I have been fighting against the digitization of education for a number of years. I have nothing against laptops and smartphones in higher classes and universities, but digital devices not only have a fatal effect on the mental development of kids in the formative years of primary school education and beyond, in my opinion, the use of digital tools in the classroom is proven to be fundamental Educational mission of the schools in the way.
Jonathan Haidt, about whose recent work I regularly report here on Piqd and who shares my position, has now written a long plea for a ban on smartphones in schools in the Atlantic. In his blog on Substack there is an even longer version of the text with additional links to scientific studies that support his theses.
I am aware of this and other studies and the scientific results are clear, especially when it comes to the educational mission: reading and writing with digital devices produces reduced brain activity. The reason is simple: when reading and writing with haptic, physically palpable tools in meatspace, brain areas of spatial perception are stimulated, which anchors what has been learned in the memory. In digital environments, this stimulus is almost completely absent, there is no connection between the written word and the motor functions of the brain, or the read screen content and spatial perception, as with handwritten notation on paper, or haptic reading in a printed one book, and what you have learned will be forgotten more quickly.
A few years ago I was sitting on an island in Greece talking to a teacher from Holland whose school used digital equipment even in the lower grades. He just shook his head and said it was all a catastrophe and that the children’s learning performance had noticeably decreased in the last few years alone. Just a little anecdote with Aegean sunset to spice up the scientific studies just described.
For this reason alone, namely that digital environments undermine the actual educational goal – as a reminder: learning – digital tools should, in my opinion, be avoided completely, at least in the lower grades. Of course, separate digital teaching units for the training of media competence are conceivable, but that is qualitatively completely different than the use of digital as a writing and/or reading tool.
On top of that comes the obligatory Socmed warnings: Social media is one of the main reasons for a depression epidemic among young girls in particular, recent studies find a connection between the age at which children get a smartphone and their later mental health – the younger in the digital world, all the more unstable later in life -, social media changes the psychological development of kids, etc. etc. As long as smartphones are allowed in schools, all these effects will be noticeable and relevant in the classroom itself.
I think social media are psychoactive drugs that expose our dopaminergic-oxytocinetic hormone balance to a consciously self-manipulative environment – clearly: you trip with social media, but not cognitively, but socially. At the risk of sounding like the angry old man I am, this stuff has no place in schools.
If parents want to give their toddler a smartphone – there you go. If they later read articles like this one, they can charge their parents for the therapist’s deductible.