Jared Cooney Horvath argues that educational technology undermines how children learn and develop<\/p>\n
Jared Cooney Horvath is on a mission. In the wake of global campaigns for smartphone bans in schools and social media restrictions for under-16s, the neuroscientist wants to raise the alarm about educational technology in classrooms.<\/p>\n
A former teacher, Horvath believes the use of screens and digital tools in schools is undermining how children learn and develop. \u201cThis might be one of the hardest truths our generation has to face,\u201d he writes in his book, The Digital Delusion.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age,\u201d he says. \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starting around the year 2000, something changed. \u201cAcross the west, IQ scores began to fall \u2013 even as time spent in school kept rising,\u201d writes Horvath. Scores in international tests started to drop. Why? \u201cThe answer lies in the meteoric rise of educational technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to a recent Department for Education report, the UK educational technology \u2013 or edtech \u2013 market generated an annual turnover of about \u00a36.5bn. In the US, Horvath says it is a $400bn (\u00a3295bn) mega-industry, woven into every aspect of schooling.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve 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,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s not just about getting rid of screens for entertainment. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The uptake of laptops in schools \u2013 especially in the US where he lives \u2013 began in earnest in 2010-12, Horvath said. \u201cIt\u2019s when Covid hit, that\u2019s when every school had to pivot digital as a Band-Aid \u2026 rightly so. Better to have something than nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when Covid finished you would assume they\u2019d rip that Band-Aid off, but the vast majority of schools didn\u2019t. They just stayed digital.\u201d In the US 88% of school districts now had one-to-one computers, he said. In the UK, Covid had a similar impact.<\/p>\n
Horvath has been studying how people learn for over 15 years and has concluded that \u201ctech is not a very good tool for it\u201d. He cites recent scores from the programme for international student assessment (Pisa) which takes place every three years and tracks the academic performance of 15-year-olds across dozens of countries.<\/p>\n
In 2012, 2015 and 2018, Pisa asked students how much time they spent using digital devices during a typical school day. \u201cThe more time students spent on screens at school, the further their scores fell,\u201d Horvath said. \u201cOn average, those who used computers for more than six hours per day scored 66 points lower than their peers who didn\u2019t use them at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others working in the field are concerned about the risks of confusing correlation with causation. Rose Luckin is an emerita professor of learner-centred design at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London and a recognised expert on AI in education.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Horvath] does get certain things right,\u201d Luckin said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIn 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\u2019s just that the heaviest daily use is the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n