The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech in Schools

Sophie Winkleman lays out the reasons why screen-based schooling is interfering with education and harming children’s development

Intro by Jon Haidt:

I first met Sophie Winkleman when I was in London last April to speak about The Anxious Generation. She was selected to introduce me in the House of Commons, and I soon discovered that she has been a major force making the case for rolling back the phone-based childhood in the UK.

She has been writing and speaking about the risks of the screen-based childhood in outlets across the UK media landscape, from The Times to The Telegraph. More recently she has turned her attention to educational technology and the mounting evidence that computers and tablets on students’ desks are interfering with their education because the distraction effects almost always outweigh whatever educational benefits were promised.

Sophie’s voice is particularly compelling for two reasons. First, from her involvement as a patron of the educational charity School-Home Support she has seen firsthand in many schools how badly children learn on screens. I am hearing from more and more parents and teachers who think the same. And as a college professor, I am one of those teachers. I banned the use of all screens in all of my classes at New York University several years ago, because it became clear that many college students can’t stay present in class when there’s a laptop or phone on their desk. I don’t see how we can expect eight-year-olds to do it.

Second, Sophie is also a well known British actress, having played many roles in theater, movies, and television. So when Sophie speaks, she speaks beautifully. Sophie was invited to give a lecture last week at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, in London. Her talk is just 20 minutes long, and it is to my mind the best talk I’ve ever seen on what computers and tablets on the desktops of children do to the child’s education. When I saw the video of the talk, I knew that I had to share it with the After Babel community. I hope you’ll watch the video and share it with other parents and educators. We also provide a full transcript of her talk below.

— Jon

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Transcript, written by Sophie Winkleman

I’m going to start with a slender anecdote, totally true, from about four weeks ago.

It was early evening, and I was on a packed 19 bus in London, standing over a young man and a young woman. They were sitting beside each other, both gazing at their smartphones. Nothing unusual about this of course.

They were both attractive, smartly dressed, professional-looking, around the same age. Willfully invading their privacy, I subtly angled myself to see what they were up to on their phones. They were each on dating apps, reading the profiles of men and women who presented as extremely similar to the two of them. Our bus reached Piccadilly Circus and both happened to alight at this stop.

I watched the two of them as they walked away from each other, one towards Shaftesbury Avenue and the other towards St James’s.

I don’t need to labour the point of what I witnessed with this couple never-to-be. They were side by side, both seeking companionship or love but they didn’t even register each other’s existence.

Social media is described as a great connecting force. And it can be a wonderful thing. But when we stop noticing people in our immediate surroundings in favour of the swirling masses online, I don’t think of it in quite such a warm, fuzzy glow.

Whether it’s my young couple from the bus, teens alone in their bedrooms glued to hours of futile or dangerous rubbish, parents scrolling on their phones while their babies try in vain to catch their eye or toddlers given Siri voice companions in nurseries, none of these newly acquired habits seem to bode well for our spiritual flourishing.

The disintegration of adult society and the loneliness of our elderly population is bleak enough, but the digital destruction of childhood is a crisis we must face if we’re to have an alliance of remotely functioning citizens, let alone responsible ones.

I first became interested in the topic of screens and children a few years ago when I was made patron of the education charity School-Home Support. I visited schools up and down the country and too often I saw children distracted in classrooms yet silent in playgrounds.

Screens were taking their attention away from their teachers during lessons and away from each other during break time. I also observed children in general becoming a different species - the raucous exuberance of youth was being replaced with an anxious, irritable insularity which was disturbing to see.

From a personal point of view, I know that if I’d had devices, in and out of the classroom, I would have bombed academically. I’d have been constantly distracted, thrilled by all the garbage available online, I wouldn’t have read any books, and I’d have got up to God knows what on my various machines. Our household landline was quite derailing enough.

Looking back, I cherish the analogue form of education that I received and the human connection with my beloved teachers; it’s been the greatest gift of my life, and I want all children to be able to focus, to acquire knowledge and to achieve their maximum potential. I think that should be every civilised society’s aim.

But the evidence shows we have already put this gravely at risk. We left the doors to our children’s classrooms, their bedrooms and their minds wide open to the world. Perhaps we thought we were giving children the right to access everything which might be good out there, but instead we’ve given everyone else — the good and the bad — access to our children.

Let’s consider some facts and figures: As illustrated in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, “the great rewiring of childhood” is causing a plague of mental illness in our children.

In the decade up to 2020, the suicide rate for younger teens increased by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. Hospital admissions for children with eating disorders in the UK have risen sixfold in a decade, the “contagious influence” of social media cited as a major factor.

And 2022 saw a 500% increase of self-harming among teens over the past nine years. In a British study last year researchers found that one in three children are now short-sighted.

Myopia is predicted to affect nearly a billion children around the world by 2050.

Too much screen time is the culprit, with blue light harming developing eyes, not to mention interfering with children’s hormones and sleep rhythms. Spending time outside can be preventative for myopia, yet screens suck children indoors more than in any previous generation.

Recently, the technology regulator Ofcom reported that a quarter of British children under the age of seven have a smartphone, increasing to 97% of 12-year-olds. This mass buy-in to smartphones is resulting in a lost and deeply damaged childhood, with screen addiction displacing every wholesome activity you can think of.

As Douglas Gentile puts it: time spent on screens is time not spent elsewhere.

A healthy childhood should involve lots of free fun: drawing, running, reading, writing stories, make-believe, kicking a football around, even just staring out of the window and wondering – these are all halcyon images in a sepia tint because they scarcely happen anymore.

Health Professionals for Safer Screens, recently issued guidance stating that 11 to 17 yr olds should have no more than 1-2 hours’ screen time per day – this includes everything – iPads, school laptops, smartphones – it’s all just screen time to the brain. And yet, children aged 8-18 are, on average, spending seven and a half hours per day on screens – outside of school hours.

Out and about, the reality is starkly visible: the number of toddlers subdued by screens on public transport when they’d be perfectly happy looking at the strangers around them, the dogs on leads, the opening and closing doors is, to my mind, tragic.

This unthinking crossover from the analogue to the digital is resulting in heavily impaired speech, cognitive development and emotional regulation. How will children so constantly but artificially stimulated ever learn to think, imagine, create or just be still? Short answer – they won’t.

Excessive consumption of screen-based technologies is damaging developing brains in ways too seismic yet to fully comprehend.

The battle on the smartphone front is being waged with ever more power thanks in no small part to Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt – who've established that the harms of a front-facing camera, addictive social media platforms and 24/7 dopamine ignition are incontestable: from the damage to focus, to self-esteem, to deep thinking, to the ability to read books, to be patient, to sleep well, to interact healthily in real life, to think of others as opposed to one’s own ‘brand’, to pure opportunity cost – the list is relentless.

And these harms are at the more minor end of the spectrum - the enhanced facilitation of knife crime, the enticement to radicalisation and terrorism and the repulsively violent porn - these horrors are globally recognised, yet still readily available on children’s phones.

Law-makers around the world are taking action to limit social media for the Under 16s, bravo Australia for taking the first stand.

All civilised countries will surely follow suit, as a matter of urgency – in a fashion which protects children without impeding and controlling adults’ freedoms.

And this is important - adult freedom and child safety can and must be symbiotic.

Some parents do everything in their power to mitigate screen harms at home, but then their children go to school and experience hours of screen-time in the guise of educational technology or ‘EdTech’.

Whether that’s in the form of iPads and Alexa voice buddies for nursery school children, learning systems like PowerSchool in primary school, or GoogleClassroom on secondary school devices, who has proven that this deluge of screen education is what’s best for children?

No one has.

If we step back and view this state of affairs through a compassionate lens it’s fairly understandable – let’s wave aside the fact that only 7% of UK EdTech companies have conducted randomised controlled trials and just 12% have used third party certification – let’s put aside these pesky facts — at the beginning these products seemed futuristically exciting.

Well-intentioned schools spent fortunes buying and implementing the latest software and trained their teachers in how to use it. And some of the tools like No More Marking have been helpful for teachers.

But we now have better data on how tech is impacting pupils, so we must press pause and, in many cases, rewind.

The Karolinska Institute in Sweden recently published research concluding that, ‘there’s clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning’. Sweden has taken note and been the first country to kick tech out of the classroom, re-investing in books, paper and pens. They had the courage to admit that EdTech was a ‘failed experiment’.

Bill Gates himself has said that devices have a lousy record in the classroom. Mark Zuckerberg went to a tech-free school in Boston. Steve Jobs didn’t let his own children use iPads. Many Silicon Valley titans send their children to the tech-free Waldorf School of the Peninsula.

Unesco says ‘moderation’ should be the key word relating to tech use in the classroom. The OECD found that most EdTech ‘has not delivered the academic benefits once promised’, and that ‘students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes’.

Global test scores in maths, science, and reading are plummeting.

I’ve spoken to teachers in British state schools who’ve acknowledged that classroom tech has hampered the progress of many of their pupils and the huge boom in tutoring among private school children points to the fact that they’re not learning well in school either.

So why are we getting so overexcited about EdTech over here in Britain? Why are we outsourcing executive function skills to a computer? Why are we allowing exam boards to take every subject online by 2030? All the emerging research should generate a pulling up of the drawbridge rather than the open-armed embrace we’re seeing.

There’s currently talk of AI being pumped into our classrooms with children’s data being harvested ‘to better improve the AI’. Why?!

The fact that AI will soon outperform humans in many areas means that schools should be backing away from the neurological junk food of digital learning,

alert to the fact that it's counterproductive to learn on one instantly ageing system, and teaching their pupils the deeply human skills which AI will have a harder time replicating.

The skills of reading about and getting to grips with the human condition, empathy, concentration, eloquent and humorous discussion and creative expression.

The neurology specialist, Cristina Koppel, explains that the brain is like a muscle which needs to stay fit with sustained focus and deep thought; online learning encourages a short-circuitry which damages the mind’s ability to focus, rendering it flabby, needy and easily distracted. Reading a book in contrast to all the stimulation, bells and whistles of a tablet then feels like a leaden, demanding and deeply unattractive prospect.

The standard defences of ‘convenience’ and ‘having to be au fait with the modern world’ are crumbling as progress rates dive downwards; plus digital literacy is a very different beast from digital dependency and atrophy – the literacy can be taught in IT lessons without contaminating every other subject.

Easy questions such as:

• Why is cutting and pasting some information from Google into a PowerPoint superior to reading a passage in a well-researched textbook and handwriting a response?

• Why is homework listed on Teams better than jotted down in a paper homework diary?

• Why is digitally transporting a child to the Egyptian pyramids better than the child imagining it?

This kind of jazz-hands immersion as an engagement tool doesn’t work – it negates the need to imagine, rendering the pupil a passive rather than an active learner.

Parents ask these questions but they do not get answers.

As educational psychologist Dr. Jared Horvath has said, “The question isn’t ‘What’s the best way to take arsenic?’ but ‘Should we be taking arsenic in the first place?’”

There’s even no consensus that interactive smart-boards are safe - they’re insanely bright, they’re radiation-emitting and they’re simply not as effective as a teacher writing out what is in that second being explained on a black or whiteboard.

Yet we seem to be marching into a world where screens are replacing books.

EdTech companies are relentlessly flogging their wares to schools – very successfully too, the business of EdTech is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars – teachers are having to submit to the new normal and as mentioned, exam boards in Britain are threatening to go online for all subjects, which effectively forces the hand of the whole profession at once.

So where is all this coming from?

If, like social media, EdTech is not in fact in the best interests of the children but of the people who make the products, shouldn’t we step back rather than gallop ahead?

Emily Cherkin, former teacher now Screentime Consultant, calls EdTech ‘Big Tech in a school uniform’.

Yet the British government has committed to the high-speed rollout of AI experiments which could mean a future where children learn via screens, directed by AI.

Surveillance will intensify to track pupils' progress. Classrooms will be filled with cameras and listening devices. Voice recognition devices and chatbot tutors are already being piloted for classrooms.

Why?

Children who have their eyes on the teacher at the front of the classroom learn better than they do from a screen. Why is the rush to remove human beings from the learning experience so lauded?

Why is it considered progress to render ourselves obsolete?

There must be a hidden incentive beneath these plans because all those multiple millions should be spent on teachers – more of them, more training, more recruitment, more retention.

This rollout has implications far beyond learning and children’s wellbeing too - it threatens privacy, liberty and democracy – perhaps that’s where the incentive lies.

I say ‘no way’ to all of this.

No way for the reasons above and no way from a learning point of view.

Text has been clinically proven to be more profoundly absorbed from a page in a book than it is from a screen, and handwriting installs learned information into the brain more effectively than cutting, pasting, swiping and typing.

Reading books and handwriting work is a deeper, not to mention a calmer, way to learn. Screens manage to be both caffeinating and numbing – where books are decompressing and absorbing.

Reading and handwriting are also harder, in a good way. Friction and struggle are a necessary part of the learning process. Make everything too easy and it’s like feeding ten-year-olds puree when they need to chew.

Hearteningly, members of the teaching profession are pushing back. David James, deputy head of a leading independent school, says ‘the most powerful learning tool in the classroom is an excellent teacher, and the most effective way to ensure children progress is to teach them to read and write effectively.

A screen can be a distraction, an obstacle to learning in a way which a book, paper and pen never are’. Certainly, the schools I’ve visited where tech is used in moderation as opposed to trigger happy abandon are far more successful in terms of student attainment and well-being.

Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School is one of the most triumphant schools in Britain. The children are discouraged from using devices, in and out of school, the lessons are taught by passionate teachers who quiz the children on the facts and figures in every subject. The lessons are electrifying, the school is calm and organised, the children happy, self-disciplined and hungry for knowledge.

Katharine is known as Britain’s Strictest Headmistress but on visiting the school it quickly transpires that she’s Britain’s most loving headmistress – these children are given every possible tool they need for incredibly successful lives.

Another oasis of screen-free education is to be found at the Heritage School in Cambridge. Jason and Fiona Fletcher’s haven of focus, serenity, classical intellect, Christian heritage, nature, art and beauty is a profoundly effective learning space – again, it would not be possible if the classrooms were filled with screens.

To build on this movement we need both a parental revolution and government cooperation. Firstly we must employ tech as our slave rather than our master. Our use of it has to be intentional, specific and moderate.

Secondly we need transparency about how much is being spent on EdTech compared with what’s being spent on teachers.

We must drastically reduce the presence of screens and technology in our classrooms, and smartphones should be permanently excluded from the school day, ideally from children’s lives altogether.

We should empower parents with a right to Opt Out of classroom tech in favour of paper and pen. We should inspire generations of children to love, honour and cherish books. To conclude, if we want to produce a generation of responsible citizens, we must flip the argument on its head.

Rather than constantly having to prove that screen use is blighting childhood, we should ask simply: where's the evidence to prove that it’s safe?If we take these brave steps, I believe we can veer away from catastrophe, return childhood to our young and light the way to a hopeful future.