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

by Joe Clement

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.