Several years ago, Jared Cooney Horvath’s interest in teaching took a scientific turn.
He entered teaching during a period he calls “the decade of the brain” — when much of the buzz around education and learning covered new theories about brain activity and information processing. Horvath believed that if he learned more about the brain, he’d become a better teacher.
But the education ideas that captured the popular imagination in the early 2000s had to do with catering to so-called learning styles — right- versus left-brain thinkers or visual versus word learners — and notions about how to hasten cognitive development through certain outside stimuli. Remember those moms-to-be with headphones on their bellies for their babies to experience the “Mozart Effect” in utero?
The gains from these methods proved to be short-lived or difficult to measure accurately.
Yet the science of learning persists. And what Horvath — today a neuroscientist and education consultant — now knows about human cognitive development has spurred him to join a cohort of researchers who are questioning the proliferation of technology and education software in schools.
His new book “The Digital Delusion” feels like a logical progression from Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” which looked at how hours spent in front of screens, especially on social media, with its rapid-fire videos and toxic commentary, has damaged children’s overall mental health and learning.
In “Digital Delusion,” Horvath outlines research showing how digital devices and screen time, at the expense of playtime, interferes with children’s cognitive development. Then he argues how the ubiquitous use in schools of laptops and edtech, at the expense of traditional skills like handwriting and note-taking, alters, for the worse, how kids learn.
Horvath’s book arrives at a pivotal moment, with digital systems facing a cultural reckoning: Social media companies defend themselves in court against accusations that their platforms harm mental health, and lawmakers propose legislation that would severely restrict screen time for kids under 13. Meanwhile, school districts across the United States impose bell-to-bell cellphone bans, and parents push to opt their children out of using digital devices for school.
Horvath takes a pragmatic approach on that score, suggesting arguments parents can use with administrators and at school board meetings. He has chapters that include examples of letters and other tools parents can customize to mobilize action at state and federal levels.
Some educators maintain that schools should emphasize responsible use of technology, including AI, to prepare students for a technology-driven workforce. Horvath isn’t convinced. First, he argues, workforce preparation should not be education’s priority, particularly in younger grades. Second, it’s inefficient: “Teach someone to use a tool and they’ll be able to use that tool,” he writes. “Teach someone how to think and they’ll be able to use any tool.”
Even so, Horvath insists he isn’t anti-tech: “This isn’t a book about resisting devices,” he writes. “It’s a book about reclaiming education as a deeply human endeavor.”
EdSurge spoke with Horvath about “The Digital Delusion” and his work with schools around the globe, including in Australia, which at the end of last year banned social media for anyone under 16.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: You make the point that whenever a new technology is introduced to a culture, early adopters are the enthusiasts. But for any given technology to have broad acceptance, it must pass muster with skeptics. Yet that didn’t really happen with digital technology in schools, did it?
Horvath: If I invented something, I had to convince you. This [product] will get rid of that stain on your shirt. This will keep your iceberg lettuce crisp in the fridge. If you promised something you had to live up to it, because for the few people who adopted it to begin with, if you didn’t clean their stains, they’re not coming back.
Digital technology never made a claim to anything. It just kind of appeared and people just started using it. When AI came out, the developers flat-out said, we don’t know what this does. Why don’t you guys tell us what it does? And for some reason we shoved it into schools and said, instead of me telling you what it does, why don’t I let my kids tell you what it does?
Something very weird happened where they made no claims to efficacy and then we jumped in and started using it. Our job now is to start to pull some of those weeds rather than protect before planting. And unfortunately that means there’s been a lot of victims along the way.
A lot of kids have suffered due to our rush to just put things in their hands, unfortunately.
I think we have this love affair with digital technology. I don’t know if it’s because of sci-fi or “Star Trek” or what. We intuitively think this is going to be helpful.
And now we’re just scrambling back.
You explain that children need to play for optimum cognitive development, but ordinary childhood play and behavior has been disrupted by screens. Is there evidence that if we take the technology away from children whose brains are still forming that they can bounce back?
Yes, absolutely. The good thing about human biology is it is wickedly malleable.
There’s two aspects to keep in mind. One, biology is also wickedly conservative. It changes all the time, but it never forgets anything. So if you have had a habit at one point and you drop that habit, you can move your biology a different way, but if you come back to that habit even once, your biology will have held onto that entire circuit. It’s a survival mechanism. Our genes, our brain, hold everything.
So when it comes to these tech habits, if you’ve already formed them as a kid, they will always kind of be there. If you think, I’m over this, and you pick up your phone, you will move much faster back into that habit than you did before.
The other thing to recognize here is everything we know about learning, and most of what we know about biology, basically starts after the age of 5. That’s when what we call human biological learning mechanisms really kick in.
From birth to about 5, you’re in a totally different world. The brain is basically in input mode. Gimme, gimme, gimme. And I’m going to hold onto everything. This is why if a kid grows up in a house with two languages, they will easily learn two languages because the brain just says gimme, gimme, gimme.
So that’s where I think the super danger zone comes in. If you develop habits or problems before the age of 5, when you hit 5, the brain locks itself down. You won’t be able to consciously remember what happened before the age of 5, but all of that [input] forms the foundation upon which further learning is going to occur.
My fear is if you form a habit before the age of 5 and then your brain locks down, are you now stuck in a spot where it will be very hard to get that out? If you’ve already addicted your kid before age 5, be careful. I don’t know what that’s going to mean when they get older.
There is data that says around 40 percent of 2-year-olds have tablets.
Why? My question is just why? There are a lot of states right now putting forward bills to limit screen time in primary years: K through [grade] 2, 90 minutes; [grades] 2 through 5, two hours a day. To which I always reply, why any hours?
I could easily make a case they don’t need any of this at any moment. It makes no sense for learning and development why [technology] needs to interface with anything they’re doing.
But by banning, aren’t we setting up a mystique around technology — causing a different kind of distraction around the yearning to use it?
That’s what you want. By banning and building a mystique, you give kids aspirations. I think back to my generation, when we turned 16, you couldn’t stop us from driving. Why? Because with our parents, that was the hold: you want to go to your friend’s house? You got a bike, you got feet, I’m not driving you. You want to get to school? There’s a bus, you got feet, I’m not driving you. So by the time we knew we could drive, that’s the first thing we did.
If by banning tech, that makes kids say when I’m 18, I’m using tech — then, good, that means I have 18 years to train you to be ready to use that machine.
Can schools realistically go back to paper? Textbooks, for instance, are expensive and take longer to update than websites, which are dynamic.
It’s funny, this is where you get the clash between different masters. In a good rule of thumb you can only serve one master at a time. So we’ve got issues of, I want my kids to learn, but I have monetary constraints and I have administrative bureaucracy that I’ve got to wend my way through.
When you’ve got multiple masters, eventually you’ve got to settle on one because if you try and serve many, no one’s going to be happy. And I would hope that in education we choose learning as our ultimate master. If that means, look, we have to devote more of our budget to textbooks and that means we won’t be able to do X this year, then so be it.
If that means, look, we’re going to only use the website for the last two years of history, but we’re going to have the book for the rest because it’s better for learning, then so be it.
I don’t know how much more research we need on this. People learn more from hard copy text than they do from digital text. It’s done. That battle is over. So if learning is our outcome, why not go back to what we know works best for that?
Can you explain the findings around taking notes by hand?
Most students think note-taking is something they do while they learn. So [they think] if AI does it for me — cool! But they miss the point. Note-taking is the learning, not something that’s happening in parallel to learning. That is the learning. Because that’s where you’re doing your transformation: Your teacher said it. I now have to analyze it, think about it, organize it, get it out.
That requires friction. Your brain is going much faster. So the handwriting is constraining the speed with which you can think, which in turn is forcing you to focus on ideas, which in turn is transforming those ideas as you’re going along.
That is the definition of learning.
The act of handwriting is arguably the most complex thing we do. When it comes to motor skills, there might be nothing more complex than that.
We talk about the difference between gross- and fine-motor movements. Name one skill we do that is so minutely fine as handwriting and so varied as handwriting. If you’re using a pen versus a pencil versus a crayon versus a marker, you’re doing very subtly different movements.
Those develop so much more awareness and understanding of the body in a way that then translates into other fields in ways we’ve never seen from any other skill before.
If you know how to write, you will become better at reading. If you know how to write, you will become better at recognizing faces. Why? We don’t know. But everything seems to be correlated back to that skill.
So when people debate [whether] handwriting is still worth teaching? Of course. Is cursive still worth teaching? Of course. No one’s going to use cursive as an adult. That’s not why we’re teaching it, baby. It has nothing to do with what you’re going to do as an adult. ’
You were just in Australia. What is the feedback from the social media ban?
The response is overwhelmingly positive. Basically every school I worked at, the kids are fine with it. Teachers are fine with it. All of a sudden, behaviors are getting so much better in school. They said the biggest problem is with parents, oddly enough, who basically have to hang out with their kids and they don’t know what to do. If that’s our biggest problem, we’ll solve that. Hang out with your kid.
Any time you remove something from your kid’s heart, you’re going to have to fill it with something else. You’re going to have to fill it with yourself, which means you’re going to have to take some of your own tech out of your own life to devote more of your time to your kid.