Are Screens Ruining Schools?

This post is part of a series exploring Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death chapter by chapter. You need not read the book or previous points to appreciate this one. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, part 6 here, part 7 here, part 8 here, part 9 here, and part 10 here. In this essay, I will respond to Chapter 10: Teaching as Amusing Activity.

Your college graduation day should be a celebration. But Jared’s graduation day felt empty. He confessed to his pastor, “I think it’s because I cheated in every class. I don’t think there was a single assignment, paper, or test I didn’t cheat on in some way. I learned that with AI and Google, I didn’t really need to learn anything. The only thing I deserve a degree in is working the digital system.”

Of course, cheating is immoral, but that’s a topic for a different post. For our purposes, we must confess that Jared’s confession was deeply insightful about the purpose of educational institutions: they don’t exist merely to dispense information; they exist to train us how to learn. One of the last century’s most respected experts on pedagogy, John Dewey, observed in Experience and Education,

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes . . . may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history. . . . For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.

He’s right, of course. The reason why employers prefer college-educated workers isn’t because they come pre-loaded with knowledge. In fact, most businesses provide robust on-the-job training to supplement the information they know most college grads lack. They prefer college grads for more prosaic reasons: you must be able to work hard and learn well to graduate. Those are the valuable skills college develops and proves.

Or they used to be.

Jared is far from alone. While he’s personally morally culpable for his decisions, I can’t escape the sense that the education system failed him well before college. Indeed, his behavior is precisely what our technologized primary and secondary education systems inadvertently trained him to do. 

Writing decades before the advent of one-to-one devices in classrooms (i.e., schools where every student has her own iPad, Chromebook, or laptop), Neil Postman bemoaned the introduction of televisions into schools. He rejected the idea that television could be educational, not because it can’t disseminate information (it can, of course) but because it exercises the wrong intellectual muscles. He wrote,

The most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. … We learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.

Of course, in the ’80s, a TV could only serve a limited range of purposes. Today’s one-to-one devices, however, have become the hub of everything. They replace textbooks. House teacher–student communication. Manage homework. Mediate information audio-visually. Organize the learning process and student responsibilities. This is to say nothing of the non-school-related distractions one-to-one devices introduce to the classroom or the amount of AI-driven homework and testing workarounds that, I suspect, most students have learned tremendous fluency in. For example, Apple’s “Math Notes” app can solve complex math problems for you in your own handwriting. 

But in the final analysis, the greatest threat to learning isn’t what schools give children. It’s what parents give them: smartphones. Of course, it doesn’t help that most middle schools and high schools long ago stopped restricting smartphone use by students. They’ve normalized smartphones and, however unintentionally, made them a part of the educational milieu.

A friend of mine (a Luddite who dared not to give his sixth-grader an iPhone and unfettered access to Instagram) told me that the biggest adjustment his daughter made from elementary school to middle school was technological. Instead of talking at lunch, students just stared at their phones. His daughter spent 20 long minutes every day speaking to no one, doing nothing, and feeling left out because her school refused to curtail technology use.

To state the obvious: screens are different than schools, but schooling is now a highly on-screen experience. Of course, some teachers and administrators hate this. Others love it. Classroom management is easier with screens, and most schools have people whose entire jobs are managing tech. 

But most teachers I know tell me the same thing: their students are more anxious (which is demonstrably caused by social media and screen use), less able to focus, and less well-educated than the students they had just ten years earlier. 

Somewhere along the line, it seems as though we stopped asking, “What are schools good for?” and instead asked, “What is technology good for?” Rather than technology serving the school, the school began to serve the technology. Of course, no one wants to be the tech curmudgeon, asking “Are we sure this is good for education?” After all, it’s very American to believe that technology is part and parcel of progress. Who would dare obstruct the future?

But if the price of admission for the future is the mental, social, emotional, and educational welfare of our children—and it is—then I refuse to pay the cost. 

So here I stand: it’s time to get smartphones and one-to-one devices out of primary education. It’s time to dramatically curtail their influence in secondary education. Dewey was right: schools exist to train us how to learn. And learning on a device certainly is a way if you want to learn how to be entertained, how to work digital levers, how to deploy AI to avoid work, and how to online bully and be anti-social. If you want that, then by all means, embrace one-to-one devices. 

This is why I feel a lot of empathy for Jared. We failed him. Jared never learned how to learn. He never learned to love learning for its own sake. He learned how to work a screen, how to avoid work, and how to fire as few neurons as possible. And that was enough to get him through college. Will it be enough for what comes next?

If you don’t believe me, let me enlist the wisdom of a 7-year-old who recently began attending summer school at an institution that uses one-to-one devices. During the academic year, he attended a school without one-to-one devices that banned smartphone use in the classroom—so this was his first jaunt into screen-based learning. After the first day, he reported to his dad, “It’s not hard at all! It’s fun! No one reads anything. We watch videos and stuff. It’s cool.”

But several weeks in, he wizened up and realized that there was nothing educational about his experience. In fact, he missed learning because he’d already begun to learn the love of learning. So he walked up to his teacher one morning and gently suggested, “Maybe we should put the iPads away? I think we’ve had enough for today. Let’s learn something.” 

Isn’t the goal of every day in school? “Let’s learn something.” If only we had the wisdom of a 7-year-old. Let’s put the iPads away.

Christians: we should lead the charge. We are a people of the book. We are students of the great teacher. We should want our children to learn to love learning. To do this, we need not be anti-technology. Instead, we must take the lead in public by asking: where does technology belong? I don’t need an MRI machine in my living room. Likewise, I don’t need computers and smartphones in primary education. 

Yes, I know some parents fear that this will somehow set their kids behind. Fear not. Our technology is designed by the world’s best behavioral scientists. Even chimpanzees can use iPads. Your little one will be fine. In the final analysis, which is better—having a child who’s a whiz on a Chromebook but spends his twenties battling with the chronic anxiety and depression that screen-based childhoods have been proven to generate OR having a child with normal computer skills and better-than-normal mental health?

For the sake of our children’s mental and social health, we need to push our schools to ban smartphone use on their premises. For the sake of our children’s education, we need to train them in how to learn the old-fashioned way: by reading, thinking, dialoguing, and writing. Yes, it’s less entertaining. Yes, it’s harder. But that’s the point. We want them to be capable of more than consuming entertaining content. We want them to be capable of more than using Google and AI to solve their problems. We want them to be capable of more than navigating educational platforms. We want them to become complex thinkers and problem-solvers who not only know how to learn but also how to love learning for its own reward.