We Have to Get AI and Screens Out of Schools and Out of Kids' Hands
Not just to save their brains from the zombies of Big Tech, but to save our country from a descent into the un-human.
If you are the parent of a child in American public school (and many private schools), your child — even your very young child — is probably looking at a screen for much of the day. This is the case even as many parents have limited screen time at home, strictly monitored how screens can be used, or agreed to wait until eighth grade to give their child a smartphone. Once your child is in the classroom, they are probably in screenland, from watching teachers pull up YouTube to playing games as a reward for completing assignments to completing assignments on an iPad to reading textbooks on a Chromebook. That’s tremendously bad for kids’ brains. It may also be creating the kind of attention deficits, apathy, and nihilism that characterize this particular political moment — that threaten democratic governance, have made our country worse, and threaten to make it worse still.
There is a blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal this week about the proliferation of YouTube in schools, and another in the New Yorker about AI companies seeing schools as modern-day goldmines and rushing to wrest control of classrooms. The anecdotes are depressing and dystopian: Hands-on science experiments replaced by videos of other people doing science experiments. Kids with ADHD being required to use iPads, then watching 240 minutes of video per day and seeing their grades fall to failing. Kids without ADHD spending 40% of their educational time scrolling and clicking, with one student watching “more than 1,000 YouTube videos in about 50 days,” and another watching 13,000 in three months. “A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing,” Shalini Ramachandran of the Journal writes. “A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6.” Kids assigned to use AI to make art, and winding up with pornographic Pippi Longstocking. Kids trying to type out essays and getting AI prompts: “Help me write.” “Help me edit.”
Close to 90% of public schools now offer 1:1 devices for students. The vast majority of those are Google Chromebooks — onto which Google’s AI product, Gemini, can reach all of those kids.
And all of this is making it harder for children to learn, and interrupting their very ability to learn. A Harvard study found that AI in the classroom “may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy,” but implored readers to please not discuss their findings using terms like “brain damage.”
Neuroscientist Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, who has co-written several studies on screen use and child brain development, said introducing digital tools too early to children may prevent basic neural networks related to executive functions and language abilities from building. Her research has shown that screen-based learning can interfere with children’s attention. “You know how to push buttons really fast but don’t have the attention level to focus on your teacher,” said Horowitz-Kraus, head of the educational neuroimaging group at Technion, an Israeli university.
A few facts from the WSJ story:
“When a child reads a physical book with an adult, important brain regions fire up. Screen-based stories have the opposite effect.”
“Shared book reading is linked to improved executive function, like faster processing and stronger attention
…but on screen-based stories there’s lower brain activity.”
“Shared book reading activates this area, suggesting that social processes foundational for language and literacy are occurring
…but experiencing the same through a screen shows less activation.”
“More reading time strengthens the neural bridges between this area, known as the brain’s “letter box,” and other important regions
…but screen overuse is associated with decreased interconnectivity with this area.”
“Shared reading is associated with stronger white matter tracts supporting language, literacy and executive functions
…but high screen use is associated with lower organization of white matter tracts.”
AI offers outcome; learning requires a process that AI undermines. YouTube offers quick-hit entertainment; learning requires engagement. AI chatbots mimic emotional intimacy, but largely tell users what they want to hear; they don’t force young people into the messy work of navigating relationships with other people, of learning how to be a human in the world.
This is not to say that all tech is bad. You can learn a lot from YouTube. But it’s not a substitute for actual in-person teaching. Elementary and middle school kids can learn how to type without being issued personal Chromebooks or iPads. A high school student can research with Google and type papers on a word processor without being handed a device with unlimited access to whatever they might prefer to watch in class. And frankly I don’t think AI should be in the classroom at all; AI definitely shouldn’t be used to complete homework (and schools should teach kids early that using AI to write essays or complete assignments will result in a failing grade). Kids don’t need presentations beautified or their essays machine-edited; they need to make decisions on their own, take the time, practice the process, engage with actual people. They need to learn how to learn, not simply how to hand in a completed assignment.
As Jessica Winter asks in her New Yorker piece on AI in schools: “What do you want from this?” Technology has a place in schools. But we should be able to articulate a purpose beyond “it’s inevitable.” Are the technologies in question actually helping students be better thinkers? More creative? Better citizens? More thoughtful or empathetic or logical or curious? Or are they simply helping students do less work to create products that are more pleasing to the adults around them?
The more young people filter life through a screen — the more they can scroll past the boring stuff, use a robot to do the challenging stuff, and disassociate from the humans around them — the less human their lives become. That is a recipe for societal disaster. It is a straight path away from empathy, resilience, and curiosity and toward nihilism.
Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance has a piece out today about the growing acceptance of political violence from the left and the right. Our society is already badly degraded. A large part of that is decades of bad policy that fueled inequality and left a great many people feeling vulnerable. A large part of it is the political polarization fueled by a truly out-of-control far right that has taken over and is driving America into the stone age. But I think it’s hard to deny that the broader social climate is shaped by the country’s media climate — and for most people, the “media climate” is found on the laptops on their desks and small computers in their pockets.
We just crossed a troubling tipping point where violent left-wing plots now outnumber right-wing ones, LaFrance writes. For decades, acts of right-wing violence far outnumbered acts of left-wing violence. That has changed — not hugely, but right-wing violence has decreased while left-wing violence has increased. The two lines finally crossed.
I have my own pet theory as to why right-wing violence is down, and it’s because right-wing extremists have won on many of the issues they committed violence over. They now have the full force of the state behind them, and instead of committing individual acts of violence, they can sit back watch their government behave with extreme cruelty and enact mass immiseration. The abortion clinics they used to bomb and shoot up have closed, leaving women scared and alone. The immigrants they detest are being deported or are in hiding. The African Americans they hate are being politically disenfranchised and the Jews they resent are now a target of some factions of the far left, too.
LaFrance points to broader social conditions that tend to fuel political violence: “highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in civic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the ‘other,’ and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it.” This seems right, too.
But I think something else is going on.
