Don't blame technology

Schools are addicted to silver bullet solutions and the public lacks knowledge on learning. We've got nobody to blame but ourselves for the backlash against tech.

Hi there, Bell Ringers—there’s a big backlash against education technology brewing among teachers and parents. They’ve had enough, and with good reason. Today’s newsletter looks at why parents and teachers are revolting, why we are so gullible for silver bullets in education, and what the public should know in order to inoculate themselves from the next time anyone guarantees a total revolution in how humans learn.

Understanding the science on learning is vital public knowledge—it will help schools, governments, and parents make better decisions for kids. Consider becoming a Bell Ringer Pro member to support my mission of making the science of learning something everyone understands.

Don’t blame tech

I have been an edtech skeptic for more than a decade, since the years my sons were knitting koozies for their baseballs while listening to flute music in their Waldorf school—an insane sentence that’s also 100% factually correct.

My son was really into baseball-themed fabric arts. Top picture features his hand-sewn baseballs; bottom picture, a real baseball kept cozy and warm in his hand-knitted koozie.

My argument for sending them to a school that didn’t use screens at all—handwriting every assignment, reading paper books, hanging with fairies, beeswax and woodwinds—was that they were young, and I wanted them to engage in the world of the senses while they were still open to the world. Kids should make art by hand with real paint and crayons, not by swiping on an iPad; play real instruments instead of some stupid beat machine; turn the pages of a real book instead of a Kindle. Technology may be what the future has to be, my husband and I reasoned at the time, but we wanted give them a strong foundation in the real world first.

And we have no regrets—it was an absolutely beautiful way to educate young kids. As they got older, moved to local public schools and got their school-assigned laptops, while still skeptical of the technology, I could see some positives. Simply eliminating “I forgot my homework” from our family lexicon, for example, was a huge win, due to all the homework now being located on the laptop in their backpack, and my sons could not escape.

Other aspects of the technology, including the sheer number of folders and platforms required for a 10- or 11-year-old to use on a daily basis, bordered on the absurd. (“But where is the thing you’re learning?” I’ve yelled in frustration more times than I could count.) Kids also figured out how to get around the learning part of the technology with incredible efficiency so they could play Fortnite or watch March Madness on their laptops in class, and they did.

And that was just the school-issued tech meant for learning; the individual phones were more like a slow-moving nightmare that wouldn’t end. When my middle son attended middle school from 2018-2021, I was so frustrated by the phones but couldn’t feel anything but sorry for the teachers and staff who spent their days not teaching, but breaking up arguments over photos taken without permission; managing exclusionary group chats; chasing down the routine filming and posting of fights; and reporting the sometimes violent social media posts made from inside a classroom during the school day. It’s kind of a miracle, looking back at it now, that anyone learned anything at all.

It’s not just older kids whose learning is being degraded by the strangle of digital tech—parents of very young kids also report too much totally inappropriate screen time at school. Parents of kindergarten- and early elementary school-aged children say their students are spending too much time on tech during the school day when they should be interacting with teachers and other students. Some students are having trouble developing the most basic early childhood social skills due to screen time. “He’s not able to tell he needs to go to the bathroom because he’s sitting there with headphones on for an hour playing these games that are sort of addictive,” Kate Brody told the LA Times about her first grade son’s classroom.

A New York parent told The Hechinger Report that her daughter came home from kindergarten knowing “jingles from diaper and car commercials,” from YouTube videos she wasn’t allowed to watch at home.

And my reporting from last year confirms many of the issues brought up by the viral parent story about i-Ready math.

After more than a decade of this experiment with education technology—with the vast majority of elementary, middle and high schools going fully digital during Covid school closures and never looking back—parents have had enough. Teachers and school leaders are right behind them, and along with scientists and experts, they are all pushing back in a big, coordinated way. They are armed with data and research on the decline of student learning and mental health, but they’ve got big feelings, too. It feels like something’s happening, the rarest of things in today’s world: an organic movement for change.

All this nonsensical screen time has been going on for quite some time—I wrote in The Atlantic about preschoolers and daycare toddlers using iPads at school back in 2013. 2013!—but the environment has changed. Families are rightfully upset at the damage social media companies have done to their children—and some are suing them. The arrival of artificial intelligence into classrooms, which has given more students the opportunity to cheat at even the most mundane learning tasks at unprecedented levels, has genuinely freaked out parents and teachers. Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt’s push to get phones, and now laptops, out of classrooms from kindergarten to college has reached an exhausted but grateful audience and quite a few willing statehouses. They all deeply understand the problem and are ready to hear the solutions.

The problem is so far-reaching it’s even overcoming deep political divides. Moms for Liberty and the Iowa State Education Association teachers union, for example, the strangest of bedfellows, are teaming up to support a bill restricting elementary students’ screen time in school.

It looks like the time has come to return to real textbooks, paper and pencils, and some photocopied worksheets—at least for the youngest students. And I agree that digital devices have largely provided more distraction and more cognitive overload than learning over the last decade.

But if we want to see real improvement in learning, Americans need to heal our own addiction—not to screens, but to silver bullet solutions. Through the 2010s, we were promised a learning revolution from digital technology, that students would learn more than ever before. Yet the vast majority of districts didn’t ask hard enough questions about how those tools were going to support real learning. Too many let themselves believe things about the power of computers—that students no longer needed to know things, for example, now that they had Google—without a serious investigation of the downsides and opportunity costs.

Removing screens now may well improve the learning situation for students by removing an obvious distraction—but we need to be careful not to substitute one silver bullet for another. If the only thing we do is remove screens, it won’t be enough to get all kids learning.

A better solution would be a public understanding of how learning happens in the mind. When teachers understand how learning happens, they have better tools for teaching. Parents can advocate for real learning instead of gimmicks or social advantage (not to mention provide better homework help). Leaders who understand learning science can choose materials that line up with the evidence instead of who has the most persuasive marketing department. Our lack of knowledge on how learning works, from state policy leaders and curriculum providers on down to teachers and parents, is just as harmful to students as screens.

Removing screens is the next silver bullet, and that’s where we are headed.

Understanding how learning works is a vaccine against silver bullets

If the public, including schools and parents, had a general understanding of how students learned, that knowledge could act as a vaccine against the next silver bullet that will try to be sold to us as the answer to everything.

I’m not suggesting that every single citizen understand Willingham’s model of the mind, or be able to discuss the intricacies of assessment and working memory—those details are for practitioners to understand. But if the public could digest a few key ideas, a few simple rules taken from learning science—the education version of Michael Pollan’s easy food rules, “Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—we could all, collectively, better evaluate the next snake oil headed our way. Because we all know there will be more.

Here’s what I think the public should know about the science of learning to make better future decisions and vaccinate us all against silver bullets. Want to spend billions on an initiative intended to “revolutionize” student learning? Then you have to go through the research filter first. Schools with this knowledge could make better decisions. A knowledgeable public could more easily hold schools accountable. It could look something like this:

1. Learning academic material doesn’t come naturally—it takes effort. Learning to walk and talk is hardwired in the human brain; reading and math are not, they must be taught to most young people. Learning can be challenging for students because it often requires a lot of effort on their part, so a knowledgeable teacher who teaches things to students, and who knows how to support them when they struggle with an idea or concept, is of the utmost importance.

2. Most students don’t know much about math, history or science, therefore school should teach them things they probably don’t already know. Schools should stop worrying so much about being relevant and reflecting back to students what they already know, or trying to make students feel like they’re authentic scientists or historians with decades of knowledge and experience. Schools should instead worry more about what kids don’t know about the world, and use the knowledge students already possess to make connections to new worlds, to history and science knowledge they wouldn’t be likely to stumble onto while talking to their friends or scrolling TikTok.

3. Brains only have the capacity to pay attention to so much—the more elements for students to pay attention to, the less learning will stick. Multiple tabs, layers of folders and the constant buzzing of digital notifications, layered on top of what students are supposed to be learning, overwhelms what their brains can pay attention to—but so does constant classroom chaos, vague learning materials, and complicated procedures. Fewer distractions and more explicit and direct teaching facilitates learning.

4. Critical thinking begins with having knowledge stored in your brain—not on Google. Schools were sold a story on digital technology and knowledge—one of ed tech’s biggest selling points was that students no longer needed to learn “boring facts” because they could just Google them and focus on higher-order skills like creativity and critical thinking. But that’s not how knowledge works—critical thinking and creativity depend on knowledge being stored in the brain’s long-term memory.

5. Memorization facilitates more learning. The very popular idea that learning multiplication tables or the 50 states by heart is harmful to the brain’s conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability has it exactly backwards. Research shows that the more students have memorized, or what scientists would call “knowledge stored in long-term memory,” the more room they have to learn something new. For example, if students have memorized their multiplication tables, it’s easier and faster to learn long division.

6. Practice is essential for anything students want to do well, including academics. Like music and athletics or anything, really, a lot of practice is essential to getting good at any school subject. To get really good at book-reading, students should read whole books, for example, or practice writing by writing a lot of essays. Another form of practice can simply be recalling what’s been learned in different ways, in different order, and under different circumstances, which strengthens the memories of what they learned. This means more quizzes and tests, not fewer, and perhaps a little more homework, not less.

Breaking our addiction to silver bullets and embracing the science of learning won’t solve every education problem, of course, and it won’t replace digital tech. But it’s a start.