1KHO 748: Public Schools Should Serve Students, Not Screens | Dr. Jared Horvath, The Digital Delusion

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My name's technology harms our kids learning, and how to help them thrive, again, is here, Jared. Thanks so much for writing this book, and thanks for spending this time with us today. Welcome. Now, thank you for having me on, I'm really looking forward to this.

So, you've got quite the background here, PhD, and a master's in education, neuroscientists, educator, bestselling author, you specialize in human learning, and cognitive development. You're creative, the learning blueprint, so many accolades here. You conduct a research in taught at Harvard, Harvard Medical School, University of Melbourne. Worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world, published over 60 research articles,

your work has appeared anywhere people think work could appear, New Yorker Atlantic, and this is just one of six books. We're going to be focusing on this one today, digital delusion, but you've written a lot of books. Can you give us a background on how you got interested in this topic of ed tech?

Oh my gosh, and let me just, for anyone who just got, I hate, there's nothing worse than hearing somebody talk about the things you've done, I'm just a normal dude. It's happened, I don't care, I'm not. But also normal dudes don't also have six books, I mean, I do think there's something to be said about accomplishment, you know, because there is a vast majority of people

that are like, you know, I go to my, and I don't think that there's anything wrong with it, but they're like, I go to work, I come home, you know, and we watch Netflix.

“So there are, there is a cohort of people, that's what I do too.”

I just so happened my work, as I said at a computer and I type things up, it's fine. At the end of the day, I'm just a normal dude. So, in fact, I had set the stage, I was a teacher originally, so education teaching is kind of my passion. Actually, I'll take you a step back, I was actually a filmmaker before that, so I, my undergrad

was in film, I thought I would be a director, but I, you know, doesn't really work out. And that's when I realized, why was I interested in film, because I liked people, how they thought, how they acted, why do I like people? I like helping them develop and think, so why not be a teacher, and that's where that really kind of started to bubble in.

And then I got into learning stuff, I was teaching during the decade of the brain. So everyone was talking about brain, books, and brain, gym, and brain, and this, that. So I think, cool, I'll go learn that stuff, it'll make me a better teacher. So I go study neuroscience, that ends up taking out, I've been doing that for about 18 years now.

But my focus has always just been on how do human beings learn.

And so what I teach most of the time when I work with schools, I just teach teachers and students about learning. If here's how human beings learn, it's a very specific process.

“If you know that, what does that mean for being a better teacher?”

What does that mean for studying at home or as a parent? What does that mean for helping my kid with homework? And I just never, I never thought the EdTech thing mattered. So like, believe it or not, if you took like a 30-hour course with me, say, at university about learning, towards the end, I would like for about 30 minutes, I would say, okay,

digital technology. Now that we know all this stuff about learning, I want you to have a discussion, and digital technology would be good, would it be bad? In 30 minutes later, everyone would come back and say, yeah, it's not good. I'm like, good, there you go.

It was always just this flipping thing where once you have a learning, of course technology

is not going to be helpful for it, that's not what it does. And then COVID hit and everyone got stuck online and then COVID stopped and everyone stayed online and schools went hardcore into the tech and that's where I just said, okay, clearly I got to put all this together to say, stop. The experiment is done. It wasn't working. It's not useful. Let's go back to what we know is best for our kids and their development.

Uh, and what a sad thing that it's an experiment. That's the thing. You talk in this book that is your illusion about like this one school where they're,

going to make the switch and then obviously like some parents don't like it and some parents do like it. But I was like 12 years as a whole childhood. So there is a cohort of kids that started in the kindergarten or first grade with one to one laptops possibly and had it all the way through or, you know, in the older years, like they had it for their whole high school and there was a parent that you had quoted

in the book who said, oh, I guess my kids just going to be the experiment because, you know, they're like, the people who are fighting for a tech, which is the ones that are making tons of money, they're like, well, you're just using it wrong or, you know, we haven't had enough time to quite figure it out. And so then the parent I like was my kid, like, just an experiment

“for you to figure out your tech situation. So can you give a little bit of the history here?”

So like I, you know, we had computer lab growing up. It was Apple computer. You went to computer lab. Almost like you went to gym class. It was probably like one to week. You go to computer lab for an hour and we played Oregon Trail. That's all you remember. And we learned how to type actually, which is a useful skill. We learned how to type and we played Oregon Trail and that was it was when our week computer lab. In a specific location, you talk about starting in the year

2000 things really began to change. Yeah, I think that's, you could push it even a little further than that. So computers used to be exactly what you were saying. It was like wood shop. There was a specific spot in school where you go, do that skill. And then you go back to school and do everything else.

Yeah. It was never integrated with everything else. And then realistically it was right around 2004

when personal computers started to get a bit cheaper that I think main was the first one to come out and say, let's just give everyone a computer and it'll make it easier. Now go back to that date when they, because they're the first state in the union to ever do a 1-1 program. This was decades before some other states did it, not decades, a decade. And ask them why, why would you give every kid a computer? Where is the evidence that I would help them that it will support them that

it will help them develop? Their argument was never that we have proof this will help. Our argued, their argument was always, we think this will help. We think this should help. Well mate, I think my shoe should earn me a million dollars. Shoulds don't mean anything in this world until you can demonstrate. Yeah, that shoe is played in gold. It is worth a million dollars. Hooray,

“evidence matters in this context. And that's why you're spot on is we started following this ideology”

that because the world is becoming more digital, kids should also be more digital. And we started moving all learning online thinking that was going to somehow prepare them for the world ahead of them. But what really ends up happening is the more our kids were spending on tech and schools, the worse everything was getting. Their literacy was going down, their numeracy was going down,

their critical thinking was going down. All of these skills we thought we were benefiting,

we were actually harming. And I would hope that after a decade or so that we would have figured it out. It's been probably 20, 20 good years, 25, in some cases. And people still haven't quite caught in on to the fact that all of this decline we're seeing in cognition. By all means there's some cultural things going on to smartphones at the home, broken families, absolutely. But my goodness, in schools, what's been the big change? It's just the tools we're using. We moved

“it from a computer lab, something we learned about into every class, something we learned through.”

And that was the big mistake we made. Huge change. This book is phenomenal. So you talk about this is now a $400 billion mega industry that really has only been around for a couple of decades. So this is just skyrocketed. You really get a sense in your book, the digital delusion about how pervasive this is. In the United States, 88% almost all of public school districts now operate one-to-one device programs and you say. Today's ed tech is nothing like what we grew up with

and many parents have no idea just how far things have spiraled. So there's a time component here. You talk about reading and writing and you really talk about, you use the phrase cognitive collapse. And at a time, this was what you wrote. When we need children who are sharper and more adaptable than we are. So can you talk about the cognitive collapse and why it matters even more than maybe it would have when people were working in factories all the time? Yeah, absolutely. So since

we've been recording cognition and cognitive development. So this is since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents. On every measure we have, memory, attention,

general IQ, literacy, numeracy, we're always going up. And that's exactly what we want.

Each generation has the world grows more complex. We need a generation of kids that can handle that complexity better. And the reason why we've always seen this growth was school. Each generation of human beings went to more school than their parents. School is where we train you how to adapt to a changing world. And I want to make that absolutely clear. School has never been a

thinking institution where we teach you how to drive your own thoughts and cognitions. That's

“how we adapt. So I always think about an ITT institute. If you want to learn welding,”

you go to school, you study welding for two years. That's a tool-based institution. Yeah. I will now not expect you to also be a good plumber or a good carpenter because we train you in one tool. Yeah. K through 12 education doesn't train you in tools. We train you how to think through knowledge. We're not teaching you history because I want you to be a historian. I'm not teaching you how to write because I think you're going to be a novelist. We're teaching

you how to think through knowledge. So that when you are old enough in the world starts to change, you understand the patterns you have to go through to adapt to twist your thinking to make that new knowledge work. So that's why the more time we spent in school, every generation was better at adapting to the world. Until now, we now hit Gen Z and Gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform their parents. Even the basic measures of just basic working memory,

they are now lower than us, even though they spend more time in school. So that was my kind of big

aha moment when I realized somehow schooling, which was always driving our cognitive development,

decoupled from our cognitive development right around 2000 to 2010. And what was the big change? It's the tools we started to use. We started to change K through 12 general education into a tools-based system. We're going to teach kids how to use computers. Why? Mate, nobody taught me how to use a computer. I'm doing pretty dang good on it. In fact, millennials are more digitally literate than Gen Z. They never taught us and you'd like

you, they just taught us typing program. That was as far as we ever got. Why are we so good at computers without being trained on it? Because they taught us how to think. They taught us how to solve problems. Now, when a new computer program comes along, we're fine. But kids who are taught only on tech, as soon as the tech evolves, they're toast because they don't know how to think beyond what they were trained on. And this by the way, there's two, and I'm sorry to go on

a tangent here, but there's two things to recognize about that. I just want to bring it home for the audience. You yourself, if you have a phone, sometimes you get a phone update. You didn't ask for. And now all of a sudden, you don't even know how to use your own dang phone. Because everything is haywire. Now, luckily as adults, we were trained to think we can adapt. Some kids as soon as the phone changes, they're done. They don't know how to adapt. So they did like, I can no longer find this.

“Can you teach me how to do it? That's what happens in a tools-based system. And I think”

going forward, that's where the world is only going to change faster. We're going to get new tools. We're going to get new techniques. I don't care that their digital or analog doesn't matter what the tool is going to be. We need a generation that can move faster than we can. Unfortunately, we're locking them down into a very specific thinking style, which means they can't go one way or the other. And tech companies know that. That's why the biggest battle

thank goodness all the papers are starting to come out. The biggest battle is between Microsoft and Apple to see who can get the kids youngest. Because if you're trained on an Apple, you will forever use Apple. If you're trained on a PCU forever home, very rarely do people switch

between the two. Like me, I've never used an iPhone. I don't know how. My wife never used an

Android. She doesn't know how. I'm sure I can learn. I just don't care. So that's the battle is now. Can we get younger and younger? The first computer they get will be the system we expect them to use. You've now built a lifelong customer. Which does my head in. I'm not believable, Jared,

“and it makes so much sense. And that's why they're giving out iPads to five-year-olds. And they”

are. They're getting them in kindergarten. You wrote because it's a 400 billion dollar industry. And also, they are taking everyone's data. This is a wave of invasive tools designed by four-profit companies. Many to add tech platforms openly track personal data, including there was a list in it. It's like in another spot in my notes. But it was like the way that they're, you know, the way that their face is look. I mean, it's taking all of this data.

So, and to your point, there are constantly new tools. And AI would be an example of a new tool. So I want to read what you wrote. This is a fantastic book. It's called the digital delusion. Maximizing employability shouldn't be the ultimate goal of education. But even if it is, chasing digital skills is exactly the wrong strategy. Ironically, the best preparation for a volatile rapidly changing workforce isn't tool-specific training. It's broad general knowledge.

Rather than trying to anticipate every future trend, schools serve students best by cultivating the cognitive skills and habits of mine that let them adapt to whatever the world throws their way. Employers increasingly report that young people are arriving less job-ready than previous

generations and lasting. Today's essential tools often become tomorrow's trivia.

to thrive in whatever comes next. The more we narrow the focus of education, the more we limit

“our children's futures. Can you talk about how there is so much research to support that this”

is not working? Yeah, that's if you look at international test data on anything. So literacy, numeracy, science, creativity, anything. A lot of these international tests, and these are the tests that are given to hundreds of thousands of kids across dozens of countries. One of the things they'll do is they'll also ask survey questions like, "Hey, where are you from? How many parents do you have? What's your favorite book?" And one question they'll typically ask is how often do you use

technology at school? And then they might ask them for different purposes in all of those examples. When you line up performance on the test with how often do you use a computer at school, for learning purposes, scores go down, significantly now. And this has been having since 2012, we've started getting this data. So we've got this hard data showing. The more our kids are using tech, the worse they're getting at these higher order skills that we would want them to have.

But of course, most of that is correlative. What you want is causative data. So how do you do that?

You run research. Well, luckily we've had research going on since 1962, as a first paper I've

ever found on back then it was called Information Computing Technology. So we've got data for decades looking at what happens specifically, causatively, wind tech enters the picture. Does a boost doesn't harm learning? Since 19, the very first, what we call meta analysis. So what we do in research is you run dozens and dozens of studies, right? Yeah. Now, any study can show anything. So there was a study published a couple of years ago that showed physicist found a particle that moves

faster than the speed of light. Of course, later papers come out, say that's not true. But we have, I could go look it up right now. There's a paper out there saying we found faster than light.

“So because any single study can find anything, it's very noisy. Yeah. What you have to do is”

do what's called a meta analysis. You pull all of that research together and say collectively,

here's what's being said. And the very first meta analysis done with Ed Tech was done in 1977,

and it showed that tech was harming learning compared to analog methods. It doesn't work as well as other things we were doing. Since then, we've had hundreds of meta analyses. The latest meta analysis was done in first published actually last month, 2026. It was published here. So we've now had hundreds of meta analyses. Pool all those together. What have we found? The exact same value. Digital technology harms learning compared to analog methods at the exact

same value. Nothing has changed for 60 years. It doesn't matter that we've got the internet. We've got AI now. Things have gotten faster. Things have gotten cheaper. The systems themselves have not improved in a positive way. And that says to me a very clear thing, look, you've had 60 years to prove worth. You haven't been able to do it. You've had billions of dollars. You've had hundreds of different programs of platforms. It hasn't worked yet. Why do we continue to assume

that next time we'll be better? Give me just another five years and we'll get this right. Give me just one more year of your kid's life and we will figure this out. No, you won't. And it says to me that we're not looking at a problem with implementation. It's not that the programs aren't good enough for that the tech isn't fast enough. It's that somehow tech is just going against human biology. It does not align with how we learn. And it's not the specific

program we're training. It's not that. It is the tool itself does not resonate with human learning. And so no matter how you use it, it will diminish learning compared to working with a teacher and having actual interaction with physical objects and human beings. Yeah. Spring has a way of filling up the calendar quickly. Field trip sports, travel, co-op with your all good things, but they get make it challenging to keep curriculum learning

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“about downtime, I want to make sure we get to you talk about Neil Postman which I think is incredible”

because I've always been like what would he be saying about this? I love his books. You're talking

about anxiety. There is a lot covered in this book called The Digital Delusion. One of the things that you say is that it's just so much wasted time. You know they're going to sit down for an assignment in six minutes in. They're already drifting into some sort of a distraction and that these products they have to flash faster and they have to move quicker and they're like this is the opposite of how people assimilate and taking information and really have it become a part of them.

You know we need stillness and stability and did sustain thought which is opposite of screens. So let's talk then about this all in the book about reading. So paper versus screen. Now we at home school and I speak at different conferences and I've had people come up to me I didn't know this Jared and like to your point earlier where you said today's tech is nothing like we grew up with and many parents have no idea. So people have all sorts of different reasons

for changing what they're doing for education and I had this family come up when they were like every single one of our kids techs books is on the computer and I was like what? You know and I had no idea and apparently this is the norm. This is awful. So let's talk about the one thing just even about place. Your brain is searching for place but this actually really affects so much if affects comprehension, if affects retention, like what in the world we have their math books

in all of their textbooks on screens? This is one of the if when I teach freshman at university

they'll always ask me hey what's the number one trick for studying? Like what's the one thing I can

do that's going to make me better at all this? Answer is always been the same by a printer print everything out. If you do nothing different with your life but have paper instead of a screen you will learn more comprehend better retain longer than doing the exact same stuff on a screen and exactly to your point you just nailed it. The reason is space so one of the big I don't know so there was a video game I used to play growing up called Grand Theft Auto. I don't know if your audience

run it online. Yeah Grand Theft Auto comes out and that's just a giant world and now you can go

anywhere you want to. You can go up down left right free to you but to make sure you never got lost

what they did is they put a little map in the corner of the screen which always showed you where you were so you always knew in the bigger scheme of things cool here's my location. Your brain has that same map. The world around us is so large and chaotic that we have an ever updating map in our brain and any and it's just telling us where things in space are happening and every time you make a memory that memory will become stamped with a three dimensional location where did that

just occur so space is a huge part of human memory. Now why does that matter books books have an unchanging three dimensional location until this book I'm holding burns into dust. The word commercial will be 10% of the way through left page top left hand side it ain't going nowhere that becomes a part of my memory boom that makes that memory much deeper. Now if you're an avid reader you know that when you finish books you might know it not know verbatim what you just read but you

will know exactly where in the book everything occurred. If there's an action sequence you want you

“can almost flip directly to it. If there's like a quote you're like oh remember I read something”

there it is the space is part of the learning. Now go to a screen I read the exact same thing on a screen all of a sudden the word commercial starts in the bottom of the screen scroll through the metal goes out the top there is no three dimensional location and an entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped. This is why when we read on screens we after about five minutes we just start skimming because everyone like your brain recognizes you're not actually locking any of this down

so we just so you can tell how a person is reading based on their eyes when we're actually reading our eyes will move in nine letter jumps it's like a very specific sequence thing if I just watch your eyes I can tell you if you're reading or not. When we read a book you'll see these nine letter jumps once we read a screen after a couple of minutes we go from nine letters to huge jumps to vertical where all of a sudden we just move our eyes down the page and every once in a while

you'll see a sideways glance and that's to sign that you're not actually reading you're just

“skimming that's what happens when you move textbooks online kids will just start skimming they're”

not actually reading they're not remembering anything they're reading it becomes a waste of everyone's time just print it out so if you're a parent number one thing you can do to help your kid plant a tree by a printer print it all out this is gonna you homework assignments brings it out readings print it out they got to do survey printed out whatever you're doing just get it on the paper things are gonna get better. Wow whatever ridiculous thing that we have done to our

children is putting all these textbooks online you what your brain is searching for a place but on screens placed doesn't exist screens stripped text of any static location and unfortunately location is a key anchor of human memory readers can often tell where in a book something appeared about 20 pages in left hand page near the top even if they can't remember the exact word reading from screens often triggers an unconscious shift they don't even know what's happening

and actually one of the things that you said was that you said somewhere we're undermining our children you say somewhere along the way we've stripped something vital from them and perhaps the cruelest part is they don't even know they've lost anything they don't know they don't know that in 1987 every kid got these heavy textbooks and you had to you know wrap them in a grocery bag and make a copy or whatever that didn't ruin it then you cut it in you know but and then

they were heavy but also actually that's probably good for you too because it's helping with your bone structure and humans are meant to walk and carry weight until we've switched these into a child wouldn't even know that people used to do are there stuff in a book? Take it cognitively if you've

“never read a book if all you've ever done your entire life is skim you have no clue that there's a”

that reading actually is supposed to be engaging it just it's words to you you've never sat down

and experienced actually you do realize reading does something to you no it's just just scrolling just through a page and that's where it's like like if you grow up say say you grew up with one lung and somebody says what's it like to have one lung you'd be like mmm I don't know what it's like to have two so I can't I can't tell you and you have just life how much are kids like they think here's one of the scarier things about Gen Z into Gen Alpha we have demonstrable proof that they

are performing where their memory is down their attention is down their cognitive their creativity is down but their confidence is way up they think they are doing so much better than everyone else has ever done before and that's where you just don't realize they mistake their low level creative thinking

for actual creativity because they've never experienced what it is to actually design iterate

that stuff when they hopefully fingers crossed the real world kicks them enough that they they have

to start learning they can't just phone it in anymore my hope is they're going to be real mad at us they're going to look back and they're going to say what did you do you you took 12 years of my life to teach me and instead of helping me develop and understand what the world is you just gave me a screen and the simplest smoothest easiest path to growing up that didn't prepare me for anything so I generally it's a weird thing but I genuinely hope Gen Z gets mad at us for what we did

and then they start to push back and hopefully with Gen A we don't make the same mistakes running the same experiment I agree I mean and what a thing the coolest part is they don't even know that they've lost anything because they don't know what it was like before and this is a topic then that you cover extensively in this book called the digital delusion because not only do you talk about the problems you also talk about the solutions and there are really really good

ideas in here about how to increase comprehension and attention and focus and delight and enjoyment of learning in this book so there's a whole page on how to bring long-form reading back it's on page 240 go pick it up the digital delusion then you also talk then about handwriting so there's two parts here that I want to focus on first of all it's the fact that when you're

“taking notes and I remember this from a kid you're constantly having to make these small decisions”

about what am I gonna write and what am I not gonna write because you can't type you know you write a little bit slower so there's that there's more thought going but then the other part is that this

is a transferable skill this is the phrase you use when you're writing and I never even considered

this you said there's all sorts of micro adjustments are you using an ink pen are you using a mechanical pencil are you using a fat marker you know are you writing on paper are you writing on contract are you you know it's is so interesting that that it's this flexible you say it's a deeply flexible skill so can we talk about why we should be using our hands more than we're typing absolutely so there's that big debate for a while do we still teach handwriting in the

in the age of typing what about curse of all this stuff of course you do so two things to know about handwriting and you just nailed so go back to just straight note taking let's say you can write we're so we're talking about older kids now and we're taking notes when we take notes for learning there are two kind of flavors of notes you could take one are called shallow that's when you just take copious amounts of notes you hear word you write or get it all like a cornstanogra for get everything

out the other flavors deep notes that's when you take notes on themes meaning linkages how

“do ideas fit together when you take shallow notes the only thing of importance is the sound”

in the order of the word did I hear it did I write it did I hear it did I write it the meaning is totally irrelevant so if you ever see kids taking huge amounts of notes ask him hey what do we learn today they'll tell you I don't know I gotta go read my notes oops when you go to deep notes that's when you get learning because now you have to make decisions how do ideas piece together what's the theme what are the concepts most kids older kids anyway they can type about as fast as I speak

so if you're typing notes in my classroom chances are you're just going to be taking copious amounts of notes you're not learning anything but man they're in a a human in the world who can handwrite as fast as I speak so if you're taking notes with a pen and paper by definition you have to be partying meaning you have to be thinking deeply and that's where note taking becomes the learning it's not about getting the material down it's about thinking through the material

“and the only way to guarantee to do that is pen and paper so when we think about just playing”

note taking never type notes handwrite them because it's going to force you to do it in a different

way that's actually going to boost learning yeah but take it even back now to the to the younger kids skills in this world very few skills are what we call freely transferable right if you learn how to do something in one realm it does not automatically make you good at something else in another realm you have to go through a process called transfer which is a conscious process of taking that skill adapting it and moving it over here now the best way we have to make transfer

easier is to make the initial skill you learned as hard as possible the harder the skill is that you've learned now when you have to transfer at most times you have to do less than what you initially learned transfer becomes very easy so think about it like this if you grew up learning how to drive using a manual transmission you got your stick shift you got your clutch and now I say can you drive an automatic transmission yes why because man I trained much harder than I had to perform going

from one to the others much easier transfer is smooth but flip it if you do it the other way around if you learn in a very easy way and you now need to transfer that skill to a very hard concept

so if you grew up learning in an automatic car and I put you in a 1977 four on the floor let

a rip you ain't gonna know what to do is you never even tell you like I'm sorry back to square one

all right so let's take it to writing now stand a hand he's arguably the most important living neuroscientist today he has said handwriting is the most complex things human beings can learn it is we don't we we don't appreciate just how hard handwriting is to your point what makes

“handwriting so tricky is not this only the subtle movements you need you need to develop what are”

called fine motor skills which are very hard to do and there's nothing harder than holding a pencil and making it do what you want to but it's also the my new changes every time when I move from this pen to that pen I got to do stuff subtly differently when I move from this piece of paper to this hard desk I'm gonna have to do things so all of these my new changes make for a skill that is where ridiculously dense and deep yeah now when I say can you transfer that motor ability anywhere else

the answer is yes because if you ask me can you type heck yeah this is so much easier than this

but you teach a kid how to type and now say can you go learn how to handwrite nope because these gross motor movements do not translate to this really my new fine motor movement over here so when it comes to learning take it back one of the most important things we have is friction learning needs to be difficult learning needs to be complex because in that learning is where you would have would develop the set of hard skills that now can transfer more easily into a world that's

starting to adjust around you yeah what is the one thing tech does it makes everything as easy as is humanly possible it reduces as much friction as you can reduce friction from learning do not be surprised when kids cannot perform in complex situations when they got older because they just

“never actually train that way so that's why go be going back to handwriting do we need it yes why”

because kids are gonna handwrite as adults no because we're teaching transferable learning skills I don't I don't let my kid climb a tree because I think she's gonna become a professional tree climber as an adult I'm doing it because she's developing the my new skills that will allow her to learn how to manipulate her body in a way that maybe in the future will be meaning for for her so hopefully that all kind of makes sense it's good and it's so important since we switch to this

one to one laptop situation where the reading is online and the writing is typing we are taking away so much from our kids we're taking notes by hand we'd significantly to significantly better learning than typing notes on a computer and note taking is not passive it shouldn't be passive transcription you know like you're not a it would call the stenographer like you know that is a job it is but that's only one job out of however many you know tens of thousands of jobs there are

there's one type of person that sits in a courtroom and types out everything everybody else is not doing that job we're training everyone to do that one job all 10 million kids are gonna fight for that one position yeah you say note taking is not it shouldn't be passive transcription it should be an active cognitive task that deserves the same time structure and intention as any other classroom activity the slower writing promotes deeper thinking and there is no shortcut for that

additionally there's so much in this book I'm just like um i'm just popping over different parts but you do say also that children who can write fluently by hand are more likely to read fluently by i so all of this is interrelated and it matters in incredible amount so so i want to hit that yeah because i think you you listen i should know that so yeah the parts of the brain we have to develop to hit right by hand at the same parts of the brain

we will use to develop literacy and read so in a very real sense reading and handwriting correlate they they grow together as one grows the other grows with it so that's another thing believe if you train handwriting literacy goes up without you doing much of anything and it's just huge

“it's so important to know handwriting activates thinking in ways typing can't okay i think that”

page 101 in this book called the digital delusion is one of the most important pages that

anybody should read and here is what it's about okay what it's about is that we have to have down time so i talked to this man named Dr. Bruce Perry and he said in order to learn you have to have dosing and spacing dosing and spacing you get a small dose of information and then they're space and so you're talking about i loved it because you talked about it with piano and i play piano so i'm excited about this example but you're like okay someone learns a piano piece

and you i think everybody kind of knows like when you wake up the next morning you're a little bit better at it you're like something in my brain has happened and i'm a little bit better but here's what you say even when you're awake so if you learn the simple piano piece even when you're awake

the notes that you had just learned hundreds of times and so what you're talking about is that

this consolidation time which is not just i only learned about a Jared from sleep but this consolidation time is happening all day it can be happening all day as long as there is downtime and that these phones and screens this is one of the biggest issues is taking away all of that yeah there is who did i just i read a stat yesterday and i might put you this so somebody call me out on this if this is totally wrong but somebody said there's a chance that the kids this year in school

will only have an estimated 15 minutes of downtime throughout the day because they will be on their phones in between every single thing and you see it man you go to the go to on a bus people are on their phones go to the bank people on their and we're not immune to it man i'm an adult i do the exact same thing and i hate myself for it but imagine a kid who hasn't quite even figured out how much they hate themselves yet for doing this because they're like it's just

what we do so exactly what you're saying learning happens when you stop you could estimate probably 80 to 90 percent of all learning happens when you quit paying attention and it's happening through

a process called consolidation and we for exactly as you said we always thought that happened only

when you slept you learned something once somebody tells you something one time today so the only

“way biology changes by the way is through repetition the key to all learning is repetition but we”

rarely get enough repetition to change biology so biology does it itself let's say somebody tells you their phone number cool when you go to bed that night while you're dreaming one of the things your brain is going to do your hippocampus is going to replay that phone number hundreds if not thousands of times all it's doing is cycling cycling cycling that's how it's building that memory and like you said we always thought that was a sleep based thing turns out we call it

waking consolidation it's actually starting when you're still awake when you stop and now you can go do something it's just you just have to get out of cognitive mode so you can walk with a friend kick a ball this is like go outside this is what we used to do kids on a playground in between classes what do you do you go make jokes you go to your locker you go drink from the water found all of that is fine it's the when you're actively cognitive when you're thinking about something

or something is really quickly grabbing your attention just like a phone does that's when you can't get into waking consolidation so what is waking consolidation when you're awake what's happening is your brain now in those moments of downtime it's going to start to recycle those memories really quickly not as much as when you're asleep but let's say dozens or maybe a hundred times what's happening is that's basically stamping that bit of information telling your brain

tonight when you go to bed this is one thing you absolutely must lock down so if it's flipping you just had a coffee your brain won't replay that your friend gives you a high five your brain won't replay that someone teaches you one plus one equals two now during a rest your brain goes cool one plus one equals two hundred times it says it to itself now when you go to bed that night your brain is going to say cool what was important well you did that a hundred times must

“be important let's cycle out of thousand times now so that's how the brain is learning what is”

important what's not you don't have downtime you never been your memories you lose memories you

go to bed that night your brain doesn't know what's important doesn't know what's a lock down waking consolidation drives everything so by all means between class periods is not it that's what was schools when people were talking about cell phone bands and other schools were like we don't need a band we just have a policy don't use it during class but you can use it on your own time in schools with policies you saw no difference learning didn't change at all it was only

in schools with a hard bell to bell band that you saw learning go back up why because it's as important during lunch not to be doing this during recess you cannot be on your phone it's the whole system has to work together this is one of the most important critical things I think everybody has to know about this waking consolidation and it's kind of exciting to know that when I'm taking breaks hey my my brain is practicing that alpha away piano song that I just learned

and saying for my kids it's a really big deal and for people that are getting outside which is what we're trying to do and if you're getting out for a thousand hours that's a thousand hours of waking consolidation time that you have phone to take it away and I even you know I like the bell to bell is like a phrase all I do that's been used you know I think more recently

“which I think obviously is critically important but honestly if you can't you be longer than that”

because what about the bus ride home you know it's like that was the time you kind of like stare out the window you know the bus ride in all of that or you know sitting on the you know in the car with your parent on the way home it's like that's the time you got a little bit of downtime and it's like people are going straight to their phone and this is affecting waking consolidation

on page 101 of the digital delusion it's okay sticking with the bell to bell policy them I want to talk about this fact that kids are reaching for their phone every four minutes on average if it's in class it's 14 times per class but they're not reaching for it because it brings them joy and I think everyone will relate to this they aren't grabbing their phones because it brings them joy they're grabbing it because they need to because it's bringing them relief

yep they're quieting their nervous systems by grabbing a phone every four minutes on average what an awful thing to do to children so what happens is and by the way go back to what you're saying the no society should need a bell to bell ban because no kids should have a cell phone that was

always my argument is people say when is your kid gonna have a cell phone you kidding me when she

can buy it I ain't gonna give her one that's where I was always like the need for a bell to bell is like a bandaid for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place and if I have yet

“for someone to tell me a reasonable reason why a kid would need a smart phone if you need to get”

a hold of your kid and you think they need a phone get a dumb phone get a flip phone you can do everything the same there and that stops them from gaming or doing whatever the heck else they're doing yeah or the watch you can get to the little watch you don't need a smart phone but anyway neither here nor there bring it back so it's called the addiction or habit cycle is the way the brain kind of builds habits is this you start with a cue something in the world

has to grab your attention so let's say it's your phone dings or let's say someone says hey you

in response to a cue you can undertake an action I got a ding maybe I'll check my messages anytime you undertake a successful action in response to a cue an action that resolves the cue your brain will give you a hit of dopamine and make you feel good so you've got this kind of pattern cue action reward cue action reward so when kids first touch the phone that's what they were doing to them it was nothing and then the cue oh here's a flash action I press the flash the phone

turned on reward cool cue actual reward cue actual reward your brain is not stupid you do that in the same order enough times eventually your brain is going to preempt you it's going to go cue ding and your brain is going to say I know what's coming and it's going to give you that hit a dopamine before you've done the action and anticipation of the action your brain's like I know

what's coming and so it kind of preempts you the problem is when you get dopamine after doing

an action it feels good it's rewarding when you get dopamine the exact same chemical before you've done an action and no longer feels good now it feels like a craving now it feels

“like an urge now it feels like a pole now you have to do the action just to stop the dopamine”

release and calm your nervous system down get a sense of relief when you've gone from cue action reward to cue reward action you've now built a habit cycle and you have to act in a certain way just to regain homeostasis to control your system again and that's how addicted kids and not not just kids it's adults if you've ever got a phantom phone signal or something we're all part of it that's why every four minutes they're reaching for their phone because they're getting

these now you can say what are the cues the cues are anything and by starting to feel slightly uncomfortable that's a cue if I woke it up today that's a cue to check my phone we've built so many cycles into these phones now think about it so most kids will have built a cycle that says anytime I feel uncomfortable I got to reach for my phone so when it's making me feel awkward I'm gonna reach for my phone girl friend is making fun of me I'm gonna reach for my phone

“learning by definition is uncomfortable if learning was comfortable you're not learning it's like”

if you go to the gym and you're not uncomfortable you're not working out you got your stair separate on to you're there but it's only when you're often that you're actually now in the mode where your body is changing because learning by definition is uncomfortable and most kids have trained themselves to use uncomfort as a cue to touch my phone you can see why in a classroom it becomes the most wicked thing you can ask possible there now people say well what are you

gonna do get rid of it the brain is also again as like I said it's not stupid you get rid of the action so you get the craving oh I feel uncomfortable I got to touch my phone you don't have access to your phone for eight hours your brain will ramp and then it will release and now it will start to decouple that cue from that reward and so you can get to the stage where all of a sudden yeah after a couple of minutes I'm fine now in a classroom I got to find a different

way to deal with this discomfort which is exactly what we want we need you to find a different way to deal with it called learning when you feel uncomfortable engage with the material that's the cue I want I was like so many things in this book is like this is critically important this

of it helps you gain a better sense of why it doesn't work for them to keep their phone in their

locker because what you say is they're they're anticipating so the anticipation it build and it build and it builds then they're completely distracted for the last 40 minutes of class or whatever and that because the craving is building building building and they know you know during passing time

“that's what I'm going to go do and then there's that's a whole other issue that's messing with”

the waking consolidation that's messing with their social skills it's just a whole mess so that's it critically important topic that's talked about in the book the digital delusion I want to mention that in this book you have tons of drafts like um in opt-out letter for parents or you know what a letter to the parent from the teacher who says this is why we're going to have less screens maybe a letter from school administration because sometimes it's or I've heard a lot

that the parents are the ones pushing back because they're like I want to be able to get rid of my I want to be able to get a hold of my child but you're like well there's a lot of ways to do that besides I'm having a smartphone but I do not want to run out of time before we talk about the fact that you had a big part in here about Neil Postman and there was a line that said we've reduced humans to lesser versions of the machines we build that huge but Neil Postman was a futurist he

died in 2003 you know he had some really interesting things to say about computers before computers were so ubiquitous and one of the things that is a is a thread here is that technology is pedagogy you know technology is worldview to a degree it's not just a tool that's one of the things that

Neil talked about so here's what you say this is huge compulsory one to one computing is not merely

technology and it's not merely technological over each it's moral over each um we wrap it up with that so I I love that you love Neil Postman that guy it's when the one guy wish was still alive today during AI because I think he would have just demolished it I've actually tried to find his kid he's got a son I was like anything his son is written like out forward to one of his books and I was like is he still alive can I talk to him I think his name's Andrew yeah yeah that was

so what I tried to do in this book is I tried to channel Neil Postman to say what do I think he would have said about AI and what's going on here and you're right his his big argument was look there is no such thing as a neutral technology every technology isn't better with a worldview when you

“use it you have to assume that worldview a hammer a hammer isn't neutral a hammer makes you think”

of hitting things because that's what it's designed so all of a sudden the world shifts and what what is important becomes highlighted what what's irrelevant becomes low-lighted everything changes when you use a tool yeah one to one computers we're not just using that as a tool to learn we're using that as a tool to define what learning is what is meaningful what skills are good what skills are useless what information is meaningful what information is meaning less when we use it we're

teaching you how to exist in not just exist in the world but interpret the world around you now you've got hundreds thousands of parents who are doing nothing but spending their lives trying to stop their kids from being on a screen at home there's no there's no TV at home there's no smart phone at home now you send those kids to a school and the school says we have mandatory one to one programming well now you're changing the very value set that I've been working on with my kid that

you're reaching into my home and telling my kids what I've been doing over here is wrong for five years and then to tell a family you can't opt out that does my head in is I mean but there are public schools that say you cannot come here unless you put your kid on a computer in pre-school well cool I ain't going there but that is so beyond the purview of what a public education ever should be meaningfully able to do it just does my head in so just just know these are not neutral technologies

and there are huge amounts of people who are doing their best to give their kids an actual analog childhood and you force this stuff on them so there's a woman working right now in Australia

who's basically because everyone is trying to Utah's passing laws like this Vermont's passing laws

like this that limit the amount of time young kids can use computers at school she's trying to say no don't limit the amount of time it shouldn't exist in schools especially primary years from kindergarten through age five or six or year five or six there should be zero screens in schools

“and there should be zero screens in homes too because this is the most important time for them to start”

developing and I got to say I agree a hundred percent with that I'm helping her out as much as I can I am so trying to find this quote that I read and I don't remember which one of his books it was in but he said something like he was like I don't know of these computers are going to really take over

basically he predicted it's going to be like data mining we're not going to be able to keep up and then then some people there's going to be a of small set of people that are going to experience benefit at the

“at the detriment of everyone else yeah I mean it's like that he makes a good point that basically that's what”

every tool has done is you think of something as innocuous as the automobile right as soon as an automobile comes out everyone thinks that's going to narrow gaps no even with the automobile you're going to have different versions of cars yes there's going to be different peripherals to your cars

the halves will be able to get better versions the half knots will always start to struggle and

all of a sudden these divides are going to get wider until somebody wins and somebody loses there will always be winners and losers and I think with his big argument with digital technology was exactly that was it was going to get so complex and so unnecessarily confusing that the losers would be the 99.9% of people who simply couldn't keep up with what's going on and the winners would be the point 1% who might not even understand what's happening but they at least pull the levers and so

all of a sudden you've got yourself the biggest divide you'll see and I mean tell me he's not wrong and isn't that what we're seeing it's what we're seeing they're mining our data that's basically what he was talking about and it was like years and years ago before he even knew that people would have personal computers in their home let alone this one-to-one situation and you see it and you know I you know I think just the other day that was like okay AI is all well and good well it's

free what happens when they start charging you $2,000 a month to use that chance to be TV and

all of a sudden you have you don't have the skills anymore because you out towards them or you never

had the skills and they charge it for exactly what they're doing they're trying like you're not that's not a conspiracy theory that is out of their own mouths if we can make our tool so integral to the way

“you think now we control you because all we have to do now is say $2,000 if you want to keep using that”

tool and you have to pay because exactly like you said a kid doesn't even know how to think outside of chatGBTA anymore none of this is altruistic none of this is out of the kindness out of someone's heart and I promise you no one in the field of digital technology gives a rat's maturity about student learning or child development. Of course they are not in this to make better humans they are in this to make bigger profits and in so doing they're going to exploit us in any way they

can and the way the best way they have to do it is to add to us to their product make it so we can't leave without it and then start pulling the rope away that's exactly what you're seeing. All right Neil Postman now this is someone who died in 2003 and wrote his books like in the 80s so this is someone who was like I mean this is like simple television you know you wrote the book I'm using ourselves to death like in the 80s you know and the early 80s what was on the PBS you know

that was like the extent of technology for kids he says to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social for social change to maintain that technology is neutral to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is at this hour in the 80s stupidity plain and simple technology is a friend of culture no way so you talk about this in the book and you

were like there's one lady's like my pediatrician told me my kids aren't supposed to be on screens and yet this school system is mandating it and so you say more than 50 years of research show that when screens enter the classroom learning almost always suffers it is a phenomenal book there's so much more than we even talked about in this conversation all sorts of good ideas all homework should be done offline you say how do we reclaim effort and rigor we should definitely

be banning data harvesting oh my goodness they're collecting kids facial expressions they're voice recordings you know they're typing cadence they're engagement patterns it's a phenomenal book and we're out of time it's called the digital illusion Jared what's a favorite memory from

your childhood that was outside we always end with that question oh the the first one that always

pops in mind it's a huge rainstorm one of those wicked rainstorms where it's you came and see and for whatever reason my mom said go outside and so we were playing inside and outside of the garage hitting this ball and it was the best like it was like swimming outside it was wonderful I love it what a mom Jared what a book thank you for spending this time with us thank you for writing

“this I think it's a fantastic one for any parent today and I think then you can have all these”

conversations you can have with your kids also Hugh Grant is that an actor that is Hugh Grant that is Hugh Grant the Hugh Grant has five kids and is very much angry at what digital tech at school did to them so he is an entire tech that is wild it's right in the cover Hugh Grant says that this

thanks for being here thank you but what I still want to tell you the most important

“student semester by tag leapt or Bücher soft behind the internet so master's really”

great to say you can say that you can say that you are a player but you don't believe it. egal.

zauber word for lust for track. make the whole thing like that and when they then work,

he says catching. save like that. hold your money. now cost a lot of money.