Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber

by Joe Clement

You might be thinking, I provide and do everything I can for my children at home. I wonder if something is going on at school. You don’t really know what happens during the bulk of their day. That’s where I come in. I do know what happens, and you’re right—it’s not good. I’m not going to sugarcoat the truth. What makes this warning different from others about “these kids today” is that I believe the problems many of our kids are having with their academic, social, and family lives are being caused in part by their schools, which are doing the bidding of the government and corporate America.

According to one of the most comprehensive surveys done on digital natives’ technology use by the nonprofit group Common Sense, teens are averaging almost nine hours a day on entertainment media. This includes self-amusement activities like participating in social media, watching television shows and movies, listening to music, and playing games. Tweens (eight- to twelve-year-olds) aren’t too far behind, averaging almost six hours a day. This time does not include that spent on screens during school, for homework, or even time spent talking on the phone or texting. Nine hours is a significant portion of the digital native’s day, to say the least. Teens are spending more time on screens than they spend on any other activity in their lives. It’s more than the eight hours a day they spend at school, and more than the roughly seven hours they spend sleeping. After spending this amount of time on their phones and other devices, there is virtually no time left for more traditional childhood activities such as studying, playing outside, meaningful face-to-face conversations with friends or family, and hobbies.

"Last year nearly half of mobile screen-time worldwide was spent on social apps (and more than a quarter of waking hours were spent on phones)" archive.is/h8MEJ

As if the nine hours a day weren’t enough, schools are now adopting initiatives that encourage and in some cases require kids to be on screens for much of their school day as well. With kids of the near future spending nearly fifteen hours or more on screens, electronic media is no longer having an impact on their environment. It is their environment.

According to the Common Sense census, 78 percent of the time teens spend on their electronic devices is devoted to “passive” and “interactive” consumption. These categories include “watching, listening, reading, and playing with media content created by someone else.” Young people only spend about 3 percent of their digital time in “content creation.” This would include things like real writing, taking a creative photograph, composing a song, coding, or any of the other mentally stimulating activities technology has to offer.

One year, I had a senior who was doing poorly in many of his classes. As a county policy, he needed to pass my economics class in order to graduate. Not wanting to be the reason he didn’t get a high school diploma, I made a deal with him: if he did well on his final paper and passed his final exam, I would bump his grade up to the lowest possible, D-. Considering how low his F was, this was a generous offer. The essay was to be an analysis of the recession we were experiencing at the time. In the directions I provided him, he was to work in concepts like inflation, stagflation, unemployment, underemployment, GDP, and complementary goods, all major concepts of our course. The day came when the assignment was due. I was eager to see what he had done and hopeful that he cared enough about his education to put some effort into this assignment. But what he turned in to me was shockingly bad. It was a printout of a conversation about a 9/11 conspiracy theory in an online forum. Not only was it completely off topic and lacking any type of actual evidence, it was 100 percent plagiarized. He had simply copied a crazy person’s accusations he had found on Reddit and pasted it into a Word document.

In 2014 Microsoft researcher and ed-tech advocate danah boyd wrote a piece for Time magazine entitled “Let Kids Run Wild Online” in which she advocates for children to be allowed to explore the Internet and social media free from parental constraints. She labeled parents’ monitoring of their children’s online activities as “helicopter parenting” and likens it to parents who won’t let their kids go outside or go to a playground unmonitored. That’s not a reasonable comparison. Imagine a playground where there were stashes of porn under the slide and the swings, and a significant number of the other “children” were actually forty-year-old sexual predators in disguise.

Socrates’s fear that the development of writing would inhibit man’s ability to memorize information seems absurd today, but not because it isn’t true. The reality is his prediction was more than likely correct. Consider one of Socrates’s points of reference, the famed Greek storyteller Homer. Despite being illiterate (as were most Greeks of that era), Homer is credited with composing and memorizing the entire works of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These works alone would be the equivalent of a modern thousand-page book. Memorizing them would be a seemingly impossible feat today. But in a world without writing, memorization would have been an important part of one’s environment, and the brain would adapt by allotting additional resources to make it more successful at that task.

The problem with almost all learning is that it is sequential. This is what makes learning so challenging, and so resistant to shortcuts. Just as infants don’t learn how to run before they can walk, a person can’t make sense of complex mathematical equations without an understanding of how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. To say this ability is no longer relevant in an age of complex calculators is to misunderstand the importance of knowledge.

This is what digital immigrants will never understand about digital natives. Technology is most effective when being used by someone with a strong fundamental base of knowledge in the area that a particular technology works to enhance. To a digital immigrant, someone who is starting off with a base of unenhanced, self-developed knowledge, technology can act like a springboard, expanding the potential of existing abilities. However, for the digital native, who has a reduced baseline of fundamental knowledge from a lifelong dependency on technology, technology offers little potential for enhancement because there is nothing to enhance in the first place.

A 2005 multinational study illustrated how influential media consumption can be on a child’s imagination. It followed eight- to ten-year-olds’ media consumption and then tracked their “daydreams.” They found that most children’s imagination deviates very little from the presented story line. Their daydreams are almost a verbatim retelling of the story they just watched or the game they just played.

The brain is a very efficient machine and it hates to waste energy. So from the age of two to five, a toddler’s brain starts realizing what pathways it is actually going to need, and what pathways it does not. If the brain rarely uses a particular pathway, it simply closes and discards it. This is an important developmental process known as pruning. Just as a gardener would cut back the dying branches of a bush to let the living ones become stronger, the brain removes underused synapses to strengthen the synapses it does use. If the brain did not do this, the excessive number of synapses would be too much for the brain to handle. Pruning allows the brain to focus on the pathways it actually needs. This creates the use-it-or-lose-it principle of cognitive ability. As the brain prunes away rarely used synaptic connections, it loses the potential to realize that particular cognitive ability later in life. A child who rarely uses imagination in childhood will be unimaginative later in life.

If a student is facing a challenging critical-thinking question, all she needs to do is type it in to a search engine, and she will most likely come across a variety of sources to answer the question for her. Contrary to the digital native claims, millennials aren’t using these answers as a starting point to explore solutions to new problems. They’re using them to answer homework problems as quickly as possible and go back to Netflix, their game, social media, or porn.

Madison gave me a familiar response. “I’m just not a great test taker,” she said with a dismissive shrug. This is a cop-out. I hear this all the time. Virtually every student who consistently struggles blames it on not being a good test taker. There is no doubt that some students have genuine test anxiety and freeze up on test day, even though they know the material. But that is pretty rare. In reality many students have heard adults throw the phrase around, so they think it has some validity. And more important, it absolves them of any responsibility for their own performance. They fail because they’re not great test takers, not because they didn’t learn enough of the material on the test to be successful. The vast majority of students who make this claim struggle because they are underprepared, not because they’re genetically predisposed to fail tests.

If you consider the fact that technology is designed to solve problems for us, it should only be introduced after students have mastered the ability to solve problems on their own. Otherwise, technology works to mask their lack of understanding. For example, if you were to give a student a calculator moments after teaching her multiplication and division, chances are she would stop working through the problems on her own and start depending on the calculator to do the work for her. The calculator would become more of a crutch because her own multiplication and division abilities would never fully be formed. This gap in her understanding would become more apparent later when teachers tried to build on these simpler concepts with more advanced ones, such as algebra or geometry. And eventually, the student would reach a point, much like Madison did, where she struggles with new, more challenging content and concepts.

Years ago, I would give my class of ninth-grade English language learners the assignment of writing a five-paragraph essay based on several pages of information they had to read and interpret. After about an hour of class time, 90 percent of the students would turn in a completed paper, despite needing extra time to translate phrases from their native language to English. Today, I give this exact same assignment to my ninth-grade honors students. Unlike my previous students, all of these digiLearners are proficient in English. Despite this, instead of an hour, I give students three class blocks amounting to four and a half hours of time to complete it. That’s just time spent in class. They are also free to work on this assignment at home. This year, when the four and a half hours were up and it was time to turn it in, 17 percent of the students hadn’t finished and 8 percent of students hadn’t even started it. These honors students chose to spend four and a half hours playing on their cell phones and take a zero on a major assignment rather than spend one minute working on it.

After years of budget cuts, many schools have to cram thirty or more students into a room designed to fit twenty-five. Students are practically sitting on top of each other. Because of that, students can often see and hear what the student sitting next to them is doing. It has become easier to spot a kid who’s playing a game or watching a movie on his phone because normally he’ll have the two students sitting next to him also staring intently into his lap.

Unfortunately, the ill effects created by an entire childhood of multitasking may be irreversible, severely impairing one’s ability to focus as an adult. The brain is more “plastic” than “elastic,” meaning that it’s malleable and adaptable in the developmental stages of childhood. However, once hardened it becomes more difficult to change as an adult. Heavy multitaskers have trained their brains to constantly search for alternative stimuli. By doing this they neglect the regions of their brains designed to focus. Eventually, and with enough neglect, these regions of the brain wither, and die. Because of this, the multitasker cannot suddenly make the decision to put down his phone, ignore everything going on around him, and focus on a lesson—or anything for that matter.

Jayden admitted that he normally had Netflix on his television to create background noise in concert with music he was playing through his laptop. “The noise helps me focus,” he claimed. Because his textbook was online, he was reading the chapter on his laptop. However, he had Facebook, Instagram, and different messengers simultaneously opened in other windows. Jayden and his parents began tracking his phone usage through an app that tallies how many times users unlock their phones and how long they spend actively on their phones. He was unlocking his phone over two hundred times and actively using his phone for over two hours of the time he was “doing homework.” He admitted he would regularly respond to text and Snapchat messages. It became clear that very little of the time Jayden was dedicating to homework was actually dedicated to doing homework. Instead, he was spreading his attention between at least six different activities—and doing a poor job at each.

Staci was the first student to make this clear. One of the class’s alpha females, she had a strong, dominating personality and ruled over her clique with an iron fist. She felt resentment toward authority and strongly disliked being told what to do. She struggled in school and engaged in a daily fight with Dana over Staci’s perpetual use of her phone, hair brushing, and talking to her girlfriends throughout class. Dana has no counseling or psychological credentials, and she assumed Staci was just severely narcissistic. Shortly after the first semester, Dana was caught off guard when she received news that Staci wouldn’t be returning to her class. Staci had tried to kill herself. Dana learned she had been cutting herself with a razor blade in the restroom, and eventually tried to slit her wrists. Although the resulting wounds were mostly superficial, her underlying problems clearly ran much deeper. She spent the remainder of the school year in a mental health facility. Dana barely had time to process what had happened with Staci when a week later another one of her students was also hospitalized for attempted suicide. Riley was a quiet, reserved, and conscientious student. She stayed away from the drama that surrounded Staci and her friends. So it was surprising to learn she had taken a bottle of pills after an incident involving her boyfriend, who had recently broken up with her and posted ugly rumors about her on social media.

The narrative that modern children’s declining mental health is mainly caused by today’s academic pressures doesn’t fully explain what teachers are seeing in the classroom. Like most of the girls in Dana’s class, a majority of the incidents involving suicide and depression were rooted more in social pressures, such as problems with friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, body image, and low self-esteem. For most of these students, their interest in education was very low. Looking at the bigger picture, when you consider that 64 percent of seventeen-year-olds are spending little to no time at night doing homework but logging nine or more hours on their screens, it becomes clearer where the problem lies.

Each group was given a story about a lonely young high school student who punches a popular jock in the face for reasons only known to the lonely young man. It was an allegory for the events of 9/11. After reading it, the students were asked to have a conversation about what the jock (and the United States) should do next. This was not a graded assignment. The point was to get the students talking to each other about foreign policy through the medium of the high school drama they were more accustomed to.

Education really is just propaganda. Maybe screen schooling isn't so bad.

As Susan and I chatted and caught up, I couldn’t help but notice that her granddaughter was silent, hunched forward over an iPad as she pecked at the icons on the screen in a zombie-like trance. Susan realized I was looking at the girl. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing to the iPad. “I remember trying to grocery shop with my kids. What a chore! Now she’s occupied and learning, and I can get in and out of here in a hurry. Isn’t it wonderful?” My head nearly exploded. The only response I could come up with was some sort of guttural noise. We said our good-byes and parted ways. Rather, she moved on as I stood there, processing what she had said. Of course grocery shopping with little kids is a pain—because they ask questions! A grocery store is, at its core, a learning laboratory for a child. “What’s this? Can I have one of these? Why is ketchup in a plastic bottle and pickles are in glass jars? Why do the lobsters have rubber bands on their claws?” Even when children are too young to ask questions, they are still aglow with curiosity. They touch everything, filling the cart with random items they’ve pulled from the shelf when the parent has turned away, trying to get a sense for what different things feel like. They point to different-looking people as the parent quietly pushes their hand back down. They interact with their parent and with the people and products around them. Yet Susan, who was charged with making academic acquisition decisions for her school, th...

Microsoft conducted a poll and found that 64 percent of parents aged twenty-two to forty believe that digital technologies bring their family closer together. However, that perception is not reality. A study by the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has found that teens who spend an average or greater than average amount of time on screens per day are less attached to their families than teens who spend less time on screens. How does this affect education? The degraded relationships between teens and parents make it tougher for kids to do their best in school. Yet that’s not what ed-tech firms would have us believe.

Ask most adults today about a family vacation from their youth, and you’ll not only hear about the Grand Canyon or Disney World, but you’ll hear about the trip there. Those experiences are often important pieces of a family’s puzzle. Will future generations talk about trips from their youth by saying, “I played seven hours of video games, watched YouTube, and never talked to anyone else in the car”? Chevrolet and other car companies apparently think that would be great. They have tapped into memories of long car rides and now advertise Wi-Fi in their cars. These ads show happy families cruising down the road. Of course, everyone in the car is isolated, but they all look happy.

Psychologist Michael Oberschneider has written a children’s book called Ollie Outside. It’s about a boy who wants to go outside and play but everyone else in his family is consumed by their screens and won’t go outside with him. The fact that this book exists is truly a sign of the times.

One of the saddest things I see in school is kids who are craving adult attention because they do not get it at home. Many kids just hang out after school. They go from teacher’s room to teacher’s room, often just looking to chat. The conversation will typically start with something related to class, but it often becomes clear that they are just looking to talk to an adult. I’ve seen a marked increase in this behavior over the last few years. Kids isolate themselves, their parents are isolated at home, and the need for attention has to come out somewhere.

When parents are in constant contact, they do not allow their children to truly be present in their natural environment, which from 8:00 AM until 3:00 PM is school. Kids have to have a chance to formulate who they are. That is hard work, and some of it has to get done away from home. If they feel like they are never truly on their own, then they will never truly be ready to be on their own. Conflicts arise during any school day. Most of these conflicts are relatively minor. Solving those manageable difficulties is a critical part of growing up, and parents have to allow it to go on.

In my ideal world as a teacher, there would be no texts at all between parents and students—even in times of emergency. For generations, parents have called the school office and messages have been delivered to the student. That is still the best way to handle tough times and emergencies. That way, a trained counselor can deliver the news, or can bring the child to a private office to call home. Texting a child about a death in the family (I have actually seen this happen), for instance, puts too much on a kid in a far too public forum.

Forbid screens in kids’ bedrooms. One rule that is used by every tech executive in a recent survey is that their kids are not allowed to have any screens in their bedrooms. Aside from the obvious benefits—being able to more closely monitor what a child is doing online—this rule has the benefit of keeping the child in the common areas of the home. That is, even if the kid is going to be playing a video game or watching a movie, she will have to do it with other people around. This will simply give more chances for social interaction—direct and indirect. It also reminds us as parents how long our kids have been on screen.

They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home. —STEVE JOBS ON HOW HIS KIDS LIKED THE IPAD

This rejection of technology for children has given rise to the popularity of Waldorf schools. These private schools are built on a century-old philosophy that touts the benefits of a hands-on education, by providing in-person social interaction and focusing on creative problem-solving. Consequently, they also reject the use of technology both in and out of school. Some schools go so far as to make the students and their parents sign contracts promising limited exposure to technology even when they’re at home. Void of computers, iPads, and other new gadgets, their classrooms are filled with energetic and engaging teachers who design creative, outside-the-box lesson plans. They have chalkboards, No. 2 pencils, and even knitting needles to teach their students. The theory behind the Waldorf philosophy is that teachers should have a great deal of autonomy in how they foster creative and socially competent students. Hands-on teaching encourages students to experience tactile rather than virtual learning. With tuition as high as $24,000 a year or more, however, they aren’t necessarily accessible for poor families.

Now imagine handing out iPads in a classroom riddled with students like Chet, who have these strong cravings owing to excessive nightly gaming. Ed-tech advocates would say that a strong teacher presence in the classroom could prevent misuse of the devices, keeping kids on track and productive. But is this a reasonable expectation for a teacher (or anyone, for that matter)? This would be like handing out full glasses of wine at an AA meeting and asking the leader to make sure the meeting participants were only using them to make music on the rims.

In the United States the amount of time spent gaming averages eight times higher for boys than for girls. Girls tend to spend more time on social media and texting. Along with its more addictive nature, gaming seems to have a more negative cognitive impact than social media. A study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that people who spend more time playing video games have more attention problems, and individuals who are more impulsive or have more attention problems subsequently spend more time playing video games. This study also found that video game addicts are twice as likely to have ADD or ADHD. This could help explain the recent explosion of diagnosed attention disorders. A 41 percent increase of ADHD diagnoses in the last decade has disproportionately impacted boys. Now, one out of five boys is diagnosed with ADHD and 85 percent of all attention-related medications are prescribed for boys in the United States. So much for the claims that video games help improve a child’s ability to focus.

Considering teenage boys’ raging levels of hormones coinciding with their unfettered access to mountains of pornographic material provided by their digital devices, it’s shocking they even manage to use their devices for sixteen minutes a day for schoolwork. The digital immigrant equivalent of this would be if the teacher stapled a Playboy or Hustler magazine in the front of every teenage boy’s textbook and then their parents sent them off to their room to do their homework on chapter 12. This, however, is precisely what an online textbook or digital assignment is to a digital native boy. In order to even start this assignment, they have to fight off both their drug addiction–like urges to game as well as their most primal hormone-driven sexual urges. Getting to the log-in page of their textbook is a feat in and of itself.

A study done by the Harvard Graduate School of Education illustrates just how influential strong teacher-student relationships can be. Professor Hunter Gehlbach, an educational psychologist, had both students and their teachers fill out a survey about their likes and dislikes on a wide range of topics. Then, for the experimental group, the researchers would sit down with each student and teacher and go over the things they had in common. The idea being that this would strengthen the relationship between the two. After then tracking the students’ progress in school, they found that the students with the stronger teacher relationships performed significantly better than the students who hadn’t had this simple intervention. The groups with the greatest improvements were African Americans, Latinos, and lower-income students. In fact, it led to an unheard-of 60 percent reduction in the school’s achievement gap.

Even in the hands of a skilled teacher, technology works to separate teachers from students and weaken this relationship. With online classes, students may never even meet their teachers. With flipped classrooms, the teaching is done through the computer as teachers play a secondary role in the classroom. In fact, that’s a common mantra of the ed-tech movement. Teachers are relegated to the sideline as students are given more control of their own learning. I’ve watched many “integrated classrooms” in action, and they almost always involve students silently working on their laptops while the teachers sit in the corner, silently working on theirs. The only direct interaction they have is at the beginning and end of each class when they tell the students to get out and put away their computers.

The London School of Economics did a comprehensive study of schools that were in the process of adopting a strict no-cell-phone policy. What they found was that banning cell phones led to a 6.4 percent across-the-board increase in test scores. However, the lower-achieving students had the greatest increase, averaging a 14 percent improvement. By removing the screens that were separating the students from their teachers, these schools turned F students into C students.

George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act. This left the United States with two major parties both believing that education was an issue for the federal government. Pity our poor local school official. I take no position on either of these acts, or even on the role of the federal government in education. However, what is clear is that these steps marked an enormous increase in pressure on schools. Failure was not going to be tolerated (which, of course, it shouldn’t be). Failing schools were brought to the consciousness of a nation anxious about how its children were going to compete with students from around the world—children who seemed to be getting smarter faster than ours. People have always been concerned about schools, and likely always will be. In the past, though, concern might have meant a PTA meeting in a school gymnasium at which the superintendent was asked tough questions by worried parents. Now, politicians on both sides of the aisle in local, state, and federal offices scream for change and call for the heads of those in charge.

In 1994, the same year President Clinton signed into law the Goals 2000 Act, Dr. Anthony Picciano warned of what he called “the education-industrial complex,” clearly echoing Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex. He has since coauthored an excellent book on the subject that explores this topic in much greater detail than I will here.

THE Journal reports that nearly 90 percent of US school districts plan on acquiring at least some tablets for students during the 2016–2017 school year. The percentage of school districts planning these purchases is highest for the youngest students.

In fact, a recent study, “How We Learn” by researchers for Scientific American Mind, “reviewed more than 700 scientific articles on ten common learning techniques to identify the most advantageous ways to study.” Of those deemed most advantageous for learning, exactly zero used any sort of advanced digital technology.

I attended a workshop recently at a school that had just adopted one-to-one education (where every student gets a computer). The meeting was filled with the protechnology claims mentioned above. The first speaker opened with, “Technology today has revolutionized the world. Now, my phone can give me directions to virtually anywhere. My car communicates with tollbooths, paying my tolls without me having to stop my car. We are living in a very different world where today’s students learn differently.” The problems with this logic are many. The claim that several minor increases of convenience have “revolutionized” the world is a bit of an exaggeration. Discovering agriculture, which allowed people to move from hunter-gatherer clans to full-blown civilizations, is worthy of the title “revolutionary.” Making it so people don’t have to throw quarters in tollbooths is not. More important, how do any of the changes mentioned affect how the brain processes and stores information? Living in a world where cell phones make it easier to get around is not necessarily linked to the idea that children learn differently. What parent has ever driven through a tollbooth and then thought to herself, That just revolutionized the way my kid’s brain works? Unfortunately, tech advocates like this speaker often simply repeat their illogical conclusions until everyone accepts them as truth.

Speaking of Los Angeles, the unified school district there in 2013 awarded a massive contract to Pearson and Apple. The deal was intended to provide every one of the 640,000 students in the nation’s second-largest school system with an iPad loaded with Pearson software. It would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars—just for the iPads and software. However, the school system’s infrastructure was in no way prepared to have all those students logged in to their network at the same time. This required an enormous overhaul of wiring in the schools. The rewiring effort required an additional $800 million. The total price tag was $1.3 billion. Amid allegations of deal fixing and a noncompetitive bidding process, the contract was scrapped, and the bidding reopened. But consider that again—by making one sale, Apple and Pearson were set to earn over $1 billion. The device purchases will now be made from Apple as well as Google, Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft.

That situation, while expensive and troubling, pales in comparison with the way the Common Core State Standards came into being. Calling them state standards (as opposed to national standards) would be hilarious were it not so misleading. In the military-industrial complex I referenced earlier, decision making is centralized. If you’re a defense contractor and you want to build a new jet, for instance, you need to convince a few people in the Pentagon and you’re good to go. Education isn’t like that. There are over thirteen thousand school systems in the United States, all of which have different needs and priorities. As Dr. Picciano explained to us, that’s an awful lot of sales pitches to have to make. What would simplify that? National standards. Having those would mean that all school systems throughout the country would need to teach the same things. If you had products that prepackaged these new standards and content, they would sell themselves. Schools would come to you to buy these products. Cha-ching again!

Why would they seek out Bill Gates? Mr. Gates is brilliant, but he also happens to be one of the world’s richest people, and his charitable foundation gives hundreds of millions of dollars to educational causes. Much of the money in this case went to convince politicians and state boards of education that the Common Core standards were an improvement over existing state standards, and the new model was needed to even the playing field nationally. For example, over $15 million went to lobbying groups in Kentucky to get that state to sign on. A single North Carolina group, the Hunt Institute, received $5 million. This group created “sample letters to the editor, op-ed pieces that could be tailored to individuals depending on whether they were teachers, parents, business executives or civil rights leaders.” All told, the Gates Foundation spent over $170 million nationwide to get states to sign on to Common Core. Former US secretary of education Arne Duncan, who had been head of Chicago Public Schools, worked to push the standards through. While in Chicago, Duncan received $20 million from Gates to reform high schools there. Ironically, while serving in DC, Duncan’s children attended public school in Virginia, one of four states to not adopt Common Core. Forty-six states signed on. Eight have since abolished the program. Currently, the future of Common Core is murky. The effects of the program, though, are long lasting.

If you are not an educator, think about your own time in school. Picture a lesson you found inspiring, informative, important, and engaging. Think about a lesson that left you sad when it was over. Then, educator or not, answer this question: How much advanced technology was involved in that lesson? If you are like the overwhelming majority of people I surveyed, the answer is little to none.

We have experienced vast improvements in technology in a relatively miniscule amount of time in the human experience. This is undeniable. What has remained almost completely unchanged since Paleolithic times is our basic anatomy. How our brains function, how we develop thinking skills, how we learn, how we interact with one another has been ingrained in all of us.

If you want to teach a child how to ride a bike, you don’t give him a paper and pencil test on the parts of the bicycle. You don’t have him watch a video on riding a bike. You teach the skill of riding the bike, and you assess whether or not the child has mastered the skill.

Too often, technology-based education actually teaches technology use to the detriment of the skill students should be learning. For instance, many school systems now offer online PE courses. Yes, you read that correctly, virtual physical education, an oxymoron. Students are taught how to use digital heart-rate monitors to record and document their physical activity. They are expected to spend an hour a night in a target range of “beats per minute,” indicating they were engaged in some type of strenuous activity. At the end of the week, they are expected to upload their data into an online exercise log. The problem is, students quickly learn how to upload the same heart-rate file over and over again. A student only has to exercise once in an entire semester and simply rename the file several dozen times. One student admitted he never even exercised once he just hooked his heart-rate monitor up to his dog for an afternoon. He got an A+ for the semester.

To get to these textbooks, many schools that have not yet gone the route of giving each student his or her own device have “mobile computer labs” that are laptop carts teachers can check out and bring to their rooms for student use. In schools where these are used, the carts are a common resource, and they are often in disrepair. Either they do not get plugged in so the batteries are dead, or the school’s network is down, or there are missing or stuck keys. They are also old. Distributing the laptops, getting them turned on, and getting all students to the right software application or website is guaranteed to take twenty or more minutes of class time.