There was an assumption, bordering on religious tenet, that computers and smartphones giving students constant access to the internet would put all of human knowledge at their fingertips at any moment, and this was going to change everything for the better. Accordingly, much of what was considered valuable in education changed. From such banal skills as handwriting to higher order skills such as reading books or knowing how to do math calculations, smartphones made them unnecessary and superfluous.
After all, who needs to write when the future is keyboards? Who needs to know math when the phone can calculate any problem a thousand times faster? Who needs to read a book (ugh, boringo) when you can google its synopsis, boiling thousands of pages into a sentence or two? Maybe school children do?
The decline in test scores started well before the pandemic, around 2012. One obvious culprit is smartphones, which became popular just as test scores started to decline. Since 2017, I’ve been doing research on what smartphones do to our mental health, and I recently started to study how they affect academic performance. The negative impact of smartphones on learning is one reason many school districts have instituted a bell-to-bell ban on smartphones in K-12 education, including all public schools in New York State, which also banned students’ personal laptops, tablets and smart watches.
I’ve long been a fan of Jean Twenge, who recognized that we’re enduring an epidemic of narcissism long before anyone else realized it. She was right then, but is she right now?
These days, nearly every middle and high school student — and a good number in the elementary grades as well — brings a laptop or tablet to school and uses it at home for homework.
Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.
Much of the still controversial discussion is whether students should be allowed to have their smartphones during the school day. For reasons that elude me, a surprising number of parents insist that they need the ability to be in constant contact with their children, including during classes, “just in case.” Just in case of what? Did students and parents not manage, and manage quite well, to survive before smartphones existed? Was the lack of constant communication a societal problem that needed to be fixed? Apparently, some parents think so.
But not all parents. Even worse, the problem isn’t just the smartphone, but the school provided computer handed out like crack to addicted students.
Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.
In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves — picture being a teenager in math class trying to concentrate on sine and cosine while sitting behind that display of flesh. It is disturbing on a number of levels.
But isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to make sure their children are using computers responsibly? (This, of course, assumes that watching porn during math class is not responsible student computer usage. Your mileage may vary.)
If tablets and laptops are behind even a small portion of the decline in academic performance, parents and educators will need to work together to find solutions. At the moment, parents are virtually powerless: They can’t install parental control software on school devices. Nevertheless, many districts try to foist responsibility back onto parents by telling them, as my children’s district does, that “there is no substitute for parental supervision. Be knowledgeable of what sites your child goes to online.” How, exactly, are we supposed to do that when we can’t install control software and given that it’s not possible to hover over our teenagers every minute?
The point is not to deny students either the ability to take advantage of the breadth of human knowledge available on the internet, or to learn how to use computers and smartphones to effectively access this information, but to prevent constant access to computers and smartphones from significantly impairing education.
In the comments to Twenge’s op-ed, teachers noted that students can no longer write by hand (forget writing in script, as those days are long gone) because they lack the muscles to do so. They can’t write notes, even if they knew how to take notes or were inclined to do so, because wielding a pen or pencil is beyond their skillset. But they can text like crazy. Perhaps that’s a more important skill for the future than handwriting, but once the skills of the past are lost, can we get them back if it turns out that the glorious future of computers isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?
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When I was in first grade, we were taught the letters of the alphabet, and how to print them. Second grade, we started memorizing the multiplication tables. Cursive was taught in third grade. But then, I’m almost as old as dirt.
My daughter went to Montessori pre k through middle school (junior high to me–remember I’m old). She was reading at age 4 (Chevrolet off the back of a pickup–mispronouncing it but still—-). Computers were used in some classes; phones were out of sight, or collected during class, depending on the teacher. Double major, cum laude in both as an undergrad. She is now in grad school and working as a TA.
That indicates to me it isn’t smart devices responsible for the decline in education, it’s the system.
I think my Twitter comments on this were buried by the Nazi’s algorithm, probably because I called Charles CW Cook a slimy limey disingenuous little fuck who should self-deport if he hates Americans and our values so much.
So I thought I’d take my comments to this temple, this very Mecca to free independent thought, truly the last redoubt of heterodoxy. Oh my, there’s the shrine to Andrew Sullivan! It doesn’t matter that his pimping of Charles Murray’s work polluted our discourse with junk race science, it doesn’t matter that real scholars like Clark Glymour showed Charles Murray’s use of statistics was total BS and people like you didn’t care a whit, and it doesn’t matter that we are dealing now with a resurgent American Nazi movement whose members wield significant power high up in the Federal government. Because it’s not about the truth or about the real world consequences of misinformation here in this holiest of holies. No, it’s about the kind of heterodoxy that prizes disagreeing with consensus in provocative ways over every other possible consideration. But I digress.
I have to congratulate you Scott. It truly takes a careful, rigorous thinker like you to never once mention “rampant gun massacres in schools” as a possible reason parents may want their kids to have continual access to a phone. You know these hysterical, emotionally-reasoning parents (women, amirite?): these people too stupid to appreciate all the amazing lawyering in Heller probably saw what happened in Uvalde. All those wannabe cowboy cops, standing around so still their spurs didn’t even jingle-jangle-jingle, too scared to go inside while an armed psychopath with unfettered access to them was roaming the halls pumping lead into their children’s bodies. And these hysterics, who didn’t even read the second amendment while this was happening, thought in their stupid sheep-like way “gee, I sure hope that doesn’t happen in my child’s school. But if it did, I’d like for there to be a way to reach my kid.” And it’s possibly these weak dummies who might want their kids to have continual access to a phone.
It’s totally understandable why the petty concerns of these non-heterodox and possibly even woke (pause for scream) would elude you. But may I gently suggest that it would strengthen your essay a bit if you would remember that the way things are now can indeed be very different from the way things used to be, sometimes even in significant and material ways.
Now I’m off to see the Ta-Nahesi Coates effigy to piss on it. The man was never once heterodox! Trying to jam his unique perspective down our throats informed by his experience as a black man in America. Middle aged white boomer perspective: the true heterodoxy!
WTF did I read, and is this hallucinogen legal in Oregon?
More on point the iPad children are not learning the skills needed. Coloring on paper with a crayon develops the motor skills to write. For that matter children raised on touchscreen devices don’t understand basic computer concepts like directories. Some responsibility should fall on parents but the school system is also to blame for not teaching these skills early on. My children were learning to write in preschool and kindergarten and are both capable of using a pen as well as typing. Then again they didn’t have pervasive phones and tablets until middle school. While I try to avoid technical solutions to management problems, better web filters and limiting phones and electronics in class would address the watching videos and social media problem. It would also probably cause an explosion in 504 plans, since that was how we ensured a diabetic child had access to their glucose monitor
It’s bad enough that incoherent lunatics believe they’re witty, but most they always be so verbose and tedious? I don’t know how you suffer this, Scott.
If you can’t deal with the substance, bitch about the style. Tried and true.
A heightened risk of a school shooting is a rational reason for parents to want children to have access to phones in class. This, astonishingly, “eluded” Scott. This part of his essay can be summed up as “it didn’t seem to be necessary before, therefore it’s not necessary now.” Shallow, perfunctory reasoning. And in general, Scott’s glaring blind spots, combined with his tendency to lecture others for not thinking carefully, are a source of endless delight to me. Hence my having a little fun in the post. Now that it’s also pissed off the Scott clones in the comments, I’m off to chew some doublemint!
The substance is so nonsensical that it requires no “dealing.” The probability of a child being involved in a school shooting is negligible, even if there may be some hysterical parents who fear it more than they care about their children being educated.
But this is more a facile excuse employed by idiots to play upon emotions, nothing that any serious person would take seriously. Enjoy your doublemint and try not to fall off your unicorn.
Your touching compassion for the problems faced by today’s parents aside, your argument raises two interesting points: (1) “risk” is a function of both cost and probability. I invite you to see that people with children in public schools may consider the cost of a school shooting rather…astronomical. There are many legal barriers to implementing obvious solutions to reduce the frequency of the shootings. And here we see sneering at reasonable efforts to reduce the cost. (2) Why are you the one making this argument? Why isn’t Scott making this argument in his essay? It’s flabbergasting, reaching that part of the piece where Scott sneers “what case?” He REALLY can’t think of the #1 “case” parents are worried about? Wow. Conveniently spares him from putting into writing what you just wrote. Because surely, a stronger essay would deal with the number 1, most obvious objection to Scott’s dismissal of the need for phones. Even if to show that the obvious objections are actually frivolous! The reader wonders: maybe Scott hasn’t thought this through? The suspicious reader (me) wonders: maybe Scott *has* thought this through.
I appreciate irony and sarcasm, but I prefer it to be more biting. Yours is all bark.
Not a clone. Murray is all junk. I’m cool with his mayor being a self-proclaimed socialist. I’m more than angry at the current state of things like you. But you stupidly tried to fight fire with fire here. “Times are different now than before” is the inverse of “we didn’t need them before, why would we need them now?” Shallow and perfunctory both, not that this minor point has much to do with the main topic. You took a throwaway line and blew it up because it ruffled your feathers, but the post isn’t about you and how you don’t like SHG very much at all.
My perfunctory response to your tangent is just give ’em dumb phones if you’re so worried. Hopefully it’s a compromise leaving no one happy. But then that reflects my own experience in high school, which then makes me little different than SHG in saying “we didn’t need smartphones then, why now?” It’s easy to slip into.
“To business. ‘Tux Dude extended his hand. ‘I am Prometheus.’ I was too surprised to shake. ‘The fire-stealer guy?The chained-to-the-rock-with-the-vultures guy?’ Prometheus winced. He touched the scratches on his face.’Please, don’t mention the vultures. But yes, I stole fire from the gods and gave it to your ancestors. In return, the ever merciful Zeus had me chained to a rock and tortured for all eternity.”
Rick Riordan
150 years ago in my neck of the woods a man who didn’t know how to saddle and ride a horse and track wild game was as useless as a functional illiterate today (unless he was a lawyer, a judge or a pastor). Today most folks don’t know how to ride but the kids get driver education in every school. In the 1960’s we used slide rules to calculate roots and logaithims. In the 70’s science teachers were banning hand held calculators. By the 1980’s physics and chemistry classes required students to have them. In the 19th century a college education required Greek and Latin. Today it requires Windows, Word and Excel. Soon the kids will be taught how to optimize searches with AI. AI.Times change. The Genie is out of the bottle. The same technology that enabled humans to print bibles was used to print kiddie porn. It is up to teachers and parents to regulate the technology and make sure it is used for good, not evil, notwithstanding the foolishness of teenagers. We need to teach kids how to optimize the use cell phones, not ban them.
I remeber asking why he didn’t get multi-tools and my dad used to tell me when a tool does multiple functions, the odds go way up that it won’t do any of them well.
The chromebook is the public school mult-tool. In our district, they billed them as absolutely critical after COVID hit, because students must be able to connect and get their education even if they can’t attend school together. Should that matter years later? I’ll have that convo with the TSA as I take off my shoes, but lest we digress….
The ability to get rid of the chromebooks became complicated when districts like ours went to digital books (subscriptions are expensive, but the cover doesn’t rip as easy) and Google Classroom made sending emails to parents with assignments a daily option for them to ignore.
Which is to say that the addition of these devices created incentives, which in turn make it hard to remove them. It’s a mess. And unfortunately, the adults making the decisions typically are doing so after pitches, but don’t use the machines themselves.
I don’t know the best path forward, but I know that it wasn’t at all as obvious as it is now that this was going to be a massive problem when they first touted the notion of chomebooks for kids.
And that’s telling me that the solution is probably not going to be obvious, either.
That said, there are certain functions that smartphones SHOULD make “unnecesary and suoerfluous” and calculations are one of them.
(Teaching with computers – from Conrad Wolfram)
[hey, it’s Tuesday and our host can’t do math that isn’t dividing by 3, I’ll take my chances with a link]