requiring artificial intelligence (AI) policies for all K-12 schools, and AI appears to be the latest technology fad for government-sponsored education.

Most government (public) schools have already morphed into digital-based learning centers, relegating teachers to facilitators, with no improvement in student achievement. But adding AI to the tech-driven education system poses a great threat to a child’s cognitive development and safety.

According to Harvard University, “Brains are built over time, from the bottom up. The brain’s basic architecture is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. After a period of especially rapid growth in the first few years, the brain refines itself through a process called pruning, making its circuits more efficient.” These “use it or lose it” developmental phases of the brain happen in early childhood and through adolescence. If an adolescent depends on AI to think for his academic success, rather than his developing brain, his brain, and he will be shortchanged. Harvard says, “While the process of building new connections and pruning unused ones continues throughout life, the connections that form early provide either a strong or weak foundation for the connections that form later.”

It continues here with a lot more intestering facts about brains and AI

It Was Because The Food Sucked So Much – Michelle Obama Expresses Shock that Controversial School Lunch Program Was So Unpopular:

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is surprised that her school lunch program proved to be so controversial.

Obama made the remarks during an appearance this week on the Not Gonna Lie podcast with Kylie Kelce, asserting that her decision to make a difference with school lunches — and her overall “Let’s Move” initiative — was “strategic” in nature.

“I was trying to be strategic about aligning my agenda with something that was important to the West Wing. And I thought, ‘There’s no way that anyone is going to take issue with trying to make school lunches healthier, getting kids more active,’” she said.

The wife of former President Barack Obama then appeared to try and take credit for more recent nutrition-related statements made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming that she said “the same things” during her school lunch initiative, which launched in 2010.

“Just trying to make the next generation healthier than ours and, boy, was I wrong, which is really interesting in these times with the current Secretary of Health and Human Services [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] who is now saying some of the same things that I was saying,” Obama said.

She ultimately blamed the controversy on partisan differences. “It became a partisan issue. People were telling me that I’m trying to be the ‘nanny state’ and I’m trying to control what our kids are eating. And telling them what’s good for them and what’s not good for them.”

However, the former first lady maintained that her team achieved its goals with her program. She argued that they improved nutrition standards and factors such as “labels so that they were more readable, so that people’s parents could really understand the breakdown of fat and sugar. And it was clear we got the school nutrition standards improved in our schools for the first time in, like, 50 years.”

Obama’s school lunch initiative garnered a flood of negative attention. Many students posted photos online of their unappetizing meals after its rules were implemented. President Donald Trump worked to expand the overly restrictive program by bringing items such as chocolate milk back to the table during his first term in 2017.

rest of the story

This Is How The Northerners Ruined North Carolina

Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now.

A growing number of high-school seniors in the North are making an unexpected choice for college: They are heading to Clemson, Georgia Tech, South Carolina, Alabama, and other universities in the South.

Students say they are searching for the fun and school spirit emanating from the South on their social-media feeds. Their parents cite lower tuition and less debt, and warmer weather. College counselors also say many teens are eager to trade the political polarization ripping apart campuses in New England and New York for the sense of community epitomized by the South’s football Saturdays. Promising job prospects after graduation can sweeten the pot.

The number of Northerners going to Southern public schools went up 84% over the past two decades, and jumped 30% from 2018 to 2022, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest available Education Department data found. 

The number of Northerners going to Southern public schools went up 84% over the past two decades, and jumped 30% from 2018 to 2022, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest available Education Department data found. 

At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, total freshmen from the Northeast jumped to nearly 600 in a class of about 6,800, up from around 50 in 2002. At the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, they increased from 11 to more than 200 in a class of about 4,500 in 2022. At the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, 11% of students came from the Northeast in 2022, compared with less than 1% two decades prior. 

story (may be behind a paywall)

When I moved to North Carolina, it was the South. All the northerners came in and the big cities like Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and the like became liberal magnets. When I first got there, people would let you into traffic. Now, it’s like driving in Manhattan, or Florida. I left Florida to get away from the rude Northerners who ruined that place also.

Worst of all, they vote for all the policies that ruined their liberal states. I can’t believe that NC is a toss-up in the current election. It used to be a reliable red state.

I’ve moved now back to the South by leaving NC, but I see the damage that is done. Don’t come here and ruin the rest of the good part of the country.

I will say that western NC is still mostly pure, except Asheville. That is more like California, also leftarded.

It does say that they figured out that the Ivy League is a waste of money and not a quality education. I’ll give them credit for that.