This show proudly sponsored by Real American Freestyle Wrestling. Hi, everyone. It's Brian Kilmead here. Are you tired of those uncomfortable dress shirts, especially when they bunch up under a sweater? If so, then you must check out Collars Co., makers of the dress collar polo.
Listen up. These shirts are four-way stretch, buttery soft polos with firm dress collars on them, so they give you the dress shirt look, but extremely comfortable polo feel. You can wear them with anything under a sweater, with a blazer, or by themselves as an elevated polo. They work for any occasion. These polos are perfect, whether it's in the office, on a golf course, or a night out.
Collars Co. is exploding and have gone viral on social media thanks to the 1 million investment they received on Shark Tank from Mark Cuban and Peter Jones. You don't have to worry about collars that flop down and spread out. They stay firm and sharp all day. It's an amazing array of sweaters, quarter zips, pants, and outerwear.
If you're looking for the performance dress shirt or polo that looks great all day, check out collarsandco.com. Use promo code Brian for 15% off. of any purchase of $100 or more. That's promo code BRIAN. Hi, this is Joe from Vanta.
In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there.
So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC2 or ISO 27001 or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at Vanta.com. Hey, welcome back, everybody. In about 20 minutes, we even opened up the phones, but right now I want to bring in Jared Cooney Forbath, neurologist and author of The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Tech Harms Our Kids Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again.
This in the wake of the big move over the weekend, excuse me, over the last 48 hours, and that is Australia banning all social media. For anyone until 16 and under. And then we're seeing more and more schools buying phones all day long and very little blowback. And in fact, it's not even discernible. Jared, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here.
So Jared, if I brought up five years ago, let's band phones from the classroom and forget about social media for kids, that would have been a niche audience that supported me. How did things change? I think we spent more time with our kids on these tools, and everything started to go haywire. I think parents kind of got sick of it, and more importantly, for the educational sector, teachers got sick of it too. The amount of behavioral problems, emotional problems, and developmental stunting we were seeing was just getting out of control.
We've never seen anything like it in the past.
So, we figured something's got to be done. And a lot of it is kind of coming back to the tools we're using, this kind of tech stuff. And you also don't believe, you don't even like the fact that I know for a fact in my middle school, they tell everyone to get Chromebooks.
So everyone gets a Chromebook. You have a problem with that too, don't you? Oh, it's not a problem so much as it's just straight data. We've had data since the turn of about 2002 was when the first one-to-one laptop program really started.
So that's kind of the marker where we say EdTech, tech, really started entering schools. And that was almost the exact same time we saw a downturn in basically every cognitive skill in the next generation.
So believe it or not, Gen Z is the first generation in recorded history to be scoring less and lower on their parents on measures of memory, attention, general IQ, creative ability, critical thinking, you name it. Everything turned. And the only thing we can draw it back to is this dang tool we brought into the classroom. Is it because the act of writing notes with your hand? Is that part of it?
That's how you remember things to write it out? Absolutely.
So there's a lot of biological mechanisms that we have for learning. You can assume we've evolved 150,000 years to learn in one very particular way, and tech by and large just doesn't align with that way.
So exactly like you said, one idea is if you type notes out, most people will start doing what they just call verbatim typing. Basically a stenographer. Hear a word, write a word, which means you remember nothing. But when you're handwriting notes, what's happening is by definition, you have to summarize. You have to make sense of what's coming at you in order to get it down on paper.
Then it becomes deeper. It becomes a little bit more you, and all of a sudden, you learn it. It's not just writing. It's an act of actual exploration and learning.
So all these kind of analog methods that we've been using in the past are just simply more aligned to biology, work better than a lot of the digital versions of those methods.
So for example, you even like reading a book or reading something with paper as opposed to reading a book online? Yeah, believe it or not, there's a.
So, one of the key aspects of human memory is space. Where in space did something occur? That becomes part of the memory reform.
So, if any of your listeners right now, if you are avid readers, you'll recognize this. When you finish reading a book, you might not remember verbatim every word you just read, but you will remember where in the book something occurred. Like your favorite scene, you'll be able to flip right to it. Oh, it's a left page, top left hand side, halfway through. When we read on a screen, there is no spatial location.
The words start at the bottom of the screen, go through the middle, go out the top. An entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped.
So, this is why, whenever I work with college freshmen, all the research is really heavy on this. If they say, hey, what is the number one study technique you can tell me? One thing to make learning better. Buy a printer. Change nothing else about your life, but read on paper versus a screen.
You will remember more, comprehend better than we do on this thing.
Okay, so not only writing, but reading on a paper rather than. On uh On a screen, even though you can make notes on that screen, you're just not physically, you don't know where it is in the book. Exactly. It all just becomes that kind of matter of spacing. If you try and annotate on a screen, you kind of lose it.
So what we find is at about the five-minute point of reading online, most people will switch to just skimming. We can track how their eyes move and they basically just start looking down lines to look for keywords, in which case you're not really reading for learning anymore. But if you want to hear something kind of scary about this, though, by the way?
So the SATs, chances are we've all taken the SATs. When we were all growing up, the SATs had a reading comprehension section. Basically, it was read five, 750-word passages, answer 10 to 12 questions about each one, off you go. Last year, the SATs moved online. It became a digital version, and we know people can't really read online.
So, what happened is the new reading comprehension test: if your kids take the SATs, instead of having long passages, they will now have 54 single sentences of about 75 words each with one question tied to each sentence. And we're calling that reading comprehension.
So, rather than adapting the tool to fit what we want from our kids, We're adapting our kids to fit to how the tool works and redefining terms that we've been using for decades to mean one thing to mean something much lesser.
So that that actually worries the daylights out of me. I mean, it c it shows you too the they know what you know. They know that kids are saying they can't even pretend that they don't agree with you. There's no hiding it. And one of the scariest things is: so, with all these national and international tests.
We know scores have been going down since 2002, but what we don't know and what people It's hard to find out is that once tests go digital, so like PISA is an international test that went digital in 2015, NEEP went digital by 2022. Any time a test goes digital, scores drop significantly. It's just what we do, we use statistics to do what's called renorming, and we basically hide it.
So if scores are getting worse, you can possibly add on another 5% to 10% worse. That's genuinely what's going on once we move on to screens. We just don't see it. Thank you, statistics.
So, how long has this information been available? Believe it or not, the very first meta-analysis we have on EdTech basically was from 1962. And it has the exact same effect size then as it does today.
So we've known for about six decades that these tools aren't good for learning. But it was really only about the turn of the century that the digital stuff really started showing up. And we're like, look, that was when everyone said it will be better. The new computers will be better. Give us one more year.
Give us more software. And it's just never gotten better. There's a big researcher I work with. His famous quote is: he says, Digital technology is the educational revolution we've been waiting for for 50 years, and we're going to be waiting another 50. It's just not working.
Real American Freestyle is the first ever unscripted pro-wrestling league created by Hulk Hogan, Chad Bronstein, Israel Martinez, and Eric Bischoff to give elite wrestlers a real shot at a professional career. Real American Freestyle is where Olympians, world champions, and NCAA legends come to compete, not in a cage, not in a script, but on the mat in front of fans around the world. This is real wrestling. Reimagine for today. The first event kicks off August 30th in Cleveland, featuring matchups with some of the best wrestlers on the planet.
You've never seen wrestling like this. Learn more at realamericanfreestyle.com. Hi, everyone. It's Brian Kilmead here. Are you tired of those uncomfortable dress shirts, especially when they bunch up under a sweater?
If so, then you must check out Collars and Co., makers of the dress collar polo. Listen up. These shirts are four-way stretch, buttery soft polos with firm dress collars on them.
So they give you the dress shirt look, but extremely comfortable polo feel. You can wear them with anything under a sweater, with a blazer, or by themselves as an elevated polo. They work for any occasion. These polos are perfect, whether it's in the office, on a golf course, or a night out. Collars and Co is exploding and have gone viral on social media thanks to the 1 million investment they received on Shark Tank from Mark Cuban and Peter Jones.
You don't have to worry about collars that flop down and spread out. They stay firm and sure. It's an amazing array of sweaters, quarter zips, pants, and outerwear. If you're looking for the performance dress shirt or polo that looks great all day, check out collarsandco.com. Use promo code BRIAN for 15% off of any purchase of $100 or more.
That's promo code BRIAN. Jared Cooney Horvath is with us now, neurologist and author of The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Tech Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Before we get to the How to Help Them Thrive Again, why do you think there are so many Chromebooks in the school or so many laptops in the school still if these stats are so available? There's two things on that: is one, most people don't have access to the stats or they just don't care about them. But on the back of that, I'd also say data, believe it or not, really never changes minds.
Like, if you think about something like asbestos, we knew for a couple of decades that if you worked with asbestos, you were going to have a chance of cancer much higher than people who didn't work with it. But nobody cared. It was only once we had a mechanism, once researchers came in and said, oh, look, little pieces of asbestos can lodge into your lung, cause tumors, that's the mechanism. That's when people started to change, laws started to happen, things worked.
So I think with a lot of this ed tech data, a lot of people don't know the data and they also don't know the mechanisms. They don't know enough about human learning to recognize why it would be bad.
So they just kind of keep going about their business, assuming because we were told it was good, it's going to be good. And if you want to get really cynical about it, At the end of the day, big tech is big tech. It's a company, and companies exist to make money. I don't fault anyone for that, that's what they do. When they give free Chromebooks, when they give free laptops to kids, it looks as though they're being altruistic.
They're not. What happens is, when you learn on a device, your learning becomes tied to that device. It's an issue called transfer. It becomes very difficult for you to move your learning away from that device.
So, in a very real sense, these people know that if I get students using them now, For the rest of their life, they will be tied to this machine in order to access the learning they did as kids.
So it is a really strong business move on their part to say, hey, every kid needs one of these, and now I've just built basically a lifelong customer. Right, and that's what it's a profit margin. I'm not going to. It is. Yeah.
Uh Okay, the other thing would be: this is just me talking. Is it better for a teacher to go back to a chalkboard? But if you just look at the straight statistics, yes. But it's I think there's a good kind of. Line we can draw here is you've got kind of teacher-led tech and you've got student-facing tech.
Anytime students are using the tech, put it away. It's not working. If a teacher is driving the tech, like we've got a, I don't know, a PowerPoint design or I'm showing you things on a board, so long as I have complete control over what you're seeing and thinking, then we can use these tools effectively.
So I think teachers still have an argument to be made. Good.
Okay.
So tell me how people listening right now, they might even be teachers or principals. Parents, when they have to pick a school, now you have school choice in a lot of these states. How do we get the kids to thrive again? Step one is get tech out of the classroom. I think banning cell phones is step one.
Step two is going to be the wider. We don't need the laptops, we don't need the tablets, that goes away.
So if you're looking at a school, say, one of the first things I look for is do you have a computer lab?
So by all means, we need to teach computer skills. But there's a difference between curriculum and pedagogy. Curriculum is what we teach, pedagogy is how we teach. To say that we need to teach computers, fine. To say we now need to teach all classes, math, English, science, through a computer, That's pedagogy, that's wrong.
So, typically, if a school has a computer lab where we have computers, but they're set up in a very specific space, that means they're very deliberate with tech. That means the teachers are explicitly choosing. Today, we will get up, we will leave our classroom, I've signed us out, we will go use tech.
So, those are the schools that tend to be tech-intentional. You know they're using it well. But any school who's advertising to you, their selling point is every kid gets a laptop. That's one of the worst things we can think of when it comes to student learning.
So, try and walk away from those if you can. And, Jared, what about AI worries you the most, if anything? AI is a production tool. AI is a tool for experts to do what's called offloading.
So think about like I'm a statistician well, not a statistician, I'm a researcher, so I've had to study stats all my life. I can do stats, I just hate doing it. It takes me about two hours to do one stat set. I don't want to do it.
So, what I can do is I can use AI to do that in two minutes instead. But the only reason it works is because I can vet the output immediately. I know so much about the process that as soon as AI spits something out, I can say, yep, that's accurate, or no, that's wrong. Uh-oh, I must have typed in something different. Boom.
So, it's an expert production tool. It is not a learning tool for novices. When you let students use this as a means of trying to achieve expertise, they start offloading skills that they never developed in the first place, which means they will never develop the skill itself.
So, by all means, they can copy and paste what it says to them, but that's not a learning tool.
So, so long as we remember AI is a production tool for experts, not a learning tool for novices, then we can think about when's the best time to bring that up. Should AI be part of the curriculum with the that kids should learn about. No, one of the weirder things about digital tools is they're so wickedly easy that I mean think about it. I'm 40 plus. AI came out three years ago.
I can use it. It's a box. You type words in it. It's not hard.
So if you teach a kid how to use a tool, they'll be able to use that tool, but they won't be able to use any other tool. If instead you teach a kid how to think and learn, and then you bring the tool in, they'll be able to use any tool and they'll be able to adapt.
So the key to adaptation with an unknowable future and changing work structure is a generalized K-12 education. Do not teach kids tools. Teach kids how to think. Then they can adapt that to any tool that comes their way. And AI is potentially going to replace your thinking.
I know it was. Already doing it. Yeah, already when it comes to directions. I used to be really good at directions. I would always check a map before I leave.
I would recognize things.
Now I don't even think about where I'm going. Isn't it crazy? And then if you visit a new city and you use your GPS, you go home and you're like, I couldn't tell you anything about this. I was not paying attention to anything. Yeah.
So I already see how I used to be good with directions, but no one will know it. Because we're all stuck on apps. And I know if I don't have them, I feel lost. And then we redefine it. All of a sudden, we'll redefine good spatial awareness as someone who can use a GPS and we'll never recognize that, no, 20 years ago, that meant something else.
And it meant something much bigger, much more important than the way we're using that term now. And that's my big fear: the more we use tech, we're going to start redefining educational terms into something much less. And all of a sudden, we're going to have a generation that is beneath any other generation before, but we're not noticing it because, hey, at least they're aligning with the tools. And my last question is: are you optimistic that things are changing your direction, that people are understanding? It's not your agenda, these are the facts.
Yes. And that's I think if you Jonathan Heights' The Anxious Generation was kind of that watershed moment where we've been trying for a couple of years to get cellphones out of school and people finally said, oh, we can do that. And I think with that domino falling, Ed tech, this larger ed movement in education, is going to start falling after it.
So I think we're moving in the right direction. I am optimistic. A little bit, isn't it counterintuitive? Progress, progress, progress, right? Horses, cars, you know, planes, make the plane better, make it faster.
Okay, we got the digital devolution, make it better. Give me an iPad, put away the pad, keep your spiral notebook. But all of a sudden, when it comes to learning, hold off.
So that's interesting. It's an anomaly in the way we're used to living life, right? Yeah, and you gotta think all the tools you just mentioned are for adults, they're for experts, they're for us. Kids aren't mini adults. A lot of the times we try and treat kids like they're little us.
They're the same as us, they're just smaller with smaller hands. They are nothing like us. And I think we're forgetting that what it takes to become an effective adult is very different than what it means to be an effective adult. And what we're doing with progress up here doesn't change what they're going to need to do to achieve adulthood humanhood in this realm out here. And superintendents are being pushed to take on this tech.
Is that correct? Yes, absolutely.
Now, it's funny. What you'll see is most of the leaders are the biggest tech advocates.
So, I work primarily in schools, and I would estimate, and this is just a personal estimation, this isn't real data, 70% of the teachers I've worked with are totally over tech. They hate it. They just use it because it's the higher-ups, the people who aren't actually in the classroom. The people without feet on the ground are the ones pushing this. But as soon as you're in a classroom and you're the one who has to deal with the repercussions, ask any teacher who's been in a classroom for longer than 10 years: are your kids doing better or worse today than 10 years ago?
To a man, they will tell you worse.
So the teachers know it's just the leaders who haven't quite figured it out yet. But you did, and thanks so much. Go pick up his book, especially if you're a parent and you're wondering about these same topics, The Digital Delusion, How Classroom Tech Harms Our Kids' Learning. Jared, Cooney, Horvath, thanks so much, Doctor. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Have a good afternoon. All right, great conversation. This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52-episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus.
A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. Listen and follow now at FoxnewsPodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
