What’s good for entertainment is bad for learning

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, and I almost never review non-fiction. The Digital Delusion is a book I felt I had to make an exception for, because it is a book in whose subject matter I have both a personal interest and a professional obligation. As a teacher with a responsibility for pedagogical standards, I have seen firsthand the incursion of digital technology into the classroom and the ever-expanding wave of digital evangelists promoting (for most, read: selling) the next app and next promise of transformative results. Jared Cooney Horvath makes a compelling case that EdTech has successfully transformed our children’s education, but that the transformation has been unequivocally negative. For him, ‘we gave students laptops and took away their brains’.

There is far too much in The Digital Delusion for me to comprehensively outline in a short review, so let me pick out some of the things that resonated most powerfully for me as pedagogue and parent.

To begin by establishing two fundamentals, this is not a book that opposes the teaching of technology, or computing, or AI, or VR, or digital media, or anything else. What it opposes is the teaching of everything else through technology. If we acknowledge the educational benefits of children learning about these matters, great. Make them part of the curriculum and have them taught by specialist teachers at designated times and with the best resources the school can provide – just like every other subject.

Equally, Cooney Horvath foregrounds the obvious, and empirically proven, fact that learning not only isn’t easy, it shouldn’t be easy. And that when it feels easy, it probably isn’t taking place. Rigour, challenge, repetition, struggle, resilience, time, sustained focus, reflection: these are the ingredients of long-lasting acquisition of knowledge and skill. Yet we know that digital devices deliberately work to counter these self-evident elements of real learning.

Let’s run through a few of the scientifically proven ways in which EdTech works against the human brain. First, we know that we can only learn what we attend to. We also know that the human attentional system is extremely limited; we can only pay attention to a tiny quantity of information at any given time if we want to hold it in our working memory long enough to encode it and then store it long term. Because of this fact, we also know that multitasking is not something the brain can do, and attempting to do it is perhaps the worst thing we can do when trying to learn. Yet schools are increasingly trying to get students to learn by placing in their hands devices that we all use primarily for passively consuming fast-paced media content, usually while switching between content or having multiple tabs on the go at any one time. Good for entertainment; bad for learning.

Second, we have known  for a long time that we retain information better when reading from paper rather than from a screen. Evidence now shows that we do so because memories are multi-faceted and phenomenologically situated. When we make a memory, the space and time surrounding the piece of information we remember are part of the memory and part of what allows us to remember. Hence, when we want to remember text and/or image, being able to physically situate that material in 3-dimensional space (like a physical book) allows us to remember much more effectively than when working from a 2-dimensional screen.

Third, we have data stretching back over many decades that shows us that one of the most proven indicators of learning is human connection. Put very simply, humans have evolved to learn from other humans, not from screens. We learn better when we feel cared for and trusted by those teaching us. We learn better in environments where our teacher can and does pick up on our feelings, with a teacher who can tell whether our failure to grasp something is due to lack of knowledge, tiredness, frustration, anxiety, the fact we were gazing adoringly at another person in class, or any of the myriad other personal things that impact our learning. No AI tutor can do that. And in a world where we know that social media and tech addiction are making young people feel more isolated and more unhappy, it is at best spurious and at worst knowingly cynical for tech evangelists to say that conventional education is what’s failing our children, and that the solution to the problems born of technology is more technology.

Ultimately, The Digital Delusion convincingly argues that any notion that we are preparing our children for the future by getting them to do all their work on tablets or laptops, and by using the latest gamified learning apps, is not just fallacious, but actively harmful. Where so much EdTech promotion is based on anecdote, Cooney-Horvath builds an argument on decades’ worth of research, and simply encourages that as educators, school leaders and parents, we demand a reasonable baseline for what happens in our schools: is there hard, consistent evidence that a new tool improves learning and leads to the kind of deep thinking and transferable skills and knowledge that we all aim for as people invested in the development of young lives? If not, it has no place in our classrooms.

I am blessed to work in a school where teachers have the prerogative to use EdTech only as and when they feel its implementation serves their pedagogical purpose. Because what we know works in formal education is the formation of human relationships and the judicious use of knowledge and resources by skilled professionals who care about the young people in their charge.

This review has failed to do justice to the scope and detail of Cooney Horvath’s book, for which I apologise. All I can say is that if you are a parent, a child, an educator or someone with an interest in doing the best by future generations, get hold of a copy of The Digital Delusion.