Macbeth as McCartoon

What screens have done to school

Whenever I give a talk about The Cradle of Citizenship, my new book on civic education, I am asked how we can change our public schools. I always point out that educational policy doesn’t change in the way that, say tax policy or welfare policy does. There is no lever in Washington labeled “school.” Our schools developed town by town and state by state, and so have always been understood as a local responsibility. Although federal mandates can change behavior by offering or withholding funds, schools do not typically change from the top down, but from the bottom up.

What Parents Want For Their Kids

Thus the progressive pedagogy of “whole language” reading instruction, which trusts to immersion in the written word to teach reading skills, has increasingly given way to phonics–not because Washington or even individual states mandated the change, but because parents and teachers got fed up with a system that failed too many kids. The same is true of the ban on cellphone use in schools now spreading across the country. And if Crisis of Citizenship miraculously shoots to the top of the best-seller list, you may see mobs of parents waving pitchforks to demand that schools assign students whole books rather than tiny excerpts, and serious grown-up books rather than YA novels about crises in gender identity.

That’s probably not in the offing. And I admit that parents with pitchforks have brought us some very dubious gifts, including the movement to ban books from school libraries. Yet that red-state revolt has been petering out, perhaps because the number of people outraged by Heather Has Two Mommies is smaller than the advocates thought.

And this brings me to a grassroots movement I’m rooting for–the growing call to limit the use of technology in the schools. I am not a Luddite in these matters. In the Brooklyn high school where I volunteer, the kids do their written work on Chromebooks that they take from a cart parked in the classroom. The computer stores all their previous work as well as the texts they’re reading; they can edit their work the same way I do on my laptop. That’s a benefit for both students and teachers. And while the evidence of the academic effectiveness of computers is decidedly mixed, an analysis of hundreds of studies finds “enormous promise in improving learning outcomes, particularly when it comes to mathematics.”

But nor, it seems, is this burgeoning movement intrinsically hostile to machines. Parents in Los Angeles, alarmed at finding their kindergarteners coming home with a tablet and their elementary school children using their school-issued laptop to play video games, have formed an organization called Schools Beyond Screens. The group calls for eliminating the use of computers in grades K-2, limiting usage through eighth grade, blocking access to social media and to AI until the technology “has been proved safe, legal and effective.” (The Los Angeles school district recently passed a resolution incorporating many of those concerns.) Parents in New York City pressured the Schools Chancellor to stop planning for an AI-focused high school, in part out of concern that the city was heedlessly throwing itself into the arms of Google and OpenAI.

One of the things I like about this movement is the word “screen.” A computer and an iPad are screens, but so are TVs and smartboards. If you haven’t been in a classroom in thirty or forty years, you would be dumbstruck by the ubiquity of screens, which typically occupy the front of the room where the pull-down maps used to be. Much of the curriculum takes the form of videos–mini-documentaries, cutesy-boo simulations with cartoon versions of historical figures, Power Point presentations, online readings. At one high school I visited in the suburbs of Chicago class was interrupted for ten minutes by the remarkably professional weekly student newscast. (“For Warrior Update, I’m Mckenzie Green.”) One of the consequences of the switch from a paper-based to an electronic means of data transmission is that the looseleaf notebook has largely disappeared from students’ paraphernalia–which means that kids don’t take notes.

A Notebook, Not An iPad

Again, one shouldn’t lavish too much nostalgia on paper. Pride and Prejudice on a Kindle is still Pride and Prejudice (though a recent study concluded that “paper-based reading yields better comprehension outcomes than digital-based reading.”) But of course students aren’t reading nineteenth-century novels in any format. The digitization of the classroom is both a cause and consequence of the movement away from long and difficult texts to short and readily digestible excerpts. Teachers show videos not because they’re more nourishing than texts but because kids who have spent much of their lives in front of screens sit through them quietly. They’re as much of a classroom management tool as a pedagogical one.

One of the distinguishing features of the classical charter schools that I wrote about in my book and my recent Times Op-Ed is the almost complete absence of digital devices. Teachers have, and use, those pull-down maps. Kids take notes on looseleaf notebooks. They read novels, and carry the copies in their backpacks. These consciously back-looking schools demand a lot from students, though they also give a lot.

A few days ago I received a note from someone who had pulled his two children out of Eagle Ridge Academy, the school in suburban Minneapolis I wrote about in the Times, because the workload was so heavy and the grading so tough. But then he wrote a follow-up note saying how shocked he had been at the low expectations of the highly successful suburban public school they had transferred to. “One time,” he recalled, “a history teacher assigned a 1 paragraph assignment on Friday due Monday. There was a mini revolt. …One kid asked, “how many points is this worth?” …Also, English teachers who assign a book to read. The test? Multiple Choice.....no writing at all. An English class! They move on to Macbeth....ready for this? They read a summary in modern English and watch a cartoon showing what happens.”

It is not the cartoon that is to blame for the summary, of course, but the ethos of the school and of the larger culture; the cartoon just makes it so much easier to pretend that one is “teaching Shakespeare.” Just as eliminating phones from schools is not a panacea, but rather a means to open up space for real conversation, not to mention eye contact, so eliminating screens can enable a more thoughtful engagement with texts–if that’s what the school wants.

Schools Beyond Screens proposes a “Student Tech Bill of Rights” that includes the right to “a low-stimulation learning environment that fosters deep thinking, attention, and focus.” Here’s another: “I have the right to read whole books over the course of my education–in elementary, middle and high school. I have the right to regularly read and write on paper.”

That is a banner we should be happy to march under.