Want Less Screen Time in Schools? There’s a Template For That

Smartphone bans. Time limits on screens. Removing devices from young learners. Across the country, school districts are rolling out policies that signal a growing aversion toward the increasing use of technology in classrooms.

For Jared Cooney Horvath, a teacher turned neuroscientist, the fallout has been years in the making. He points to the results of tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and Programme for International Student Assessment from the 2000s to today that show student performance flattening or slipping.

In his updated updated book, “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning–and How to Help Them Thrive Again,” Horvath blames one main culprit for those lackluster scores: the wide adoption of digital technology in classrooms. In the book and in a now-viral Congressional testimony on Jan. 15, he argues that in countries that have widely adopted school-based ed tech, student performance tends to decline rather than improve.

During his Congressional testimony, Horvath argued that Gen Z is the first modern generation to underperform the one before it on key cognitive measures such as literacy, problem solving and creativity. He says the explanation is fundamentally biological.

“It’s not that the tech isn’t being used well enough, we haven’t been trained enough, we need better programs,” he said in the testimony. “It’s that we have evolved biologically to learn from other human beings. Screens circumvent that process.”

Remote schooling during COVID turbo-charged districts’ use of digital tools — and when students returned to classrooms, the technology stayed. Horvath’s book is part research summary, tracing how student performance has stagnated or fallen in recent years. But it’s also part guidebook and call-to-action, giving parents and teachers language, tools and templates to push back against school-based technology.

“Most people, teachers, parents and students … you feel this, you’ve known this, this hasn’t been working, it doesn’t feel right,” he said. “And just know that, yes, you’re correct. The data backs you up.”

Horvath’s arguments have met criticism. Some researchers say his work leans too heavily on correlation rather than causation, and point instead to factors like a youth mental health crisis to explain falling scores. Others argue that Horvath’s claims are too sweeping, and note that there are studies suggesting some benefits of moderate computer use.

Districts are pushing back too. One of Horvath’s suggestions to parents is to have their child “opt out” of digital devices during school time. But some districts say approving opt-outs for hundreds of students, when their curriculum is tightly tied to technology tools, would be too inefficient.

Still, Horvath insists he is not “anti-tech.”

“I don’t care about tech; I care about learning. And if tech can prove to help learning, I’ll be the first one to say, there you go, use that, that’s the best way to do it,” he said. “The problem is … the data just isn’t there, the data is pointing another direction.”

In an interview with KQED’s MindShift, Horvath laid out his perspective and offered concrete steps for parents, teachers and administrators.

“The solution? It’s humanity again. We start reconnecting with each other,” he said. “It’s the only thing we are biologically built to do.”

“It’s okay to be a human being again,” Horvath said.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

How would you suggest breaking up with bad tech from three perspectives: the teachers, parents and administrators?

The best thing you can do as a parent, right off the bat: be analog. Buy a printer. If it’s homework that’s online, print it out. If it’s a reading that’s a PDF, print it out. If it’s a worksheet with math, print it out.

If you want to take it to the next level, there are a lot of parents who are attempting to “opt out.” They’re petitioning their schools to say no to unnecessary tech during the school day. That might be a little harder for some parents in some states.

From the teacher’s perspective, I think the two easiest moves to make are return to pen and paper, note-taking and return to physical paper and textbooks. If you do nothing different with your teaching except have kids looking at paper and writing by hand, learning will go up compared to looking at a screen and typing. If you’re going to use tech in your classroom as a teacher, you drive the tech.

And then, from an administrator’s point of view, you put a moratorium on new tech. You’ve already got enough tech, so do a tech audit on what you already have. What programs do you have? What hardware do you have? What is being used? What isn’t being used? What you’ll see is probably 50% of your tech is just a waste of money. Once you do your audit, you’re going to come out with what people are actually using tech for in your school, and that’s when you can take that next step. That’s when you can run your cost-benefit analysis, ask if it’s benefitting learning enough, and that’s when you can make your final tech decisions.

Are these steps something that people can do tomorrow? Is this something that you see as necessary, first of all, that it could and should be done immediately? Or is it something that can go in phases?

I don’t see any school getting rid of all their tech tomorrow. Before you make your decisions as an administrator, give yourself a year to figure out what’s actually going on before you say, “Here’s what our decisions are going to be.” 

As a teacher, by all means, run little experiments. My favorite thing about teaching is, it’s not a science; it will never be solved. Anyone who’s ever been a teacher knows what worked with Class A is not going to work with Class B, and what worked on Monday won’t work on Tuesday. So, you’re always adjusting; it’s what we do. So, run a little experiment, do a week of what you normally do, and then do a week where we say, ‘I’m going to give you a notebook, and we’re going to take all of our notes, and we’re doing a little quiz at the end of that week.’ And then ask your kids at the end of that week, ‘What do you think is going on with their learning?’ Ask them, what did they prefer, what did they find more confusing, what did they find easier.

The good news is, learning is biological; if you’re alive and breathing and growing, you will learn. The question then becomes, what works best? If we have a finite amount of time, say, 12 years with a kid, what is the best way to push through those 12 years to make sure we can get you where we need you in the strongest possible way? If you’re using tech now, your kids are learning, they’re fine. They’re learning slower than analog kids, they’re learning a little less deeply than what we were doing in the past, they’re learning a little less accurately than what we were doing in the past, but they’re not getting nothing. Don’t think you’re harming your kids right now; it’s just, we can be doing better with the time we have if we think about our resources.

One of the things that was surprising to me in your recommendations to avoid digital citizenship curricula. What is your reasoning for that recommendation?

The digital landscape changes so fast that whatever citizenship aspects you focus on today will almost certainly be obsolete two to three years from now. That’s why most digital citizenship programs to date, they’re focused on programs like, ‘How do you interact with people over chat?’ without realizing that two years later, no one is using chat anymore. Trying to lock down what good citizenship would look like in these contexts is, you’re always chasing; you’ll never catch up.

What’s the right way to do it? You teach human citizenship. You teach actual citizenship and then kids can adapt that to whatever digital world exists when they are out of school. No one ever taught us how to be nice to human beings online. They taught us how to be nice to human beings. And now, when online came, we brought those sensibilities into the world of digital. It’s not about figuring out what are the specific digital moves you have to make, it’s going back to basics. What are the human moves we have to make? 

Is there ever a way to bounce back? Is there ever a way to get our kids back to what we’re truly wanting them to do, which is learn and learn deeply and think critically?

When it comes to tech, you’re not fighting against tech, you’re not fighting against some juggernaut; you’re fighting for something, which is your family, which is your kids’ growth and learning. You want what’s best for them and that just means us coming back together again, going back to similar ways of thinking and interacting, which I think is a wonderful thing.

There are going to be some people who say, ‘I have a kid with a learning disorder,’ or, ‘I have a kid with autism who can’t go to school.’ Remember, something is better than nothing. Everything I’m talking about when it comes to ed tech goes out the window when you remember that something is better than nothing. If you have a kid who cannot speak without a digital tool, a digital tool is the greatest thing that was ever invented, of course. Use it. If your kid cannot interact without a screen present, of course, use the screen. Don’t take this message too far. But the argument is, if you are in a position where you’re lucky enough to have two different options, always select the option that meets your goal better. And if your goal is learning, analog is almost always going to be the better option for that. But if you have circumstances that do not allow you to do that, then by all means, embrace tech, hug it, love it. But that doesn’t mean we all need it all day.

When it comes to the range of ed tech available out there, are there “Sesame Street” versions, meaning a type of ed tech that might be considered “better” for deep learning?

Where would you rather learn the alphabet – Sesame Street, YouTube or human? The question will always become, ‘’does the tech outperform a human teacher doing it?’ Most of the time, that’s going to be no. But within ed tech itself, there are two realms where it’s really powerful, but there are some caveats.

One is what we’re going to call intelligent tutoring, or adaptive tutoring. It asks you a series of questions, and depending how you answer question one, it gives you a harder question or an easier one if you missed it. That seems to be a good way to kind of drill and kill, to get skills up online. The second realm where you see ed tech actually working well is learning disorder remediation. These are kids who are struggling with basic skills – seat them at a computer and drill that skill endlessly. But I think the caveats to that are you can really only drill skills in very finite, limited areas, and those areas basically have right and wrong answers. I think Justin Reich from MIT said it perfectly. He said adaptive tutoring is really good for learning how to read; it’s really bad for reading to learn. You can use it to build the skill, but once you want to take the skill and actually do something with the skill, that’s where tech kind of washes its hands.

What do you say to people who are overwhelmed by this whole issue? There’s so many problems within our education system, and this is just one of many. How do you navigate it?

I actually consider ed tech the lowest hanging, easiest to attack fruit right now in education. There’s a lot of things we could talk about with education that we might want to adjust or change or tweak at a structural level; those things are incredibly difficult to do. But what’s the easiest thing to do is go back to a system that already exists. The good news is, when it comes to divesting from technology, it doesn’t require a new infrastructure; it requires going back to the infrastructure that’s already there. If you’ve already built train tracks all around the U.S., then you move to cars, and then one day you decide we don’t need cars anymore – good news; we never ripped up the train tracks. They’re still sitting there, we’re good to go.