Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NCE Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Welcome to Family Policy Matters.
It's estimated that American schools spend $100 billion on the education technology industry. But what if classroom technology isn't revolutionizing learning, but undermining it?
Well, that's the question posed by our guest today, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuro. scientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He's conducted research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 1,000 schools worldwide. His new book, The Digital Delusion, draws on extensive research and data and argues that while digital tools promise engagement and personalization, they often erode attention, empathy, and long-term retention.
Well, the book challenges us all to rethink what real learning requires. Dr. Horvath, thank you for joining us today. No, thank you so much for having me on. This will be great.
Yeah, very relevant topic here.
So let's start with defining educational technology so we'll all know what we're talking about here. What we typically say is EdTech is any K through 12 student facing internet connected device. That's a lot of words to basically just say, does your kid have a screen and does it? Does that screen allow them to access the internet? You're looking at EdTech.
Everything will fall under that same basic category.
Okay, well you open your book by making a pretty striking statement. You say our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.
So what evidence do you have that's the case? And why do you think that this is necessarily linked to the use of technology? It's unfortunate, but the evidence is pretty much across the board.
So you pick an aspect. Literacy, numeracy, executive function, basic memory, basic attention, general IQ. Everything we measure at a standardized level in what we'd call cognitive psychology has traditionally gone up. Every generation has been outperforming their parents until Gen Z. It's right around 2004 to 2010, things started to plateau.
And since 2010, they're all now going down. And so that's where you could say, what was the big switch? And the switch seems to be the amount of tech schools we're bringing in correlates pretty heavily with the speed with which those skills are starting to go down. You said 2004 to 2010. And now we're years past that.
We've blamed a lot of this decline on COVID. Do you think COVID just kind of revealed the problem more? Yeah, I think you make a good point. I think what COVID did was open everyone's eyes to the bigger problem, but the drops had started way before COVID. What's scary is COVID may have exacerbated them, but we kept going down even after COVID.
So if COVID made it worse two years post-COVID, we were getting even worse than that. To the points where now, if you just look at straight literacy, numeracy, and science abilities, ninth graders today are performing worse than ninth graders from 1992 when we started measuring this, at least in the U.S.
So I think COVID was the big wake-up call to everyone to say, parents especially, look, this isn't working for my kid. And then no one got rid of the tech. Like, remember, the tech during COVID was supposed to be a band-aid. Everyone just said, well, during school lockdown, we'll use tech, then we'll get rid of it when we come back to school. No one got rid of it.
88% of schools now in the U.S. are one-to-one devices. After COVID, they said, keep the computers, kids. And that's been a very, very bad idea. Wow.
And as we said at the beginning, I mean, this is like. massive amount of money. We're talking about 100 billion for American schools. You said 400 billion across the world.
So if it's not doing well, how did we get all this money thrown at it? This is the biggest question that I have not been able to address. Because if you think about it, every field, we demand valid evidence. If I'm going to take a medicine, I want evidence that that medicine is going to make me better. Every aspect of our life, we demand proof.
And people selling us products will give us that proof until it came to digital technology in schools. The very first one-to-one program starts way back in 2002. But what you're looking at is the first, so when I say one-to-one for the listeners, that's when schools give each kid a laptop.
So it's one kid, one laptop. The first one-to-one devices were given out by Microsoft, not because they had good computers and not because they were thinking about learning, but because they had built a computer, a laptop that nobody bought.
So they said, here's an idea. Why don't we give it for free to schools?
So we can start training kids on our laptops.
So instead of them going to Apple or Mac, they'll become PC students.
So the entire endeavor just started as a business decision. And for whatever reason, I think people believe tech should be very useful, but there's never been anyone to say, stop, prove it. And anytime we try and prove it, it's not working.
So really, the small amount of data we have says this isn't working, but we just keep chasing this dragon. Seems like the last few days I've heard and read so many things about how AI is just going to take over the world. You know, it's eliminating all these jobs. And if you're going to have a job in the future, you better be on AI and understand how to use it.
So what you're saying almost sounds like it's running counter to what would be needed if we're going to be ready to enter the coming world, but it doesn't. Tell us why. What do we need from kids moving forward is we need adaptability. The whole thing is we don't know what's coming next. No one predicted AI three years ago and before that no one predicted the rise of cloud computing.
So we don't know what world our kids are stepping into.
So the question becomes, how do you best prepare someone for something that's unknowable? And the only answer we have and the best answer we've had forever is you teach them how to think and to learn. Rather than teaching them a specific tool, which will quickly become outdated, you teach them how to think and learn and now they can adapt to any tool. And that is what K through 12 education has always been. We've been a general education, not because we're training you to do anything specific.
I'm not teaching you history because I expect you to become a historian. We're teaching you these things because we're teaching you how to think through knowledge in a way that allows you to adapt and solve problems.
So now whatever the world throws at you, you know how to adapt. And that's what every generation has been really, really good at. Like take our generation, man. No one taught us computers. I can use it just fine.
No one taught me AI. I can use it just fine because you taught me how to solve problems. School has quickly been morphed into a tools-based institution. Where now we're teaching kids how to use computers, how to use AI. And the more you teach them a specific tool, as soon as that tool evolves, their skills become obsolete.
So we have what's called the ICILS. It's the only international test that looks at digital literacy around the world. Between 2013 and 2023, the percentage of kids who are digitally competent, not even good at it, just competent, has dropped 21%, even though the percentage of kids who are explicitly taught how to use computers in schools has gone up over 570%.
So we're spending more and more and more time on these computers to pump out kids who are less and less and less adaptable and ready for the world. And that's what happens when you turn school into a tools-based institution. Believe it or not, the best kids coming out of schools are coming out of the schools that are tech-free schools, like Waldorf schools. Where they're just taught to think and learn. Those are the ones who are sailing at college and immediately hireable afterward as well.
How is it different then? Why is it so much different to learn from or through a computer than it is to learn without technology? And it's a great question. There are dozens of mechanisms, unfortunately, so we can't go through them all. But if you want to say kind of the underlying principle is this, the reason why we're so good at what we do is we have mechanisms that help us learn from each other and the world around us.
We are biologically built to learn in a very specific way. And it's no accident that school looks the way it has. For thousands of years, we've been honing down the edges on what does it look like to move this learning process along. Tech, unfortunately, circumvents a lot of those biological mechanisms.
So let's just consider two, right? Memory. One of the biggest aspects of human memory is space. Where in three-dimensional space did something happen? That becomes a massive aspect of human memory.
Now, think about a book. A book has an unchanging three-dimensional location until this book I'm holding right now burns into dust. The word purchase will be 10% of the way through. Left page, top left-hand side, it ain't going nowhere. That becomes part of my memory.
So, if you're an average reader, you know this. As soon as you finish a book, you might not know verbatim every word you read, but you will certainly know where in the book everything happened. That's memory.
Now, imagine reading that same thing on a screen. All of a sudden, I'm scrolling, and the word purchase starts at the bottom of the screen, goes through the middle, passes out the top. There is no three-dimensional location. An entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped.
So, this is why, if you do nothing different in your life besides read on a piece of paper versus a screen, you learn more, comprehend better, understand longer from the paper than the screen. Or take the idea of empathy. Arguably, one of the biggest drivers we have of learning that we know of is human empathy.
So, what empathy is, is it's resonance between two pairs of biology. In a very real sense, if you and I start to empathize right now, our hearts will start to beat at the same time. We will start to breathe at the same time, we'll blink simultaneously, our brains will start to look almost the same way. When a kid and a teacher synchronize, Learning soars. And that's one of the biggest drivers we have.
Now, what can't you do over a screen? You cannot synchronize with another human being.
Now, there are some ways to kind of get around it, but by no means can you ever synchronize with an AI because there's no heart to beat with, there's no breathing to do with the machine.
So, another entire aspect of human memory gets dumped.
So, when you remember that human beings have evolved to learn from other human beings, now we can say, does this tool help that process or does it circumvent it? And almost exclusively, it appears to be circumventing it. Let's talk about some specifics as far as that is concerned.
So, is it possible then that people who say, I'm terrible at learning languages or I can't do math, and they've been trying to learn it on a digital platform, that if they tried it a different way, they might discover they're better at it than they thought? Yes, and especially as you get older, too, a lot of learning problems are between the ears rather than actual biological. Things become hard when we're young, and so we start to tell ourselves we can't. Can't do it. My wife's a great example.
She was never a mathematician. She lived with me for two years. I say, can you just give me 20 minutes a night? She goes, sure. I taught her math.
Why? Because as you get older, you have a little bit more comfort in the discomfort. You have a little bit more ability to allow yourself to struggle without taking it too personally. But it only worked largely because her and I were doing it together. Exactly as you said.
If I had popped her on Duolingo or whatever the math equivalent of that is, no, those become games. We play the games, but we don't actually take the knowledge from those games back into the real world, which is why you can read those things where people say, I've spent 1200 days streak on Duolingo and you take them to an Italian restaurant and say, all right, speak Italian. They go, I don't know anything. It's because they weren't doing learning. They were just engaging and feeling good about the learning.
At the end of the day, learning feels slightly uncomfortable. As you get older, we can handle that a little bit more. But realistically, isn't that what a good teacher does? They empathize with students. They make them feel good and they help the confidence.
They help carry them through in a way. That just a machine has no ability to do.
Okay, so you're not arguing, though, that all technology is harmful, right? I mean, some tools have been proven to be helpful.
So, how can educators and parents think wisely about technology and choose what will work best? There has been no technology that's proven well. There's been a couple use cases of technology that have proven beneficial. But I think the best thing to think of is two big things moving forward: one, tech has to be highly controlled.
So if you're going to allow tech in your school, and by all means, like if you want to teach kids coding, you're going to need tech. If you want to teach kids Photoshop, you'll probably need a computer. But we go back to the days of having a computer lab, where rather than the computer is the default and everyone has access to it 24-7, there is a specific spot in the school where we run those classes.
So we bring rigor and friction back into tech. It's not an easy choice.
So if you want to learn it, you have to learn it in a specific way. And I think that moving past that, we just go back to this kind of concept of evidence. If you are a school, if you are a teacher, if you're a parent and you want to use one of these devices or one of these programs coming out, just ask for independently verified evidence, just like you would in any other aspect of your life. Where is the proof that this is going to benefit learning? Engagement, not fun learning.
And what you'll see is 99% of the time they cannot give you that evidence. And if you don't have evidence that it's better than what you're doing today, don't do it. Don't be the guinea pig. Our kids are not beta testers, and our kids did not go to school to help tech companies figure out whether or not their tools work. They went to school to learn.
And our job is to make sure they're getting the best learning they can.
So interesting. Thank you so much. And speaking of that evidence, if a parent wants to go and look this up, say look at your research, what are some ways that they can find what you've done? The new book is called The Digital Delusion, and you can find that basically anywhere online. That has all the evidence data mechanisms like this one.
You could also look at us up online at lmeglobal.net.
So that's learning made easy. And there we put videos about learning. We put papers that I've written, articles, stuff as well.
So just another really good free resource for people to kind of tap into. Thank you very much, Dr. Jared Horvath, author of The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Thank you so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
