Bad for the brain: Kids are learning less in high-tech schools
- Joanne Jacobs
- Dec 7, 2025
- 2 min read
Educational technology is bad for kids' brains, argues neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath in The Free Press. The article is an excerpt from his new book, The Digital Delusion.
Starting around the year 2000, "many key measures of cognitive development — from literacy and numeracy to deep creativity and general IQ" -- began falling, he writes. The downturn seems to be accelerating for Gen Alpha.
"Why are so many kids learning less?" Horvath asks. He blames too much screen time in school.
He agrees with those who argue that children's mental health has been harmed by smartphones, social media and overprotective parenting. But that doesn't explain the "cognitive collapse," Horvath writes. "Why are so many kids learning less?"
Traditional learning has been replaced by digital tools of unproven worth, he argues.
"More than half of all students now use a computer at school for one to four hours each day, and a full quarter spend more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day," he writes. Researchers estimate that students drift off task for up to 38 minutes of every hour on classroom devices.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) asks 15-year-old students in dozens of countries how much time they spent using digital devices during a typical school day, he writes. "The more screens children use at school, the lower achievement falls." That's confirmed by other "major national and international tests across math, science, and reading" and by "more than 25 years of academic, clinical, and classroom research."
Horvath urges parents to print out their children's assignments, so they can work on paper rather than on screens, and to lobby for the right to opt their children out of screen use at school. Finally, they should demand that schools justify the use of new digital tools, asking to see "independent, replicated research showing it improves learning." If there's no research, he writes, "ask for a clear, evidence-based rationale that answers three questions: What specific problem does this tool solve? How will it improve learning, not just logistics? Why is this the best available solution?"
My high school students beg me for paper assignments, so we have gone offline. Some hate it, but it’s a minority.
I live this as a substitute teacher. Kids who don't feel like doing the assignment watch sports videos (or other videos), play games, etc. Even if I can get them working on a math worksheet, they've been trained to perform all calculations on the Chromebook. This leaves them with no "feel" for the mathematics and if they make even a minor error when inputting their information they have no idea that their answer is ridiculous, much less why it is ridiculous. I saw kids7th graders yesterday who could not correctly spell towel, sword, and other common five-letter words. It's frightening to watch Idiocracy play out in real time...
Any adult whose spent all day on a computer (40 years on Wall St., excepting meetings--the last 30 spent all day on a screen), will grant that information is absorbed superficially and is fleeting. What is retained by the experience of knowing what one is looking for, i.e., the key bits that inform one's knowledge. Lacking an experience base and a foundation of knowledge (such as school students lack), there no way of prioritizing exactly what should be retained as knowledge, much less to know what one is looking for.
Social media is trivia, and the habit of scrolling for entertaining trivia trains the mind of habits poor for learning and knowledge retention.
I like the idea of hard copy for assignments.