Get Tech Out of Schools

I n a few years, the greatest disparity in American education won’t be rich versus poor or black versus white but low-tech versus high-tech schools. Affluent families will cough up tuition to secure a school with paper and pencils, in-person discussions, and hard-copy books for their children. Meanwhile, the rest of American children will spend their school days clicking through online learning platforms.

Indeed, surveys find that students already spend at least one hour of class time on screens per day, with 27 percent of students spending five hours staring into Chromebooks and iPads at school. Seeing as the average school day runs for 6.8 hours — if you factor in passing time, lunch, and recess — that means over a quarter of students spend almost the entirety of their instructional time on a device.

Walk into your average public school, and you’ll see something that more resembles a prosaic, stupefaction-by-technology dystopia than actual education. Children spend minutes before the first bell rings, not milling about in the hall, but silently playing online games at their desks. For math, students log into learning software for their daily instruction and practice problems. History, English, and science classes might involve online research, readings, questions, and tests. At lunch and recess, students watch TikTok.

Children spend school days clicking and scrolling, not discussing, reading, writing, or even making eye contact. Algorithms and built-in reward systems prey on students to keep their attention digitized like techno-obsessed Narcissuses staring at their own reflections.

Screen time has filled schools in the same way that Hemingway’s character went bankrupt: gradually and then suddenly. In previous decades, a boost of techno-optimism meant schools adopted one-to-one computing programs and experimented with various learning software and online classroom platforms. Then, a glut of pandemic-era emergency funding allowed schools to go online for good. As Rick Hess has pointed out in these pages, since 2020, for example, Chicago alone has spent $308 million on technology.

But such techno-optimism was misplaced. Radio, TVs, and even erasable writing utensils were all predicted to revolutionize education, and they didn’t. When calculators came around, for example, many argued that students would no longer need to memorize math facts. However, teachers soon discovered that to do more advanced math, students still had to memorize multiplication tables. It’s hard to do calculus when students are busy counting out on their fingers.

This story is repeating itself.

A steady stream of research has found, for example, that students learn better when they take notes by hand precisely because it is a slower, anachronistic process. We write slowly, so handwritten notes force students to think deeply about and synthesize information from the day’s lecture or reading. Also, writing information creates a tactile connection with new knowledge. Conversely, typing is so efficient that we can effectively transcribe everything in a lecture without thinking about it. Similarly, other research confirms that we better learn and retain information when reading on physical books and articles compared with screens, especially for youngsters.

Silicon Valley executives are well aware of the benefits of old-school education. Tech executives regularly send their children to tech-free schools while charging local districts across the country millions of dollars for their products. Similarly, the classical-education sector, known for its reliance on analog materials and avoidance of technology, has seen a boom in recent years. Some credit much of this expansion to parents’ dissatisfaction with watching their children’s education go increasingly online.

Old-school education remains essential. AI can write essays, but to communicate well, students must master the skills they learn through traditional academic essays — culling and citing sources, structuring and organizing thoughts, and clearly presenting and defending arguments. We can watch video lectures on every topic imaginable, but face-to-face Socratic debates are still the pinnacle of intellectual honing. Software might present practice problems with jingles, animations, and general razzmatazz, but nothing beats sitting down and drilling out math facts for homework.

Unfortunately, the technological takeover is likely to continue — first and foremost because it is easy. Screens lobotomize students, lessening the effort required for classroom management. Meanwhile, software can complete lesson planning, instructional delivery, and grading at a fraction of the effort for teachers and cost for district budgets. Moreover, technology initiatives and purchases allow district leaders and administrators to position themselves as innovators and forward-thinkers.

Teachers get off easy. District leaders win favor. Silicon Valley cashes in as schools purchase their software and tens of thousands of computers. As with most things in education, all adults benefit. The only losers are the demographic that education is actually supposed to be about: the students.