Your Excellency... Listen to What This Man Says!!

My name is Jared Cooney Horvath. I am a former university professor with the highest academic qualifications, and I have become a cognitive neuroscientist focusing on human learning. I have never received, and do not currently receive, any funding from any source. One of the regrettable facts our generation must confront is that today’s children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Historically, each generation has surpassed its parents, and this is precisely what we want: we want our children to be smarter than we are. The main driver of this progress was school; each generation spent more time in school, and we used schooling to develop our cognitive abilities—until Generation Z, the demographic cohort born roughly between 1997 and 2012, emerged. A defining characteristic of this group is that they are digital natives, raised in the era of broadband internet, smartphones, and social media, and they have never known a world without digital technology. This is the first generation in modern history to fail to surpass the preceding generation on almost all cognitive measures, from basic attention and memory to reading, writing, arithmetic, executive functions, and even general intelligence, despite spending more time in school than we did. So what happened? What occurred in 2010 that decoupled education from cognitive development? It cannot be the schools themselves, as schools remain largely similar. Nor can it be biological factors, as there has not been enough time for such changes. Instead, the answer appears to lie in the tools we use within schools to guide the learning process. If we examine data from 80 countries, we find that 11 of them have widely adopted digital technology in schools, leading to a marked decline in performance. Students who use computers for about five hours a day at school for learning purposes score more than two-thirds of a standard deviation lower than students who rarely or never use technology at school. This pattern holds across all 80 countries. In the United States, for example, there is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). If we take NAEP data for any state and compare it with data collected after the state adopted technology on a large scale, we see a clear difference: performance stabilizes for a period and then begins to decline. What we really need is causality. To establish causality, we require academic research, mechanisms, and explanations for what we observe. Fortunately, we have academic research dating back to 1962 that shows exactly the same result over sixty years: when technology enters education, learning declines. In fact, what do children actually do on computers? They engage in rapid reading. Thus, instead of defining what we want for our children and directing education toward those goals, we redefine education to better suit the tool. This is not progress; it is surrender. Even in schools, it does not matter whether the screen is a phone, a laptop, or a desktop, who purchased it, whether it is school-approved, or whether it bears an “education” logo. None of this matters; all of these devices harm learning and have negatively affected, or are affecting, the cognitive development of our children at a time when we need them to be smarter than we are. Therefore, we must end this total reliance on machines and return to traditional education, to blackboards, and to giving teachers a greater role in the educational process. Ahmed Al-Sarraf