When More Tech Means Less Learning

This article is adapted from Ted's podcast episode 366: Technology & Learning Don't Mix Very Well: A Conversation with Neuroscientist/Author Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath.

What I Learned After Leading Schools Into a Tech Addiction

I need to make a confession.

Somewhere around 2013, sitting in my office as the assistant superintendent of learning, I made a decision that I now deeply regret. I championed the move to go fully digital. One-to-one devices for every student. Digital textbooks. Cloud-based everything. I believed, with every fiber of my being, that we were preparing kids for the future.

I was wrong.

Reading Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath's new book, The Digital Delusion, I experienced something close to educational PTSD. Page after page of research showed me exactly what we did wrong. And more importantly, it showed me a path forward.

The Wake-Up Call

Here's the stat that should make every educator pause: Between 2013 and 2023, while digital technology use in schools increased by over 550%, digital literacy dropped by 22%. Let that sink in. We spent billions of dollars, gave every kid a device, and they became less digitally literate, not more.

In the United States alone, spending on educational technology jumped from $12 billion to $18 billion. Fewer than 60% of students could be considered digitally literate despite having unprecedented access to technology.

The data is clear: we've been sold a lie.

But here's what really got me. When Jared explained effect sizes, everything clicked into place. In education, we can't use zero as our baseline because human beings naturally learn just by being alive. Change your outfit, and kids will learn a little more from you that day. Put on a red shirt instead of blue, and there's measurable learning happening. Why? Because that's what we do as humans. We learn.

So in education, we need an effect size of at least 0.42 to say something is actually beneficial for learning. Anything below that? It's not just neutral. It's actively harming learning compared to what would happen naturally.

Educational technology, across the board, doesn't even come close to 0.42.

Meanwhile, here's what does work: positive student-teacher relationships score 0.68. Guided discussion? 0.82. Jigsaw teaching hits 1.16. Notice a pattern? The human connection wins every single time.

What We Lost in the Rush to Digital

There's a sentence in Jared's book that I can't stop thinking about. He describes children who can write fluently by hand as being "durable." Not resilient. Not gritty. Durable.

Durability. It's the perfect word for what we need and what we've been systematically removing from education.

When we took away handwriting, we told ourselves it was obsolete. Kids type as adults, so why bother teaching cursive or even print? But here's what the neuroscience shows us: when children write by hand, they're not just transcribing thoughts that already exist in their brains. The act of writing is thinking. The movement of hand to paper activates literacy areas of the brain in ways that typing never does.

Children who learn to write their names by hand learn to read other words faster. The fine motor skills of handwriting build the neural pathways for reading comprehension. You can see it in brain scans. Put kids in an MRI while they handwrite versus type the same material. The literacy areas light up with handwriting. They stay dark when typing.

We thought we were removing an obsolete skill. We were actually dismantling the foundation of literacy itself.

And it's not just handwriting. Remember when teachers used to say "take notes"? I used to give my students a three-by-five note card for tests. They could write anything they wanted on it. Here's what happened: they'd spend hours making these intricate cheat sheets, writing in tiny font, organizing information spatially on that card. And you know what? They almost never needed to look at it during the test.

The act of making the note card was the learning. The effort, the duration, the struggle to fit everything on that card, that's where the magic happened. Now we let AI make flashcards for students. Congratulations, we just eliminated the very part where learning occurs.

The Paradox of Struggle

Here's something that should change how we think about education entirely: the derivation of the word "art" is "skill." The Latin word for art is ars, which translates to skill. Art was always understood as the manifestation of intense practice and work. The best artist was the most skilled artist.

Somehow, we've convinced ourselves that creativity is this magical ability that just pops out of people. That if you're really creative, you don't have to work at anything. But that's not how creativity works at all. You need 20 years of hard practice on anything before you can even start to consider yourself creative in that field.

Digital technology makes everything smooth and seamless. You have a question? Here's an answer immediately. Struggling with a sentence? Here's the fix. Don't even worry about it.

But it is that struggle that is learning. That's where you develop durability. By fighting and hitting your head against a wall for weeks to come up with the right sentence, that's how you lock that sentence into your body. By taking a spelling test and failing it 10 times and finally getting it right the 11th time, that's how you get that thing locked inside of you.

When we use technology to avoid the tedious process of developing lower-order knowledge, there will be no higher-order thinking. Higher-order thinking, creativity, and critical thinking emerge from lower-order knowledge. You can't skip the foundation and expect the building to stand.

The AI Trap We're Walking Into

And now we're doubling down on this mistake with AI.

AI serves production, not learning. It's a tool for experts to do less work. I know how to do statistical analysis with pen and paper. I don't feel like spending two hours on it, so I let AI do it in two seconds. That works because I'm already an expert. I can vet everything AI produces immediately.

But when someone who doesn't know how to do that skill uses the same tool? They can't vet the output. It's just copy and paste to them. And they will never learn the skill itself to begin with. We've short-circuited any possibility of development.

If you think your students are using AI for anything besides cheating, we don't live in the same world. No kid goes home on a Friday night and says, "Dear ChatGPT, please pose me 10 deep thought questions about a topic so I can think more about it." They say, "ChatGPT, what's the answer? Thanks. See ya."

What We Can Do Right Now

So here's the good news. We can fix this. It won't be easy, and it won't be immediate, but we can do it.

First, ban smartphones from schools entirely. There is no reasonable answer to why a kid needs a phone at school. None. It's the lowest-hanging fruit.

Second, implement a tech moratorium. For one year, buy nothing new. No new programs, no new devices, nothing. Run a pure audit. Look at what technology is being used, where it's being used, and what the data says about it. I guarantee you'll find that 75% of everything you're doing can be eliminated tomorrow because teachers aren't using it, kids aren't using it, and it's not helping anyone.

Third, return to computer labs. There is no such thing as free-floating computers anymore. If you want to use a computer, you go to a specific spot in the school. This reintroduces friction. Right now, it's too easy. A teacher says, "Pull out your laptop," and it's right there. If that same teacher has to sign out the lab, get kids up, walk them across campus, they'll ask themselves: Is it worth it? Most of the time, the answer will be no, and they'll find a different, often better way to teach.

Fourth, start with tech-free days. Maybe Mondays. Then add Fridays. One day a week where you go old school. No smart boards, no tablets, just teachers and students and the art of teaching. Watch what happens. Teachers will tell you they have students again. They'll rediscover how fun teaching can be when you're just connecting with other people.

And finally, remember this: any new tool we adopt has to have independently verified evidence that it boosts learning beyond that 0.42 threshold. Not engagement. Not that students like it. Not that it was used a lot. That it actually helps kids learn. And that evidence cannot come from the company selling the product.

Building Durable Learners

There's a study Jared shared about fruit flies that I can't stop thinking about. Researchers were studying evolution, and they raised fruit flies in perfect conditions. Perfect temperature, perfect amount of food, no friction whatsoever. And you know what happened? The flies devolved. Everything got simpler and easier. Nothing new was created. Things were taken away.

When life has no friction, you devolve.

That's what we've done to our children. We've removed all the friction from learning, and we're watching them devolve right before our eyes. Rising rates of anxiety, inability to self-regulate, behavioral challenges in kindergarten that we've never seen before. We thought we were helping. We were creating dependence.

Our job is not to make learning easy. Our job is to make learners durable. And durability comes from struggle, from failure, from having to fend for yourself, from using your hand to write your name and looking up and realizing that's not just a name, that's your identity.

We are bodies, not brains. We don't merely have bodies. We are bodies. When we reduce learning to eyes on a screen, we lose everything that makes us human. The movement, the emotion, the physical act of writing, the spatial memory of where something appears on a page, all of it matters.

So here's my challenge to you: Read Jared's book. Share it with your school board, your superintendent, your fellow teachers. Have the hard conversations. Admit, like I'm admitting, that maybe we got this wrong. That the billions we spent might have been billions thrown into a black hole.

And then do something different.

Because on the day that every child decides who it is they want to be and what it is they want to do, they deserve to have the skills to do it. Not the ability to prompt an AI. Not the muscle memory of tapping a screen. But the deep, durable knowledge that comes from struggle, from human connection, from putting pen to paper and thinking their way through problems.

That's the education they deserve. That's the education we can still give them.

We just have to be brave enough to admit we were wrong and wise enough to change course.