Are Screens in Schools Sabotaging Your Child’s Mind?

 by Denise Champney

Jonathan Haidt, in his acclaimed book the Anxious Generation, describes how smartphones have caused “The Great Rewiring of Childhood". He outlines how these phones have “interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.”

Simultaneously, we have undergone the “Rewiring of Education”. The alarming amount of edtech being used in schools is having the same damaging impact on children and their education.

A “screen-based education system” is equally, if not more, harmful as the “phone-based” childhood. Screens in schools are interfering with the development of fundamental skills such as reading, writing, math, critical thinking and social/emotional skills. Behind the scenes, the amount of harmful content children are exposed to and data privacy that is being compromised is equally alarming.

While mental health and school performance decline and education cost rise, the edtech market has skyrocketed into the billions and soon to be trillions. The Edunomics Lab has created a great tool that shows the return of (or lack thereof) investment for each state with their education spending since 2013.

Over the past decade, as state spending increased, test scores have declined. With much of that spending leading directly to the pockets of the tech industry, our children are getting the raw end of the deal. As an educator since 1999, I have witnessed first hand how tech has taken over the landscape of schools while destroying childhood and learning. It is apparent to many observers that placing a child in front of a screen for the majority of their school day does not yield positive results. How much more evidence do we really need?

I fear there is too much emphasis on waiting for research to support what we can clearly see and not enough emphasis on all the negative consequences screens in schools create.

Research in theory is great but what happens in the real world is often more nuanced than what a study can replicate, especially when it comes to edtech. That being said, there is minimal research that supports the argument that technology improves learning and in fact there is research that demonstrates the harms. Many studies demonstrate the negative impact of technology on reading comprehension and handwriting, increasing distractibility and multitasking, interfering with social emotional skills and more.

The research that yields positive results often fails to capture the reality of how technology has invaded many aspects in the classroom.

• Can we accurately measure the number of missed social interaction opportunities when a child's attention is diverted to a screen?

• Does a child’s developing brain recognize the difference between educational versus recreational screen time?

• How many hours are kids truly spending on devices at schools when it is being used for breaks, agendas and classwork on top of digital curricula?

• What are the cumulative effects over time when foundational skills are taught through a device?

Collective wisdom, critical thinking and common sense should be enough to realize that handing over a device (made for adults) to a child to use in school is not a good idea. By the time the research reveals the true harms being done, it may be too late.

The costs far outweigh any benefit, yet the tech industry wants you to believe differently.

It is well known that the internet is not a safe place for children. A 2023 study by Common Sense Media revealed that “Nearly one third of all teens reported that they have been exposed to pornography during the school day” and “at least one in four teens indicated that they have seen pornography while at school.” Porn is being viewed at school on school-issued devices and not just by teens, by young children as well.

As a society, we need to ask ourselves if we are comfortable with 10 year olds accessing porn at school as a trade off for the supposed “benefits” that the tech companies would like us to believe exist with edtech.

This should be a deal breaker and we should be up in arms. It is not safe, period.

Take a trip back in time with me and imagine if students in the 80’s were given a giant history textbook that publishers mistakenly added pornography, rather than historical images, on some of the pages. Imagine also that they mistakenly included ads that encouraged children to call various hotlines to meet up with strangers on the glossary pages.

Would administrators have told kids to just rip those pages out when they came across them? Would kids have been told “just ignore those ads, don’t call those numbers”? Would parents have been shamed if their child were caught looking at the pictures rather than ripping them out? I believe that back in the day, the described history textbook would have been recalled and removed from schools.

Ironically, that textbook does exist today and is in the hands of the majority of children in grades K-12. This textbook is called a Chromebook.

While the access to porn should be enough evidence to remove screens from schools, there are other less talked about but equally important negative impacts that are often overlooked.

One such critical skill in childhood that is disrupted by tech is imagination.

Often unrealized, our imagination is a foundation skill, one which many social skills are built upon. Yet this skill is not fostered when gamified platforms are used to teach and entertain children. In fact it is suppressed.

There is plenty of research to support the importance of free play and imagination in child development. Dr. Peter Gray shares his wisdom regarding this topic on his substack, Play Makes Us Human. Free play and imagination go hand in hand, and having a shared imagination is critical for fostering later social skills such as having a conversation. Michele Garcia Winner, founder of the Social Thinking Methodology, writes about it in this article, What Is Shared Imagination & Why Is It So Important to Relationship Development?

Since the shift to a phone based childhood, children are constantly provided with visuals to aid their solitary play on a device. They are also bombarded with visuals while reading from a screen, impeding their ability to develop skills to visualize on their own. Imagination starts as play in young children and turns into visualizing a story in their head while reading or being read to.

For example, think back to a great book that you read before it was made into a movie. For me it is Stephen King’s, The Stand. The characters in that book are so compelling, I actually read it 3 times. I remember the excitement I felt for the TV series in 1994 but once the first episode was released, I was disappointed and annoyed. The problem was that I had visualized these characters along with the story so clearly in my head. The movie I had created and visualized while reading was way better than the one on screen.

The Stand is over 1,200 pages long and I spent hours using the words on the pages to fill my brain with images that were crafted by King. My ability to visualize was developed through years of pretend play as a young child to later reading from books.

Both the right and left side of the brain work together to make this happen. A child’s brain needs opportunity and time, free from a screen to help develop this skill. When technology is inserted into this process, the ability to visualize and imagine is suppressed not enhanced. The cumulative effect is even being felt at elite universities, where college students no longer have the stamina to read as well.

To think critically, one needs to imagine or visualize the information they are receiving and then reflect on it. A shared imagination leads to a shared conversation, so important for healthy dialogue in society. With the rise of social media and the increased polarization of the world, the ability to have conversations with others is even more crucial. Especially conversation with those that share different opinions and beliefs.

The act of imagination to some may seem unimportant, a waste of time. Yet for a healthy democracy to exist, it is an important foundational skill.

There is a reason that the human brain takes time to develop, it is not a process that can be sped up and it should not be disrupted by technology. Just as we do not hand the keys to the car to an 8 year old, or a can of beer to 12 year olds, we also shouldn’t just hand a device that is equally unsafe to children.

With devices securely placed in every student’s hands, there now seems to be a seamless transition to adding AI into the mix. Educators are inundated daily by emails pushing AI tools and products as the next answer to all the problems in schools. There appears to be no guardrails or hesitation on what the negative impacts this unvetted tool could have in schools.

The tech industry is driving the narrative to capture their audience and expand their profits.

In fact, the National Science Foundation is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into research on how to use AI in education. The AI Institute for Inclusive Intelligent Technologies for Education (INVITE) received a nearly $20 million award which “seeks to fundamentally reframe how educational technologies interact with learners by developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools…”. There are a numerous other awards for similar research.

This should be terrifying to those who truly care about preserving the developing minds of the next generation.

We do not have the luxury to wait another 15 years to tell us what we instinctively know, by then it will be too late.

Imagine if the NSF used that money instead for school funding to reduce class size, fill school libraries with actual books, stock classrooms with supplies like pencils, crayons and & paper, update old decaying school buildings, build playgrounds and provide nutritional breakfast and lunches for students.

It’s time to throw a wrench in the works and reverse this trend. We need to prioritize humanity and undo the death grip that big tech has on education by restoring schools and childhood.

After all we are raising humans first, not digital natives.

https://restorechildhood.substack.com/p/digital-danger-are-screens-in-schools