Jared Cooney Horvath has spent more than 15 years studying how people learn, and he reaches a stark conclusion. In his new book, The Digital Delusion, the neuroscientist argues that the rise of educational technology has coincided with a troubling reversal in cognitive development, and he is urging schools to drastically cut their use of digital devices.
Amid global campaigns for smartphone bans in schools and social media restrictions for under-16s, Horvath is now raising the alarm about a less visible issue: the educational technology embedded in classrooms. A former teacher, he says screens and digital tools are undermining how children learn and develop.
‘This might be one of the hardest truths our generation has to face,’ he writes in the book. ‘Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.’ He adds: ‘For nearly two centuries, the west experienced steady generational progress. Each new cohort of children grew up, on average, healthier, happier, and better educated than the last. Until now.’
Around the year 2000, according to Horvath, something shifted. ‘Across the west, IQ scores began to fall – even as time spent in school kept rising,’ he writes. Scores on international tests also started to decline. ‘The answer lies in the meteoric rise of educational technology.’
The financial scale of that rise is considerable. A recent Department for Education report found that the UK’s educational technology, or edtech, market generated annual turnover of about £6.5bn. In the US, Horvath says, it is a $400bn (£295bn) mega-industry, woven into every aspect of schooling.
He acknowledges that progress has been made on screen-based childhood issues. ‘We’ve been making some incredible strides on the screen-based childhood stuff which even two years ago, I did not think was going to happen as fast as it did,’ he said. ‘But it’s not just about getting rid of screens for entertainment. It’s about reducing them as much as possible for academic learning as well if we want our kids to have deep transferrable knowledge in our heads.’
Horvath, who lives in the US, notes that the uptake of laptops in schools began in earnest in 2010-12. ‘It’s when Covid hit, that’s when every school had to pivot digital as a Band-Aid … rightly so. Better to have something than nothing,’ he said. ‘But when Covid finished you would assume they’d rip that Band-Aid off, but the vast majority of schools didn’t. They just stayed digital.’ In the US, 88% of school districts now have one-to-one computers, he said. In the UK, Covid had a similar impact.
Horvath, who has been studying how people learn for over 15 years, has concluded that “tech is not a very good tool for it.” He cites scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which runs every three years and tracks the academic performance of 15-year-olds across dozens of countries. In 2012, 2015 and 2018, Pisa asked students how much time they spent using digital devices during a typical school day. ‘The more time students spent on screens at school, the further their scores fell,’ Horvath said. ‘On average, those who used computers for more than six hours per day scored 66 points lower than their peers who didn’t use them at all.’
Some experts, however, warn against confusing correlation with causation. Rose Luckin, emerita professor of learner-centred design at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London and a recognised expert on AI in education, offered a more measured view. ‘[Horvath] does get certain things right,’ Luckin said. ‘It’s true that a great deal of educational technology was sold on promises rather than proof. We did not have a huge amount of evidence. But that does not mean that all educational technology is problematic.’ On the Pisa data, she added: ‘In terms of that Pisa data, if you look at it on computer use and outcomes, actually moderate school device use is associated with better results than no school device use. It’s just that the heaviest daily use is the worst.’
Daisy Christodoulou, director of education at the educational technology startup No More Marking, agrees that society has been ‘a bit blase’ about the impact of many new technologies. ‘We are seeing across the board now a bit of a corrective, where people are realising that,’ she said. ‘But I would probably be a little bit more optimistic [than Horvath] about the potential for technology and AI in upper secondary.’ Christodoulou noted that screens have not had as big an impact in classrooms in England as in the US. ‘But I feel like there’s enough here that we should be thinking about it. I think it’s a bit blase to go, “nothing to see here”, move on please’.’
Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, said technology might indeed be harming achievement, but the evidence is not conclusive. ‘Technology may well be harming student achievement but the correlational studies that we currently have cannot support such causal claims,’ he said. ‘And there are many well-designed studies that show that technology can have a positive impact on student achievement. So the question, “Does edtech have a negative impact on learning?” does not have a simple yes/no answer: sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. The question we need to be asking is, “when does edtech help learning?” And the answer is, “it’s complicated”.’
For Horvath, the path forward is to reduce screens as much as possible. Yet as the experts note, the question of when edtech helps or harms learning is not simple. Dylan Wiliam’s assessment may be the most apt: ‘it’s complicated’.
