Our daycare (Montessori school for whatever that's worth) never showed videos, ever. Our very-good-for-our-city and excellent-for-our-state primary school, however, shows them quite a few movies (every indoor recess, for one thing, which... WTF), and puts the kids (yes, even kindergarteners) on the iPad a ton. Our first kid's reading ability actually dropped significantly for a while after the transition, and I largely blame all the "reading practice" in an iPad app that would read the book to the kids at the press of a button. Yeah, very, very few kindergarteners, even ones who are advanced readers, will choose to read over being read to, and being read books that are already under their current reading level (which is another topic) is doing approximately nothing to improve their reading ability.

They also give the kids math practice in a gamified app that nags them to sign up at home for bonuses and to unlock parts of the game—but of course the home version requires a subscription. Yeah, thanks assholes. What happened to just being able to buy edutainment software? That ecosystem weirdly seems less vibrant than it was in the 80s through the early 2000s, which, given the (surely?) massive decrease in development, art, and distribution costs and the huge increase in the market size makes no damn sense to me, and yet, here we are, just a handful of decent apps of that sort that can be purchased outright and even then, they're just OK.

It's shitty, frankly, but it's the trend now so you have to go way out of your way (=upend your life even more than you already are to be near "good" schools) to avoid it.