Our schools’ test scores are lower than ever. Cell phones are not completely to blame, though many schools have started to ban them. We can’t fully blame AI, since the slide predates that technology and its baleful effects are just starting to click in, though many schools are perversely trying to incorporate AI. The problem seems to have started with the laptop computer, which schools have pretty much universally adopted.
So says neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath in his new book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning — And How To Help Them Thrive Again.
The Free Press has published an excerpt under the title We Gave Students Laptops and Took Away Their Brains, with the deck, “Decades of data show a clear pattern: The more schools digitize, the worse students perform.”
The piece starts with a grim fact (his italics): “Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” For the last two hundred years, Horvath says, human beings have been growing more and more intelligent. In the 20th century, each generation scored an average of six points higher than their parents.
But starting around the year 2000, something changed. For the first time in the history of standardized cognitive measurement, Generation Z is consistently scoring lower than their parents on many key measures of cognitive development—from literacy and numeracy to deep creativity and general IQ. And the early data from Generation Alpha (born after 2012) suggests the downturn isn’t slowing—it’s accelerating.
According to Horvath, “The culprit lies in the meteoric rise of educational technology.” He cites studies showing that the more time a student spends on a screen, the lower their test scores are. The effect shows up globally, in both wealthy and poor nations, and in virtually all subjects: math, science, reading. “The more screens children use at school, the lower achievement falls.”
Why is this? Horvath says it has to do with the way the brain works and how it organizes information. For example:
Much like a global positioning system (GPS), the hippocampus (our brain’s memory center) builds a continuous mental map of the world around us. And each time we learn something new, that memory becomes tied to a specific three-dimensional location within that map.
When we read from paper, each word occupies a fixed, physical location. If you’re reading a printout of this piece right now, this sentence exists right here—and this spatial position becomes part of the memory you’re forming. This is why readers often remember where in a book an idea appeared, even if they can’t recall the exact wording.
Digital text has no such stability. If you’re scrolling through this piece on your computer or phone, then this sentence first appeared at the bottom of your screen, is now sitting near the middle, and will soon vanish out the top. With no fixed location for ideas to attach to, the spatial scaffold that supports memory collapses.
As a result, reading from screens often triggers an unconscious shift from deep comprehension to shallow skimming—glancing, scrolling, and extracting instead of truly learning.
What can be done about this? Horvath offers some fixes that are simple and some that are harder.
First, buy a printer. Reading, writing, note-taking, homework, practice problems—these all work better on paper. If families embrace this simple shift at home, it becomes far easier for schools to follow suit.
Second, allow students to opt out of ed tech. Thanks largely to the pandemic, an estimated 88 percent of U.S. public school districts now issue laptops or tablets to students. While these devices make it easier for teachers to collect assignments and generate reports, they have been shown to significantly undermine student learning. Administrative convenience should never come at the cost of cognitive development. . . .
Third, demand evidence. . . .Whenever a school announces a new digital tool, ask for independent, replicated research showing it improves learning. If the data doesn’t exist (or comes only from vendor-funded studies), the tool isn’t ready for classrooms.
I’m sure the book goes into more detail about all of this. I question whether screens are wholly to blame. There is also the mindset in contemporary educational philosophy that has so eagerly embraced educational technology. And that is oblivious both to the lack of evidence supporting it and the abundance of evidence that shows that it doesn’t work.
There is also the decline in educational content and the dumbing down of the curriculum. And the effects of postmodern relativism and the politicization of the classroom, both of which also started to dominate children’s education around the year 2000.
I’m interested in what Horvath says about the difference in reading a paper book and scrolling on a screen. But notice the metaphor. “Scrolling.” Reading on a “scroll.” The ancients too read this way–in which a “sentence first appeared at the bottom of your screen, is now sitting near the middle, and will soon vanish out the top”–as they unrolled a scroll. Those who read from scrolls usually read out loud, which perhaps mitigated the neurological problem of the “mental map.”
At any rate, this would be another example of what we blogged about earlier, that “advanced technology makes us more primitive.” But that didn’t prevent the ancients from giving us an intellectual foundation to build upon.
I suspect that losing that foundation is what has caused us not just to turn to screens but to turn from learning altogether.
Photo via PickPic, Public Domain
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