Over the past few Sunday mornings, I was part of a soul-care cohort at our church. Repeatedly, the pastor leading the class would ask, “How is your soul?”
At the start, he gave us a self-assessment to take that left many of us feeling frantic, frazzled by our own answers and our sense of urgency around improvement. Pastor Steve, sensing the frenetic energy in the room, gently called us back to the present, reminding us to slow down, pay attention, and ask God what he wants us to see and how we can invite him here.
Don’t jump too quickly to trying to solve everything at once, he’d say.
When I write about technology in schools, I often need to give myself the same reminder. This is a conversation that can’t be simplified. We can’t go back to the edtech of the 1990s, to Oregon Trail and typing class (which, ironically, seems to be missing in much of education today) and computers limited as a tool to use then set aside to go play outside.
As one secondary teacher told me, it’s important that we teach students how to use technological tools—managing projects, checking due dates, and professionally communicating via email—to ensure they are prepared for college and career. Indeed, we all need to learn how to use digital technology responsibly. But it’s become so ubiquitous in primary education that responsibility feels out of reach.
It’s tempting to either give up and stop resisting or veer into full-blown panic about the academic outcomes we’re seeing in many American schools. How are we supposed to prepare our children for a tech-infused future we can’t comprehend? Do we resign ourselves to a post-literate, post-numerate future where machines do all our thinking?
I’ve spent nearly a decade dealing with school tech as a mother and half a decade considering it on the national scale as a journalist. If those years have taught me anything, it’s that we need to slow down.
We implemented tech-forward education with little thought for the consequences, dreaming about what could be possible instead of carefully discerning what would be wise. Now we solve each tech problem with a new tech solution, layering program on program and screen on screen and disregarding how poorly many of these solutions play out in real life, at real schools, for real children.
It’s also tempting to point fingers. Responsibility for our school tech woes isn’t evenly distributed, but it’s not the bad behavior of just one group that got us here. Educational technology, or edtech, companies use lobbyists to sell their products to states and schools. Districts buy iPads for kindergartners because, well, everyone else is doing it and it’s one way to manage a too-large class of 26 kids. Teachers use virtual quizzes to save time and assign virtual textbooks because that’s what the school district purchased for them. Students cheat and take shortcuts to get through rote work in glitchy programs on their school-issued devices. And parents are often left in the dark, unaware of or ambivalent about how much time at school is spent on screens—perhaps because we have similar habits ourselves.
Slow down, pay attention, and ask God what he wants us to see and how we can invite him here.
I’m writing this article in an old church turned coffee shop in Battle Ground, Washington. I’m spending a few days out here with my elderly grandfather, caring for him after he took a fall. He is 96 and doesn’t have internet or good cell service at the house, so I used Google to find the closest coffee shop with Wi-Fi. (The glories of technology!)
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I didn’t expect to walk into an old church. But here I am, and on the first Sunday of Advent. Christmas carols are playing from the speaker mounted in the loft where the choir used to sing. It’s a little sad, but as I listen to the girls behind me discuss what passage from 1 John they want to study in their Bible class, I think, God is still here, even if this place looks nothing like what its old parishioners knew.
Tech has transformed—and in some ways, ruined—my children’s education. Similar to the old church, their schooling looks nothing like what I expected. Sometimes, when I think about it too long, I spin myself into a tizzy, worried and anxious about many things (Luke 10:41). But God is still here too.
The girls behind me settle on 1 John 4: “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is the world,” one reads, sitting on a couch where the pulpit used to be (v. 4). She goes over the whole chapter aloud.
In sending his only Son Jesus, God “showed his love among us,” it says in verse 9. In Advent, we anticipate that coming: the Word made flesh. Embodied. Incarnational. Not God in a spiritual or digital form, but God who sits at the table and laughs with you. God at a coffee shop, if you will.
And maybe that is the invitation, the answer to all our worries about tech. People are still hungry for real, human connection. I see that need all around me, and even many who work with technology and love it more than I do see the need too.
Recently I spoke to Ginger Schantz, who operates a tech education center, Venture Robotics, in Midland, Texas, with her husband, Dann. “The students we have worked with value the relationship more than the technology lessons,” she told me. “The students always want to be around Dann. Yes, they like our gadgets, but the shine wears off after a while and they just like talking to him and the other kids that are there.”
This is what 1 John 4:7 requires of us: to love one another. In our time, that must include—as often as possible—turning away from the machines and back to the moment. Back to the living and breathing, complicated and curious person sitting across the table from us—or across the classroom.
Last week, I stopped by my daughter’s high school and noticed a series of colorful, student-made research posters hanging in a hallway, a scene more common on an elementary campus than a campus like this. Each delved into the history, geography, and culture of a different country.
I spent a few minutes chatting with the principal, and when I remarked on how good it was to see that work, the principal told me it was there by popular demand: Last year’s student surveys revealed a weariness with online work, so with her encouragement, teachers were doing more offline again. I imagined the scene in the classroom where those posters were made: students talking as they worked, sharing markers and ideas and jokes.
Just down the hall was an English room, where my daughter’s class was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud. A few doors past that, in the intro to engineering class, the students were building bridges and testing them for strength, competing among themselves with the good-natured intensity only 15-year-old boys can muster.
Perhaps technology has changed everything. But walking through the halls that afternoon reminded me that it hasn’t changed what it means to be human. God is still here, still wiring humans for connection and presence. Maybe we’ve gone too fast and too far in the wrong direction, but it isn’t too late to slow down and pay attention, turning toward one another instead of toward machines.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
