Over the course of one summer at my little public elementary school in White Deer, Texas, a dusty, catchall storage room under the gym bleachers was transformed into what we children came to know as a magical portal to a new world.
It was 1989. Our community was mostly farmers and ranchers, and personal computers weren’t yet commonplace. The new computer lab, we were told, would equip us for the future.
I remember those early computer classes as both a novelty and the highlight of my week. I was cracking 50 words per minute on the typing test and dodging dysentery on the Oregon Trail—basically a technological savant! Sometimes, when we’d saved the day’s assignment to our floppy disks, our teacher would even let us play the snake game.
Even that teacher, I suspect, had no idea how technology would transform education over the next 30 years, upending decades of norms and best practices as schools chose to believe software companies’ offers of instant solutions to their trickiest problems. Too many kids in a classroom? Don’t worry—this program will help you meet children where they are! Kids bored with repetitive practice of foundational skills? We’ve turned it into a game so learning is fun!
And the transition to tech-based primary education has only accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. If my computer lab in 1989 is still what comes to mind when you envision computers in schools, I’ve got some bad news.
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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. 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.
This is especially prevalent in large public schools. Walk into a public elementary classroom today, and there’s a good chance you’ll see most of the children wearing headphones and working alone on devices. While screens direct the larger group, the teacher will pull small groups for one-on-one practice and instruction.
It’s not hard to understand why this happens: Teachers with overcrowded classrooms can at least try to individuate instruction for students with different skills and needs. And it certainly gives teachers all sorts of data, immediately grading quizzes, plotting progress, and grouping kids by mastery. Under the hand of a skilled teacher, this can unlock new opportunities to customize instruction.
But what else does it do? Let’s set aside, for a moment, bigger questions about what all this technology is doing to children’s brains and whether most children can effectively learn on screens. How does it shape an average day in an average school in an average student’s life? Those days add up. They form a childhood. Here are some of the effects of tech-centric education I’ve observed over the years.
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When my youngest was in early elementary and just learning to read, she’d rarely come home with books. Instead, I’d find her clicking randomly on words in a reading practice game.
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!”
Math was the same. Both of my girls spent considerable time on Prodigy, a game with reviews such as “Mediocre game with random math problems jammed in. Spammy.” “All this app will do is provide screen time.” “Distraction from actual learning.”
At home, I attempted to extoll the virtues of using paper flashcards to learn multiplication. Of course, the screen always won. Flashcards don’t offer dopamine hits.
Now that they’re older, the platforms my daughters are assigned have changed, but my questions remain. Some years, schoolwork was so heavily online that even a failed math test couldn’t easily be reviewed. 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.
Parents were told the tests had to be online, though, 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.)
In middle school, my eldest daughter’s advanced English/language arts classes involved just one complete book in a span of two years. All her reading assignments were digital excerpts followed by multiple choice questions asked and answered on a screen. This was part of a new curriculum that promised to improve academic outcomes.
Until then, reading had always been one of her favorite subjects, but suddenly she found it dreary and dull. And no wonder: There was no plot to follow, no difficult texts to wrestle with, no tensions to be resolved, no complicated characters to debate. Most days, she was presented with a series of disjointed paragraphs and the inevitable choice of A, B, C, or D.
How can classes structured like this foster capacity for critical thinking or sustained attention? The way we’ve failed our children is becoming obvious nationwide.
It’s not just my kids. An older student in our district told me that in her advanced classes, more than half of her work happens online. For her friends in regular classes, she said, it’s a much higher percentage.
And sometimes there’s no true teacher in the room. Long-term substitutes who in some cases aren’t qualified to teach do crowd control as students (theoretically) complete online assignments generated by a computer program or a teacher they’ve never met. Only the most driven students and those with diligent, supportive, stable families will learn anything under these circumstances.
This is bleak—but it’s not all bleak. This year, for instance, both of my children seem to be less online. I don’t know if that’s due to the teachers they were assigned or different campus cultures at the schools they attend this year. (Although we haven’t changed districts, my eldest has aged into a new school, and our youngest goes to a different middle school than her sister attended.) I hope it may be the result of some growing recognition that the tech-obsessed model of the past few years hasn’t been working.
Whatever the cause, both girls have already read more books in the first semester of this academic year—actual paper books!—than my eldest did throughout middle school. They’re doing math with paper and pencil, and the algebra teacher sometimes bans calculators.
I’m glad for this reprieve. But I worry that my first explanation—of individual teacher preferences or a strong campus culture—is the likeliest of the lot, and I know that 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. One or two good campuses are a blessing, but our whole nation is engaged in real-time experimentation on our children’s minds, and the results aren’t looking good.
Maybe the rapid shift to tech-based education during COVID-19 was like the move to shelf-stable, processed foods during World War II: a decision of necessity. As staples like flour and sugar were rationed, alternatives like condensed milk and spam were introduced to provide a facsimile of normalcy. Food companies developed ad campaigns extolling the superior health and virtue of these foods, and it’s hard to blame them for that choice.
But then the war ended, and we were still eating Wonder Bread with margarine and imagining it would build strong bodies. But then the pandemic ended, and we’ve still got our kids doing “math” online.
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.
