This article is adapted from Ted's Smart Thinking podcast Episode 387: The Digital Delusion - A Conversation with Jared Horvath - Neuroscientist and Author.
I want to apologize to every graduate between 2013 and 2020 who came through a district while I was in charge of learning. That is not a joke and it is not an exaggeration. After sitting down with neuroscientist Dr. Jared Horvath and reading his new book, The Digital Delusion, I had something close to PTSD about the decisions I made pushing schools toward one to one devices.
This conversation wrecked me a little, in the best way. I want to walk you through what I learned, because if you are a teacher, a parent, or a policymaker, this is going to change how you think about every device in your building.
Jared opened with a stat that stopped me cold. Between 2013 and 2023, digital literacy among students dropped about 22 percent, to the point where fewer than 60 percent of kids in the United States could be considered digitally literate. During that same decade, classroom use of digital technology increased by more than 550 percent, with national spending on ed tech climbing from 12 billion dollars to 18 billion dollars. We spent more and got less. The very thing we were told would prepare kids for a digital workforce is the thing that is making them less capable of using it. Why? Because literacy was never about knowing how to operate a tool. A baby can figure out an iPhone in seconds. Literacy is about thinking, adapting, and understanding systems. That is what school was always meant to teach, and it is exactly what gets crowded out when we chase the newest tool instead of the deepest thinking.
Here is something I never knew until this conversation. In most fields, researchers measure the impact of something using an effect size, on a scale from negative one to positive one, with zero as neutral. But in education, zero cannot be the baseline, because human beings learn just by living and growing. Nearly everything we try in a classroom will show some positive effect, simply because kids are wired to learn. That means the real baseline researchers use in education sits between 0.4 and 0.5. Jared put it plainly. Anything below about 0.42 is not actually helping. Most ed tech interventions never come close to that number. So when a company proudly reports a positive effect size of 0.2 or 0.3, what they are really reporting is a tool that is quietly holding kids back compared to what a good teacher could do without it. Now compare that to what does clear the bar. An empathetic student teacher relationship carries an effect size around 0.68. Guided discussion sits at 0.82. Jigsaw teaching hits 1.16. None of that requires a laptop, a login, or a subscription. It requires a caring adult, a conversation, and a well designed lesson.
We have told ourselves for years that kids can learn on their own if we just give them access to information. Jared pushed back hard on that idea, and for good reason. When people are allowed to choose their own learning path, they are remarkably bad at knowing what actually helps them. We gravitate toward what feels comfortable, not what challenges us. Given free choice, a class full of kids writing essays on a topic of their choice will split along predictable lines. The athlete writes about sports. The rider writes about horses. Nobody stretches into something new. There is a name for this. It is called the fluency illusion. The more comfortable something feels while you are learning it, the less you are probably learning. The discomfort is the signal that real growth is happening. Left to trial and error alone, kids will take years to discover what a good teacher could show them in days. That is not a knock on kids. It is just how human learning has always worked. We are built to learn from other people, not to reinvent every wheel ourselves.
This is the part of the conversation that really got me. Jared explained that handwriting and reading are deeply linked in the brain. Kids who learn to write by hand learn to read faster than kids who only type. When researchers scan the brain of a child writing by hand, the literacy centers light up. When that same child types the same words, those areas stay quiet. The reason comes down to space. A book has three real dimensions. The word you are looking for sits on the top left of a specific page, and your brain remembers that location. A screen has none of that. Words just scroll past from the bottom to the middle to gone. The same is true for notes. Handwritten notes create a spatial memory that typed notes never do. That is why students who write class notes by hand consistently outperform students who type them, even when the content is identical. Jared said something that stuck with me. Handwriting is not just recording a thought that already happened in your head. The thinking is still happening as your hand moves. Take that away, and you take away part of the thinking itself.
I asked Jared directly where he sees artificial intelligence fitting into the classroom. His answer was clear. AI is a production tool for experts, not a learning tool for novices. When an expert uses AI to skip a tedious task, they can immediately spot when the output is wrong, because they already know the material. When a student who has not yet learned the underlying skill uses that same tool, they cannot evaluate what they are getting. They are not learning. They are copying. Higher order thinking, creativity, and critical thinking all grow out of lower order knowledge that has to be built first. Skip the building, and there is nothing left to think critically about. Jared put it simply. If you are using AI to avoid the hard work of learning, the only thing it builds is an inability to think. He also offered a prediction worth sitting with. AI systems are increasingly trained on AI generated content, which creates a feedback loop researchers call model collapse. Just like a body cannot survive eating its own waste, a system cannot improve by learning from its own output. He expects that loop to catch up with these tools faster than most people think.
Jared did not just diagnose the problem. He offered a real path forward for schools willing to take it. Start with a tech moratorium. Before buying anything new, audit what you already have. What is actually being used. What is collecting dust. Most schools will find they can cut a significant chunk of their tech spending without losing anything, because half of it was never being used anyway. Bring back the computer lab. When a device is sitting right on a kid's desk, it gets used constantly, whether it helps or not. When a teacher has to sign out a lab and walk students across the building, that small bit of friction forces a real question. Is this actually worth it? Any new tool has to prove itself with independently verified evidence, not marketing claims from the company selling it. Then pilot it small before rolling it out school wide. Every teacher who wants to use tech in a lesson should be able to answer three questions. Why am I using this. How is it better than a pen and paper approach. And how long will my students actually be on it, with a real time limit attached. And maybe the simplest idea of all. Try tech free days. Monday and Friday, no screens, just teaching. Jared described a school that let a small number of families opt their kids out of tech entirely. Within a month, teachers who had built analog versions of their lessons for those students realized the analog version was working better for everyone, and the whole building shifted.
There was a word in Jared's book that stopped me in my tracks. Durability. Not grit, not resilience exactly, but durability, the ability to withstand struggle and come out the other side stronger. Technology, by design, removes friction. It gives you the answer before you have wrestled with the question. But that struggle, that discomfort, is where real learning and real growth happen. Jared's own two year old daughter is already showing him what that looks like. She has barely touched a screen, and she is, by his account, the most socially capable kid at her daycare, simply because she has been forced to sit in discomfort, work through it, and come out the other side. That is the whole point, friends. We are not against technology for the sake of being against it. We are for the kind of learning that sticks, the kind that shows up in a steady hand, a clear mind, and a person who can think without a machine doing it for them. So here is my challenge to you. Pick one thing from this conversation and try it this week. Bring back a notebook. Try a tech free Monday. Ask yourself the three questions before you reach for the next app. Because in the end, the goal was never to raise kids who are good at using tools. It was always to raise kids who know how to think. And that job still belongs to us.