well, this thing absolutely exploded in the last 24 hours. i've been reading all of the comments and tags and replies, and there's so many good and relevant points i wanted to try and amass responses in a single reblog.
(apologies in advance, this is gonna be so fucking long.)
very clearly, computer and digital skills education does still exist in k-12 schooling, but with staggering inconsistency and patchiness. some of the folks in the age cohort addressed here were boggled to hear of this, because they themselves learned/were taught in school. but many have also confirmed that they never were and don't know these things even now, or had only glancing introduction a long time ago and then never again.
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this absolutely contributes further to the anxiety, defensiveness, and sense of shame/embarrassment these younger students feel when confronted with needing skills no one ever helped them obtain, and it's too frequently made worse by the response of adults in education and the professional sphere dismissing them instantly as stupid, willfully ignorant, and not worth their time.
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(to the one person who reblogged to turn their nose up in the air and pour scorn down on their purported peers for "being stupid" and "lacking initiative" because you did figure it out all on your own, so why can't they... i'm not going to address you directly, but damn, kid, do i hope to high hell you learn compassion, empathy, and the ability to take in the perspective of people who aren't exactly like you, making the exact same choices you have. you need to learn to take a macro view on the multiple, complex, systemic factors that contribute to issues like this and create these gaps between you and others in your age group.)
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because this is a complex, multifaceted matter, with numerous levels of shit rolling downhill onto the younger folks being discussed in this post. it's our broken education system, it's ageism, it's suffocating economic stratification and the gap in resources from neighborhood to neighborhood and family to family, and so much more.
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but the schools are a massive part of the problem. an entrenched lack of resource and lack of funding, a lack of care, a calcified reluctance to incorporate the new into rigid formal structures. it's everything from the teachers paid too damn little and given too little time, to the classes that get cut the second there's a wobble in funding (or a threat to a higher administrator's next raise), to the portion of school faculty and administration who are older and themselves never learned even half of this, and so either don't see the point in teaching the kids, or absolutely do assume they should know already.
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it's also the predatory encroachment of corporations like fucking google into this sector of public education, because they have a self-interest in training up the new generations on only their technology, their UI, their systems and platforms and apps and tools (and harvesting their data from birth to death). so these desperately underfunded, overstretched schools see google so graciously offering a donation of 300 chromebooks as a fucking godsend, but that's not actually half-close to being a computer like students will need to learn to use, so they still miss out on the needed skills.
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the learning and teaching of these skills drop off in such a sharp generational divide, so damn quickly in a short span of years, because of how fast technology has moved, how poorly schools have kept up with that evolutionary pace, and how vastly different the technology and internet of now is from the technology and internet of the 80s, the 90s, and even the early 2000s. those of us who learned then had to explore, had to fuck around and find out with open curiosity. kids now are actively discouraged from it, for both good reasons and bad (bad: the big corps do not want kids to figure out how to do anything necessary on any platform from any manufacturer or producer, they want them neatly and placidly siloed in their own paywalled gardens; good: kids have had to learn a certain amount of "don't fuck around and find out" because the internet has become so utterly hostile to anyone but advertisers and data harvesters.)
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to this same end, while i completely understand those who frown at this post and want to insist the kids aren't the problem (and they're not, what they've been provided and not provided is), and that they shouldn't NEED to learn these things, but instead should be "met where they are" with ever-simpler and more intuitively navigable interfaces and systems... that's part of the problem, even though it's also part of the solution. it's a thing that SHOULD happen, but not to exclusion of teaching these necessary, more complex and technical, more independent digital skills. some of the difficulty these younger students are facing with the "just figure it out" of it all is that they have been fed to constantly simplifying, streamlined to hell and back, all-intuition-no-investigation systems and interfaces that they've been hamstrung, their ability to explore and rise to the challenge of a question mark curtailed. they've been trained to believe that if they can't just immediately figure it out from the surface of the user interface presented to them it must not be possible, or must be so ridiculously complex it's overwhelming. there has GOT to be a place where these solutions meet in the middle.
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yes, sure, some of these kids "don't want to learn", will greet attempted instruction with apathy, disinterest, with eye-rolling and immediate amnesia. that's no goddamn excuse to give up on them and leave them behind. they're fucking teenagers, they're YOUNG, that attitude is part of the organism. and just because SOME will resist or make no real attempt to retain the teaching of these skills, that's nowhere near a good enough reason to just not bother teaching any of them.
gonna end with something this post, the responses to it, and discussion it's raised have made me desperately and increasingly wish existed and i couldn't find when i went looking:
i wish to FUCK there was something like a series of youtube videos or tiktoks made by the kind of people who can engage with these younger students, in a format that doesn't condescend to them or treat them with kid gloves but also doesn't assume they already have a certain level of skill at the beginning, addressing one by one the different themes/issues that have been neglected for them.
something direct and straight up and made interesting but let-me-level-with-you that covered in one video "here's how to use a desktop computer from components (keyboard, mouse, monitor, cpu) to operating system (creating, saving, locating files, all the different types and what you might need to do with them)" and "here's how email actually works, how to include a document in one, how to save a draft, how to copy other recipients, and more" and on and on.
if i was that person (i am definitely not), i'd be all over it, because the need is there and it is GROWING. until we can fix those bigger factors noted above, this is how we meet these younger students where they actually are.
no matter what, leaving them all on their own, ass in the wind just ain't fucking it.
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