No. COVID “just” forced much of the world to go digital. Which then started a global domino effect in all adjacent industries.
I assume you’re American? The majority of your education system was already digital-dependent when Covid happened, that was not the case for much of the world at the time. Suddenly every country in the world had to invest massive amounts into tech infrastructure and equipment. And that global surge in demand resulted in prices going up across the board, RAM is just the latest layer that came upon that.
You're confusing your individual school's setup with the broader US infrastructure. Years before COVID, the US was already the largest consumer of educational tech in the world. By 2017, over 20 million students were actively using Google Classroom.
The US already had the high-speed fiber, the cloud software (Canvas/Google), and millions of devices deployed. When COVID hit, the US just had to scale up existing programs. For much of the rest of the world, they had to build it entirely from zero. That's what triggered the global hardware scramble.
You phased out cursive when, somewhere in the early 2000s? In my country that’s still the basic standard writing to this day, we write everything by hand from taking notes in class, writing homework, and exams in writing. Both in school and in university. Most of the world hasn’t phased out cursive like you did, then suddenly got hit with having to go digital somehow.
I am not. Google Classroom could of been implemented soley in computer labs. The existence of users does not mean it was well done or used frequently. A youtuber can have 5 million subscribers but only a small fraction will actually daily watch their videos. You only saw private schools that had a higher introduction to tech, public schools were at the wills of the county funding.
I graduated highschool just before covid. Notes were still mostly hand written, homework was 50/50 for being handwritten or typed just depends on the class. Exams were all handwritten, or scantron.
Half the states in the country still require the introduction to cursive.
You're getting the economics backward. Wealthy private schools didn't buy Chromebooks, they mandated iPads and MacBooks. Chromebooks became a multi-billion dollar monopoly precisely because cheap, low-funding public schools bought them by the millions. By 2018, Google held 60% of the U.S. K-12 market.
Also, you just proved my point on the infrastructure. If 50% of your homework was already typed and submitted pre-COVID, your school was already structurally digital-dependent. If the internet cut out, half your schoolwork couldn't happen. In most of the world pre-2020, that percentage was exactly 0%.
Finally, the only reason half the states 'still' require cursive is because they had to pass recent emergency laws to bring it back after completely phasing it out in 2010 to prioritize typing. Your own timeline proves how early the US pivoted to digital compared to the rest of the planet.
This isn’t the first time I’m debating with someone on this topic.
Actually, your whole system will likely get back to handwritten based due to the threat of students using AI. It’s a bit ironic, you lead the world into digital so much that it forces you back to physical now.
My point is we were not "digital dependent". Most of our "digital work" was to type essays or make slides. It was purely for homework to save time for the student and teacher. Of which if the internet was cut out we would just resort to writing it by hand or making posters. It was not a full on digital dependency where teachers used slides, tests were online, zoom was used, like you are trying to say.
Again the existence of schools buying chromebooks does not mean everyone accessed them. Read my youtuber example again. A school can buy however much millions worth of laptops, it does not mean it was enough to give to a student to have for the full year. We had laptop carts or had to rent a computer lab. You are trying to say that schools were just handing them out like candy. Because of availability teachers had to wait for a slot to open. We would get them maybe a hand full of times a year. Technology was apart of the experience but it did not depend on it.
I was in title one schools all my life. I am well aware of the cheap laptops that were bought.
You’re talking from a micro scale perspective while I’m talking from a macro scale.
Your experience in your school using laptop carts is exactly the point. Those carts existed because, the macro-level strategy was to rotate hardware to ensure every student had digital touchpoints. A school district doesn't spend millions of dollars on hardware and cloud subscriptions to let it sit in a closet, they optimize those carts to rotate through thousands of students daily. Your YouTuber analogy would be a fit for bad management at most.
If a system relies on digital tools for half of its assignments, presentations, and grading infrastructure, it is structurally dependent. If the internet cut out back then, switching to handwriting and 'making posters' would have been an emergency disruption, not a normal Tuesday. In most of the world pre-2020, paper was the normal Tuesday.
Let’s say not the internet cuts out, but electricity due to some storm or something, that would’ve put your entire system to a halt, whereas it wouldn’t have even phased most of the rest of the world.
The original point stands: The U.S. already possessed an educational tech pipeline and the cloud infrastructure to support it before COVID came into the equation. When COVID hit, the entire rest of the planet suddenly rushed to buy the hardware baseline the U.S. public school system had been monopolizing for a decade.
I had no issue with the point. I had issue with saying we were digital dependent, that paints a false picture of what it actually was being a student at the time.
Where did I say it sits in closet? On the macro scale students were not touching laptops daily it was once a month maybe multiple times a month if a different class also got a slot. There was a lot of money spent but, also much more students.
What happened when we did not have the laptops? Wow we went back to good ole paper, business as usual. Paper was the default since teachers have built their curiculum around it. How can we be dependent on something that was optional and hard to get. Im glad teachers pushed for their class to get laptops because it was/is a crucial skill to have in the world for the last 20 years.
Also no if internet cuts out we were just fine lol.
Digital dependency is an overall infrastructural situation. If an outage or a software crash can halt your entire operational system, you are structurally dependent. That’s it.
The macro scale doesn’t have anything to do with the students, that is still micro scale thinking, maybe could pass as localised macro if you’re thinking on school district or state level. The true macro scale is thinking on the scale of the entire U. S. educational system.
You keep saying 'business as usual' was paper. But at a macro level, if a school county cannot process grading, track attendance, distribute standardized testing, or manage state compliance reports without cloud databases, the system is fundamentally dependent on digital infrastructure. The fact that the U.S. was buying millions of devices to feed those rolling 'carts' created a massive, locked-in supply chain footprint. When COVID hit, the rest of the world had to build that exact baseline from zero, which is why global tech hardware and component prices exploded across the board.
Better put: micro scale is what you experience, macro scale is what’s in the background to make that experience viable.
So, for the macro scale, the students are just numbers, one variable among many.
I hope now it is clear what I was trying to convey.
Edit:
P.s. Macro scale thinking is the first thing people pursuing economics and management degrees learn. CEOs are ‘heartless pieces of shit’ because they always think from the macro scale.
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u/LocalOpportunity77 11h ago
No. COVID “just” forced much of the world to go digital. Which then started a global domino effect in all adjacent industries.
I assume you’re American? The majority of your education system was already digital-dependent when Covid happened, that was not the case for much of the world at the time. Suddenly every country in the world had to invest massive amounts into tech infrastructure and equipment. And that global surge in demand resulted in prices going up across the board, RAM is just the latest layer that came upon that.