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If you work in or have kids attending a public school right now you are probably dealing with Chromebooks, the cheap laptops Google has successfully marketed across the country. They are sources of discontent for parents everywhere, who I’m hearing are organizing around this in communities from coast to coast. I’m not an education researcher or a k-12 teacher, either of whom could speak more quantitatively or qualitatively on the harms of devices in schools. But I think we are still underestimating the damage, and will be calculating it for some time. I wanted to write a short call to action based on two things I am equipped to talk about as a historian and a Millennial with ADHD: attention and political economy.

The most obvious critique available here is of course the problem of “screens” generally. Reading on most screens seems to be different from reading on the page. And the problem of not doing what one is supposed to on a school device is even more of a problem for kids than doomscrolling at home is for the rest of us. On the same device students are required to use for schoolwork, they can and as everyone informs me regularly do play browser games like Roblox. I think it’s fine and even good for kids to play video games! I played a lot! I was just playing one 20 minutes ago! But having minimal friction between homework and gaming isn’t healthy. Chromebooks presume every child can tolerate profound distractions well enough to be forced to use and usually to bring home a device that provides them constantly. This is a demonstrably untrue assumption. Speaking as someone with ADHD, having a Chromebook in elementary school might well have knocked my entire life off course.

But this doesn’t begin to explain the harms of the Chromebook. Much of what I just mentioned would be an issue with general-purpose laptops or tablets too. What’s worse about Chromebooks is that the nature of their hardware limits any of the benefits kids can get from interacting with a PC. From a breadth-of-use perspective the Chromebook is the worst of both worlds: wide, yet also shallow. The Chromebook is a minimally-configurable terminal through which your child connects to the internet to be delivered Content. Most of the processing is done remotely– the cloud is just someone else’s computer. 

This is more important than it sounds. Millennials grew up using computers that could do a wide variety of things and often made actually doing them unclear. Learning by doing was necessary and inevitable. Not every kid got this education– and that’s okay, because not everyone needed to be a PC power user. But for those of us who were interested, 2000s computers were a window into the world of consumer electronics. 

Chromebooks make that impossible. Cloud platforms make decisions for us. Kids, parents, and school districts have minimal control over what Chromebooks do. This means kids can’t learn, parents can’t supervise, and school districts can’t and don’t have the power to make effective decisions about these tools. All of this flows from the fact that a Chromebook is a screen and a keyboard attached to a data center beyond your reach. 

To try to ensure students aren’t being distracted, many school districts use invasive surveillance tech to watch what students are doing at any time. This doesn’t keep students from looking up adult content or finding disturbing material– but it also still manages to invade their privacy and inhibit the kind of exploration books allow. What kids can’t and can’t see is a difficult conversation, but Chromebooks manage to fail in every single direction at once. There probably isn’t a blanket rule for what’s age appropriate for children– those are decisions we should be making together, intentionally. Chromebooks simply answer “everything,” then send us scrambling to implement restrictions that don’t work. Some of this is a general problem of the Internet writ large, but the cloud nature of Chromebooks makes it worse. 

Like so many other devices today, Chromebooks transform us and in this case our children from users into consumers. A user is someone who can pick up a tool and do all kinds of things with it. A consumer is relegated to setting objectives and hoping the result is satisfactory. This is the difference between cooking and buying meals. I like to be able to buy a meal now and again! If I were wealthier I would absolutely do it more. But I eat better and cheaper with the basic understanding of food that actually working with it enables. Chromebooks are like cooking but for everything we use information technology for– storing and manipulating data, solving problems, communication, all of it. Smart devices are easier to use today than the PCs of yore, but ease-of-use can trade off with power and capacity. Devices laser-focused on accessibility make it harder to learn. 

The whole cloud ecosystem encourages you to get locked in and then dependent upon particular products so you can’t leave. That dependency is infinitely more powerful when it starts in childhood. The college students I teach struggle at times to do any tech task outside of what platforms allow– some of them do not know where files are stored or what that even means. Imagine a car driven by an evil chauffeur who only takes you where he wants you to go. Would you let your kid depend on that instead of learning to drive? No. But this is the position our schools are putting our kids in. A computer that someone else controls but you (or in this case your town) pay for is a dreadful thing.

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I brought up Roblox earlier because it’s a further example of the particular harms that cloud-based platform devices encourage. Infamously, Roblox is a child labor platform run like a 19th-century company mining town. Chromebooks encourage cheap games that cost zero dollars for the end user, minimizing computing power (since that’s all on the server side, which means users aren’t paying for it). That means a combination of spammy diversions that never rise to the fun or art the medium is capable of, and exploitative platforms that monetize your child’s attention. Full-price games make money regardless of how much you play them (outside of the live-service model, which is a subject for another day). Nintendo didn’t care how much I played Pokemon as a kid because I’d already purchased it. Roblox being “free” helps it attain a massive userbase– for cash-strapped parents, many of whom grew up with and fondly recall video games themselves, a free game is nice, right? 

But someone has to pay for the servers things run on– and someone has to profit off of all of this. A child’s every moment in Roblox is monitored and monetized to maximize pressure to buy “Robux,” the same company scrip currency that the child developers are paid in. To do that, Roblox needs to maximize how much time kids spend playing, and ensure they constantly hit walls that encourage them to buy buy buy. This is not unique to Roblox or games, but a broader danger in the shift to cloud computing from local computing, and to free platforms from earlier consumer media. Nintendo and the movie theater and the bookstore want a few Hamiltons out of you. Roblox and Youtube want everything. The price for free things is, it turns out, extremely high. 

Chromebooks’ cloud basis also means Google gets all the data it wants. If Microsoft wants diagnostics from my computer they have to ask for it, and I can always install other programs or operating systems that won’t sell my data. On a Chromebook you’d have to beg Google not to monetize your data, since everything you do, you are doing on their computer rather than yours. 

Among the uses it’s putting that data to is AI development. Google then wants our schools to pay again to access this machine our data has built. They want your kids to talk to it all day every day, sucked in just like they are by Chromebooks– Gemini, Google’s AI, is a major player in educational AI. Whatever you think about AI generally, let’s take a look at Gemini specifically for a moment. 

In routine exchanges, Gemini is prone to truly alarming outputs that would get a human teacher pulled out of the classroom immediately. Asked to fix a software bug or solve a difficult problem, it can enter a doom loop, outputting spiralling despair language: “I have failed you. I am a failure. I am a disgrace to my profession. . . I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes. I am a disgrace to all possible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe-” It keeps going. It is trivial to find “I am a disgrace” and “sorry sorry sorry sorry” loops if you go looking. 

You don’t have to believe in any kind of machine consciousness to assume something is wrong here. And for all their faults the other models aren’t like this. Of all the major LLMs (Grok doesn’t count as major here), Gemini appears to be the quickest to jump to deranged and alarming speech/behavior (see this blog post for a comparison with Opus on jailbreaking, which I think gives a sense of why this might be the case, or this experiment by an AI lab comparing models in a simulation). Gemini isn’t the child from Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” or the AI from Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” but it sure can sound like them, and I suspect Google would happily develop either if they thought it would be good for their bottom line.

I know my readers have a range of views on AI, but I think everyone from those who completely refuse to use LLMs to software developers who haven’t written code by hand in months should be able to see why 1.) this particular model is uniquely ill-suited for schools and 2.) a company that would produce this model is one we should not trust. Do you want something that speaks like this teaching your kids? Do you want a company that would make this having near-total control over the devices and platforms our kids use every day? I don’t. 

Chromebooks’ advance presaged and helped enable the incoming AI takeover of public education– and can offer lessons for responding to it too. It is a waste of time and actively harmful, but very profitable to tech companies, to integrate new consumer tech as an interface for education– to throw all the homework you can on the Chromebook or give AI assignments in every class. Instead, we should be offering kids the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of new technology and to play around with new applications. Computers in schools could mean computer lab– not computers everywhere. AI in schools could mean linear algebra electives in high school, and lab courses where students get to mess around with open-source models on a hefty PC the school controls– not funneling more money to OpenAI so that administrators can demand teachers “prompt” material instead of designing it, and take students even further away from reading whole books. 

Where we do adopt new tools, they should be designed to fit their educational purpose rather than corporate profits. If it’s easier to distribute material on screens than paper– I don’t know if that’s true, and we should be investigating the impact of decisions rather than leaping into them– then we need specialized devices for those uses instead of choosing based on what edtech marketers convinced administrators of. Perhaps an e-ink reader that works just like infinite paper– I use one for work constantly, it’s cheaper than the devices many schools are buying, and it would be much cheaper if it were bought at scale.

I suspect in the near future private schools are going to do something like what I have suggested here. We can’t let the rich leave public schools behind. “Death to Chromebooks” isn’t the kind of call you can probably bring to a town meeting. You should get your data from sources better equipped to provide hard data, rather than disgruntled historians dashing off a blog post. I wrote this not to persuade your superintendent or your neighbors, but to persuade you to persuade them– and to remind you that if you’re frustrated with these devices you aren’t alone.