By Daniel Buck
Screens have grown like kudzu over school classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias. According to an Education Week survey, 55 percent of American students spend between one and four hours of class time on screens, and 27 percent of students spend five hours this way. With roughly 50 million public school students in the country, that means approximately 14 million students walk into their classroom and spend virtually every minute staring at a screen.
They practice math problems on the latest learning app. They read literature online. They log into digital textbooks and answer questions on virtual forms. They turn in assignments on learning-management software systems. They watch videos in history class. They play online games if they finish an assignment early.
From bell to bell, our students are staring at and interacting not with books, classmates, teachers, papers, and pencils but with laptops and tablets. Instead of providing moments of relief from screen addiction, schools are leading drivers of it.
Once upon a time, I confess, I took this approach as an educator. It was convenient. No dogs ate homework. No jammed copy machines inconvenienced my workflow. No papers got lost, nor were books ruined by spills or gum. But one morning, in my tech-friendly classroom, I noticed how quiet it was. Students walked into my classroom as they always did, opened their laptops, and played games.
They should have been cramming together for tests, doodling in pairs, or simply talking, joking, and connecting with one another. Instead, they were silent, cloistered off, and interacting individually with a device. I saw not exciting ed tech progress but a dystopia in my room that day, so I slowly trimmed away the kudzu and instead planted pencils, paper, and books back into my instruction.
The History
The overgrowth of screens into the school day has a history, paralleling how Ernest Hemingway’s character famously went bankrupt: at first gradually, then all at once.
The early 2000s were an era of technological hope in education. In 2001, No Child Left Behind sought to cross “the digital divide by ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade.” To accomplish that, the bill set aside $1 billion to support the integration of technology into all curricula. Moreover, many of the testing regimes No Child Left Behind incentivized were made available online, which meant schools had to get a tranche of new computers to administer the required exams.
Many state policymakers championed one-to-one device policies and new software in the classroom, using Race to the Top federal grants to purchase iPads for children, for example. Many schools even sought to integrate cell phones into the classroom. From 2010 to 2016, the number of schools that had cell phone prohibitions dropped from 90 percent to 65 percent.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. The federal government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars of relief funds, which districts subsequently spent on more computers, software, tech services, and learning apps. Before the pandemic, two-thirds of high schools and 40 percent of elementary schools provided devices to their students. After the pandemic, those numbers leaped to 90 and 84 percent, respectively. Schooling became a virtual experience.
Today, the digitization kudzu has grown over into the home, regardless of whether families embrace or resist it. When all learning occurs online, that inevitably forces screens into households. Students access homework and turn in essays on Google Classroom. Communication and class updates come through software and email. Parents who desire a tech-free home environment have to purchase computers and compromise their own family boundaries because the school has embraced tech.
Ironically, such faith in the promise of new technology to transform education is itself an old concept. In 1841, Josiah Bumstead wrote, “The inventor or introducer" of a certain system "deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind.” His book was The Black Board in the Primary School, and the system of which he wrote was—you guessed it—the blackboard. One-to-one computing, microfilm, televisions, blackboards, radios, slide projectors, iPads and iPhones, calculators, the internet, and now AI chatbots all have had their boosters claiming that this innovation will finally revolutionize education in a way never before seen.
Technology has certainly changed education. But many technological innovations are akin to educational furniture. Administrators, policymakers, and researchers fret about their purchase and effects, and then these innovations sit in the background, becoming the way things are often done without much consideration. Few consider the role that central heating or erasable pencils play in education, though they certainly changed it.
But is schooling transformed? Have we reached the maximum point on the ed tech parabola, or are we now well past it on an interval of decrease?. . . .
Read the full essay here. >>
.png?width=1120&upscale=true&name=TheAmericanEnterprise_test3%20(1).png)
