It's a crying shame that for the people in charge of purchasing, the most important criteria seems to be keeping the poor saps using the devices from doing what they want with them.
I beg to differ. From my memories in school, "doing what I wanted" had more education value than sticking to what teachers wanted me to. Heck, education is about exploring, experimenting and playing with things. The exact things schools nowdays try to prevent kids from doing.
Yes but you are different. A lot of children, even with proper guidance, don't want to learn.
Often times, even hard-working, smart people will phrase their learning pursuits entirely as a means toward financial, sexual, or social success. And outside of school, there is little or no independent learning. If there isn't a test and a deadline, they'd rather be doing something else.
I don't think this is a statement that applies to simply children. I think it applies to almost everyone from every culture.
I think it's a bug, not a feature. People don't like doing things for no perceived reason whatsoever, and that's what schools look like for many kids. They remove all the fun they can find and replace it with discipline, standardized tests and the idea that one day you'll find it useful (not for anything worthwhile, mind you, but to get to that thing called "college", which will help you get that thing called "job", which is what adults do to have money for food).
I'm not surprised people don't want to learn - because they are not allowed to learn in order to build rockets, or have fun with the subject, or do something rewarding. Instead they are told to learn for points that will give them more points, that will give them more points, that will maybe give them money one day.
Young kids go to school because that's what you do. They see their friends and have lunch and sit in classrooms with teachers they totally hate or completely adore. Maybe High School students think more about it, but not kids.
Those devices often block literally everything out of small box, whether in-class or out of class. Yes, blocking the facebook while in class makes perfect sense. There is zero reason to make big deal about them reading facebook, wikipedia or random blogs in the evening.
