We’ve digitalized schools, but students are doing worse than ever. Here’s how it happened and why some parents and teachers are pushing for a return to traditional learning.

Americans love a good success story, especially one built from failures and obstacles overcome.

Think of Edison and his thousands of attempts to make a light bulb or of Abraham Lincoln with the string of political defeats that preceded his presidency. Their dogged perseverance has inspired countless others to keep going when the going gets tough.

Less noted are the successes that breed failure.

In the beginning of the 21st century, No Child Left Behind aimed at making all students technologically literate by 8th grade. Over the next 20 years, both federal and state governments lavished vast sums of money on laptops and tablets to make that happen, with many educators enthusiastically joining this tech-ed revolution. In 2024, for instance, schools and government spent more than $30 billion on digitalized learning.

This extravagant funding worked like a charm. By 2020, two-thirds of public high schools and 40 percent of elementary schools provided such devices to their students. By the end of Covid, when school lockdowns forced students to attend school from home, those numbers had climbed to 90 percent and 84 percent, respectively. Today 55 percent of young people spend up to four hours of their school day on screens, with another 27 percent spending five or more hours.

The collaboration of big tech, government, schools, and teachers’ unions have now largely succeeded in digitalizing the classroom.

But those who were supposed to gain most from this leap into the future – the students – are failing.

On the Downward Slope

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, shows a decline in both math and reading for U.S. students. Data from 80 other countries reveal this same decline in literacy, cognitive ability, and even IQ scores. Covid’s school closures undoubtedly harmed many students, but many observers tie this deterioration in learning and thinking to the use of screens in school.

In his January 2026 appearance before a U.S. Senate committee regarding this educational train wreck, neurologist and teacher Jared Horvath testified that for the first time in American history students were failing to exceed the scores of their parents. “This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath said in his testimony. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

To sum up Horvath’s testimony, the very tools put into classrooms to help students learn were in fact undermining learning.

Fighting Back

Citing lower reading scores and loss of focus in students, Sweden is cracking down on student screens and investing in books, restoring “traditional pen-and-paper teaching.” In Great Britain, actor Hugh Grant and actress Sophie Winkleman are outspoken advocates for device-free classrooms and patrons of Close Screens Open Minds, a non-partisan organization fighting to remove ed-tech from schools and restore the use of books, pencils, and paper as tools for learning. Like their Swedish counterparts, Close Screens Open Minds argues that devices in classrooms have resulted in a falling off in literacy rates, diminished cognitive skills, increased lack of concentration, and reduced social interaction.

Australia has gone a step further and banned anyone under the age of 16 from setting up or keeping accounts on social media like TikTok, X, Snapchat, and Facebook. Those behind this policy intend the ban to protect “the mental health and well-being of Australian children and teens.”

Here in America the same fight to control or banish screen usage in our schools is underway. Some school districts have a bell-to-bell policy of banning cell phone usage, others are ditching classroom computers or limiting them, and some state legislatures are proposing laws that regulate screens in school statewide.

With schools a prime market for their products, tech companies are fighting back against this rising tide of resistance. In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt writes of this battle for the minds and hearts of individual children and teens, “The companies are competing against each other for users’ attention, and, like gambling casinos, they’ll do anything to hold on to their users even if they harm them in the process.”

With the same indifference to harm done on social media, these companies will continue pushing the sale of their devices to schools.

Join the Resistance

If you’re a parent, grandparent, or mentor new to this fight, start with some reading. Jonathan Haidt’s “Anxious Generation” is key, as is Horvath’s “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning – And How to Help Them Thrive Again.” If you have teenage Gen Z girls in your life, don’t miss Freya India’s “Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything,” which is due out in May.

Watch YouTube interviews with Haidt, Horvath, and India. At the top of this list put Sophie Winkleman’s 2025 ARC speech. This is one you don’t want to miss.

Next, start paying attention to your child’s learning. As a former teacher and the father of four, I know from both sides of the fence how easy it is for parents to turn their children over to a school system in the full belief that they’ll receive a good education. Don’t make that mistake. Have your children read aloud to you as they progress through elementary school and see how they’re doing. As they grow older, scout out “reading comprehension tests online” and have them take a test to see if they can comprehend and decipher its meaning. Keep track as well of their prowess in math and composition. The 3Rs – reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic – remain the essentials for higher education of any kind.

If they’re behind, arrange to meet with the teacher and start looking for a solution.

And if the class is largely reliant on ed-tech for work done in the class, consider looking for a different school. If household finances or other circumstances don’t allow for that option, then start reading nightly with your children, no matter how old. To send them semi-literate into the world is to handicap them for life.

You are the primary educators of your children, the person responsible for providing them a solid foundation no matter what they aim to do later in life. If something’s not working, it’s your job to fix it.

It’s Not Either-Or

In his Introduction to “Digital Delusion,” Horvath writes, “This isn’t a book about resisting devices, it’s a book about reclaiming education as a deeply human endeavor. It isn’t about moving away from screens, it’s about moving toward deep thought and real understanding. It isn’t about scrapping computers from the classroom, it’s about restoring rigor to the classroom.”

In his book, Haidt reminds us also of the importance of human connections, both in and out of the classroom: “Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution.”

Screens used in moderation and with careful discretion may enhance education but shouldn’t replace the teacher. Nor for that matter should lazy or ineffective teachers be permitted to inflict a digital non-education on their students, as apparently happens. No – those who favor keeping laptops and tablets in schools must understand that a balance is needed, one weighted heavily in favor of the flesh-and-blood teacher. Correctly blending screens with traditional learning methods is not at all an impossible task. Some home educators, for instance, take this eclectic approach, depending on an online program to teach their children algebra while instructing them in history, literature, composition, and science.

As is so often the case in life, balance is everything.

Written by Jeff Minick for the Epoch Times ~ March 22, 2026

~ the Author ~
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.