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The Problem Isn't Chromebooks
Chromebooks have been a Thing in the classroom, starting in about 2010. ‘Cos Google pushed them and because they are cheap.
Google AI says that they are great because they are cheap and the data on the cloud follows students from school to school.
But Brittany Calavitta, a home-schooler, says they are ruining education. A schoolteacher friend told her that
the overuse of screens in the classroom is changing the way our children learn. It is stripping them of their innate creativity and causing fractured focus. At the same time, schools have become reliant on them.
What is needed? “I think that physical interaction with the real world matters much more than we know.” At her homeschool,
Every morning, we slowly saunter toward our dining room table, but the feast we await sits just beyond our bacon. We find it in the study of fractions in the kitchen and the careful examination of ant colonies in our backyard. It is in the gold rush stories that flutter between our fingertips and then settle beneath our feet on the dusty soil of our local ghost towns. It is in learning about supply and demand at the gas pump and skip-counting apples in the grocery store.
But I think that the problem is not Chromebooks but the very nature of the classroom, which strips children of “their innate creativity” and causes “fractured focus.” Or no focus at all, as children sit in classrooms passively listening to teachers lecturing them and boring them to death.
And yet education is clearly beneficial.
Why learn to read? Because, for a kid, you get access to wonderful stories — and humans are the animal species that tells itself stories. And then you can use your reading skills to acquire knowledge.
Why learn arithmetic? Because we use numbers with money, and money is the foundation of the social culture of the market economy. To function in the market economy you must know a bit more than counting on your fingers.
Why learn to write? Because writing has revolutionized human society, and if you want to communicate to other people it really helps to be able to write.
Apart from that, young people should get to work, doing things in the real world. Of course, Chromebooks are really useful when you need to search for knowledge about doing things in the real world.
And by the way, why do we send kids to school?
To teach them things?
To keep them busy?
To indoctrinate them in regime propaganda?
To prevent them from competing for jobs with adults?
To bore them to death?
To turn them into mind-numbed robots?
I wonder how much education is shaped by the needs of elite children. Elite children cannot be slotted into elite jobs: military, religious, business. Not yet. They need to grow up first and develop leadership credibility.
But does that apply to non-elite children? I don’t think so. At what age can a child help stack shelves in a market? At what age can a child help out on the farm? At what age can a child help out in a factory? At what age can a child help out in a restaurant?
Fact is that children are naturally curious, and naturally able to learn things on the job.
I say that if a child can learn to ride a balance bike at age two, and a real bike soon after, then maybe children have the ability to learn all kinds of economically useful skills, and not wait till their mid teens before getting a job.
After all, what is play but Nature’s way of learning to do things and developing useful and enjoyable mental and physical skills that are needed in the world of humans?
| Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:46:00 GMT |
How Come It Took So Long?
So Treasury Secretary Bessent just talked about cracking down on the funding of the Left’s Mostly Peaceful Protest Complex.
Nonprofits who give out grants to groups who commit violence will be tracked and likely DEFUNDED
I want you to know that I am shocked, shocked that left wing non-profits have been funding political violence.
Tell me it ain’t so, Joe.
I gotta say: how come it took you so long?
OK, we know why. If you are a left-wing billionaire or just a common-or-garden trust-fund baby, it’s been a great ride. You slosh out money to left-wing activist groups like CODE PINK and AntiFa and all the various UniCauses and the send Renee Good and Alex Pretti into the streets with your money cosplaying helpless victims protesting injustice. How cool is that.
Especially when you remember that present day rich kids enjoying the fruits of their fathers have a particular interest in hindering the rise of a new generation whose creative ideas may create billions in wealth and shrink the scope and prestige of your old-time centi-millions.
Yes, folks, don’t forget that a lot of regulation and political administration are not really about protecting the powerless but about preserving the status-quo privileges and the the hegemony of the present elite and putting the brakes on the next generation of economic creativity.
Only it’s much better — and even believable! — to present your selfish agenda as the selfless and compassionate fight to save the oppressed from the oppressors.
So if Treasury Secretary Bessent’s bloodhounds are now going to be burrowing around in the Form 990s of the best and brightest NGOs in the land…
Well, what is a patriotic citizen to do but say: it’s about time.
The fun will be reading all the lefty activists and their bribed apologists in the regime media as they gussie up narratives to show that Bessent’s actions mean the end of “our democracy” and life as we know it.
Of course, they will be right. The current regime relies and depends on the government not noticing that, by funding “mostly peaceful” protests they doing the equivalent of funding what used to be called “armed insurrection” when J6 protesters did it.
The “tell” is, of course, that our lefty friends just don’t see left-wing violence as a problem. Of course they don’t, because the effect of today’s left-wing violence is to support the current regime in its fight to prevent the rise of populist nationalism and the eventual replacement of the current regime that maintains the dominance and hegemony of the global educated class.
Sorry, trust-fund kidz. Most likely all you will do is slow the ascent of populist nationalism and increase the size of the end-of-regime butcher’s bill.
| Fri, 29 May 2026 21:19:34 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When the left ran out of real victims to patronize it started inventing “fake” victims.
Nietzsche: I philosophize with a hammer. Me: No, Fritzi; you philosophize with the one-liner.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: My Perfect Plan to Make America Great Again
