Kids lose more than just books when school is on a screen

Nearly 80 percent of school districts issue kindergarteners, first-graders and second-graders devices or allow them to bring them from home. Screens are no longer occasional classroom tools. They organize the school day. This isn’t simply a story about technology. It’s a story about what happens when the medium through which children learn reshapes learning itself. Elementary school always taught more than reading and mathematics. Children learned how to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements and explain their thinking. This was an essential aspect of growing up, it wasn’t just a nice byproduct of being in a classroom. When the relational aspect of learning is removed, the conditions that allow these skills to grow are also removed. Even if some technologies improve some learning outcomes under some conditions, is this the type of education young Americans need? Do we want classrooms organized by continuous digital engagement? Or do we want schools where children spend substantial portions of the day interacting and creating? The skills that will matter most in an artificial-intelligence-powered future may be the ones computers can’t cultivate: attention span, curiosity, judgment, empathy and collaboration. Attention span in particular is weakened when schools prioritize constant stimulation over intellectual endurance. As technology becomes more powerful, distinctly human capacities become more valuable, not less. Children don’t need school to become more like the digital world. They are already immersed in that world for much of the time outside school hours. They need a place designed for other aims, such as conversation instead of consumption and collaboration instead of personalization. That isn’t resisting the future; it’s preparing children to be fully human in it.

[Sarah Schneider Kavanagh is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Katie A. Danielson is an associate professor at the University of Portland School of Education]