Tech-centric education threatens children’s critical thinking, attention skills, mom argues 

Forget the usual debates about technology and screens in learning – the real issue involves its long-term effects in forming “a childhood,” a recent commentator argues. 

“My own children are in seventh and ninth grade now, and they’ve never experienced a single day of school without working on a screen. Yes, even in kindergarten. Yes, even before they could read,” writes Carrie McKean for Christianity Today. 

“In fact, I’ve never been able to determine exactly how much time my children spend on screens during the school day. They’ve never gone to a school where computers were relegated to a lab. This is the new normal in most American schools.” 

McKean explores some of her own experiences with tech-based education, arguing it fails to “foster capacity for critical thinking or sustained attention” – crucial skills for the next generation to develop. 

“Flashcards don’t offer dopamine hits” 

Instruction in language arts and mathematics changed drastically from McKean’s generation to her children’s. 

For example, her youngest primarily learned to read not through books, but by “clicking randomly on words in a reading practice game,” she writes. 

“Once, I asked what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘after you click the wrong word three times, it tells you the answer and then lets you play the game!’” 

When McKean tried using traditional learning techniques such as paper flashcards for multiplication practice, “the screen always won” over such tools, she lamented. “Flashcards don’t offer dopamine hits.” 

As her children entered higher grade levels, “schoolwork was so heavily online that even a failed math test couldn’t easily be reviewed,” she observed. 

“After all, ‘show your work’ isn’t possible when the work is done on scratch paper that’s tossed or lost after answers are entered online.” 

However, if parents tried to push back, the school responded online tests were required “to prepare students for mandatory, state-standardized testing – also all online. (Here in Texas, those scores have significant ramifications for school ratings and teacher pay.)” 

“Real-time experimentation on our children’s minds” 

The COVID-19 pandemic helped promote a tech-based learning system as “a decision of necessity,” similar to World War II helping the growth of shelf-stable, processed foods, according to McKean. 

“As staples like flour and sugar were rationed, alternatives like condensed milk and spam were introduced to provide a facsimile of normalcy,” McKean notes. “But then the war ended, and we were still eating Wonder Bread with margarine and imagining it would build strong bodies.” 

In the same way, educational leaders nationwide need to re-evaluate the tech-centric culture infiltrating classrooms since 2020, according to McKean. 

“There’s only so much that individual educators can do when all the resources and directives from their states, districts, and administrators push them toward a digital-first approach,” she argues. “Our whole nation is engaged in real-time experimentation on our children’s minds, and the results aren’t looking good.”