Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist with a serious case of educational déjà vu, is on a mission to yank the digital pacifier out of our schools' mouths. Riding the wave of global smartphone bans and social media restrictions for the under-16 crowd, Horvath is now setting his sights on the glowing rectangles in classrooms.
A former teacher himself, Horvath claims that screens and digital tools are secretly sabotaging how children learn. “This might be one of the hardest truths our generation has to face,” he writes in his book, The Digital Delusion. “Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. For nearly two centuries, the west experienced steady generational progress. Each new cohort of children grew up, on average, healthier, happier, and better educated than the last. Until now.”
Starting around the year 2000, the cognitive gears seem to have jammed. "Across the west, IQ scores began to fall - even as time spent in school kept rising," Horvath notes. International test scores started to nosedive. His culprit? The "meteoric rise of educational technology."
And it's a big meteor. A recent Department for Education report shows the UK edtech market rakes in about £6.5bn annually. Across the pond, Horvath says it's a $400bn (£295bn) mega-industry, woven into every nook and cranny of schooling.
Horvath is cautiously optimistic about recent bans on entertainment screens, saying, "We've been making some incredible strides on the screen-based childhood stuff which even two years ago, I did not think was going to happen as fast as it did." But he warns, "It's not just about getting rid of screens for entertainment. It's about reducing them as much as possible for academic learning as well if we want our kids to have deep transferrable knowledge in our heads."
The laptop invasion began in earnest in 2010-12, especially in the US where Horvath lives. When Covid hit, schools pivoted to digital as a Band-Aid - "rightly so. Better to have something than nothing." But when the pandemic wound down, "you would assume they'd rip that Band-Aid off, but the vast majority of schools didn't. They just stayed digital." Now, 88% of US school districts have one-to-one computers, and the UK followed suit.
Horvath, who's spent over 15 years studying how people learn, has concluded that "tech is not a very good tool for it." He points to Pisa scores - the Programme for International Student Assessment that tracks 15-year-olds every three years. In 2012, 2015, and 2018, Pisa asked about daily screen use at school. "The more time students spent on screens at school, the further their scores fell," Horvath said. "On average, those who used computers for more than six hours per day scored 66 points lower than their peers who didn't use them at all."
But hold your horses - some experts are waving the correlation-vs-causation flag. Rose Luckin, emerita professor of learner-centred design at the UCL Knowledge Lab, acknowledges Horvath has a point: "It's true that a great deal of educational technology was sold on promises rather than proof. We did not have a huge amount of evidence. But that does not mean that all educational technology is problematic."
She adds a twist: "In terms of that Pisa data, if you look at it on computer use and outcomes, actually moderate school device use is associated with better results than no school device use. It's just that the heaviest daily use is the worst."
Daisy Christodoulou, director of education at No More Marking, agrees we've been "a bit blase" about new tech's impact. "We are seeing across the board now a bit of a corrective, where people are realising that." But she's more optimistic than Horvath about tech and AI in upper secondary. "Screens have not had as big an impact in classrooms in England as in the US. But I feel like there's enough here that we should be thinking about it. I think it's a bit blase to go, 'nothing to see here', move on please'."
Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, sums it up: "Technology may well be harming student achievement but the correlational studies that we currently have cannot support such causal claims." He notes well-designed studies show tech can have positive impacts. "So the question, 'Does edtech have a negative impact on learning?' does not have a simple yes/no answer: sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. The question we need to be asking is, 'when does edtech help learning?' And the answer is, 'it's complicated'."