By India McCarty
Technology might have streamlined a lot of the education process, but Jonathan Haidt says more low-tech processes are better for learning.
“This has been at the heart of the culture war in education for 50 years,” he said in a conversation for Close Screens Open Minds, a group dedicated to challenge the overuse of technology in education. “There’s a kind of progressive idea that facts are regressive — ‘teach them how to think.’”
Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, continued, “But a lot of research shows that the human mind is a pattern matcher. It is a neural network. You need to know a huge amount. You need lots and lots of patterns in order to think well.”
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He posted a video of the conversation on his Instagram with the caption, “When children and teens consume short, bite-sized content, they won’t create new mental structures to allow them to retain knowledge and think critically.”
He explained that learning from a screen “often triggers an unconscious shift from deep comprehension to shallow skimming,” while writing by hand helps you “focus on meaning and decide what matters as we summarise, reorganize and reframe material — all signs of deep cognitive engagement.”
“#edtech is failing because it’s fundamentally incompatible with how humans learn,” Haidt continued. “Learning is deliberate and effortful. It requires focus, thrives on emotional connections and succeeds when skills can transfer between contexts. Ed Tech undermines all of this.”
The Close Screens Open Minds website features many statistics that support Haidt’s comments, including “6 Months: Learning advantage for paper-based exams vs screens,” “58%: More likely to get A’s by taking handwritten notes” and “6-8x: Paper reading comprehension advantage over digital.”
In addition to Haidt, actor Hugh Grant is also a supporter of Close Screens Open Minds and has spoken publicly about the dangers of putting screens in children’s hands.
He compared the tech industry to a “drug cartel pushing its wares at children,” per TODAY, adding, “Watching our children suffer horribly — it’s been very, very depressing watching Big Tech kidnap their lives and to see children really finding it very, very difficult to get properly interested in anything that isn’t a screen.”
Grant said he has opposed the implementation of tech at his children’s schools, explaining, “When I have this fight with schools they often say, ‘Yes, yes, but these screens have restrictions, we have got wonderful software, the kids can only do their schoolwork, they can’t do other stuff.”
“What we’ve found anecdotally is that, the number one task of a school child, is to get together with other kids, either in real life or online to work out how to get around those restrictions — and they are absolutely brilliant at it,” he said.
While technology can add to the educational experience, at the end of the day, going back to basics is more beneficial to a young person’s mind.
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