Latest / Computer Says Maybe / The Digital Delusion: The False Promise of Ed Tech w/ Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

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The Digital Delusion: The False Promise of Ed Tech w/ Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath · Computer Says Maybe

• Alix: [00:00:00] Hey there. Welcome back to Computer Says Maybe. I'm your host, Alix Dunn. It's officially September, which means it's back to school season. So we have decided to dedicate the month to all the ways technology is showing up in schools and a lot of the discourse around that. And if you want to understand what happens when tech power meets public institutions, schools are a pretty revealing place to start. So from EdTech and parent organizing to strategic litigation and child safety, we're spending the next few episodes looking at how technology is being pushed into the systems that shape childhood and what it takes to push back. So we are starting with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, who is a cognitive neuroscientist, former classroom teacher, has the energy of a teacher for sure, and the author of a new book called The Digital Delusion. In his book, he lays out the case that EdTech is designed basically to fail at helping kids learn 'cause the way tech works is fundamentally at odds with [00:01:00] the way the human brain learns. So today, we are asking what is the evidence base? Does, uh, computer for everything in school actually increase educational outcomes and cognitive development? Just as a spoiler, no, they do not, and we are gonna hear from Jared on all the reasons we know that, uh, and the mechanisms behind why they don't work for learning. And then we'll dig into a little bit about his prescription for what we need instead. So here is our conversation. Jared: My name is Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. I am a teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist, and I'm the author of the new book, The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. And as you can probably guess, my focus is on how do people learn, so that we can make sure our kids are growing up well. Alix: For starters, Jared, thank you for writing this book. Do you wanna say a little bit about your discipline and kind of how you come to this [00:02:00] work and research? Jared: So teaching was my passion. That's all I wanted to do. But I was teaching back during the decade of the brain. That was when everyone was talking brain gym, brain books, brain training, and it all sounded so good until you asked, "What are you talking about?" Like and no one knew. So it was this beautiful word brain with zero depth. So that's where I figured, all right, why don't I go back to school? I'll learn about this brain stuff with the express purpose that I'll bring it back to my classroom and say, "Hey, here's what matters. Here's what doesn't. Here's how we can be better teachers." And I thought that'd be like a year or two of my life. Unfortunately, that has ballooned into a career in academia. It's been about 18 years now. Uh, academia's a black hole. Once you're in, you can't leave. But now what I do is I study what's called the science of learning. So basically any field, neuroscience, psych, AI, behavioral economics. If it concerns learning in any way, my job has kind of become to synthesize all that, make meaning out of it, and try and build that bridge between the laboratory and the classroom, to try and say to [00:03:00] teachers, to students, to parents, "This is what it's actually saying. Here's how learning works. What does that mean for us?" Alix: Okay, so you have set your sights on ed tech and if and whether it makes a positive or negative difference in kids' lives. Yeah. But ed tech is a term that maybe some people aren't familiar with, um, and also some people that are familiar with it maybe use it in loads of different ways. So do you wanna say a little bit about how you define what you consider encompassed in ed tech? Jared: I'm talking about any student-facing internet-connected device. So anything that the student has access to, can drive, control themselves, that will basically do more than one thing. So a book is a student-facing tool. Mm-hmm. Yes, that is ed tech, but there's really nothing more you can do with it other than reading it, highlight it, and write it. It's not connected to the internet. Alix: My next question was gonna be, how has that definition changed? But it's such a specific definition, I don't know if it necessarily has. I mean, I'm thinking in like AI era, like how do you-- maybe where does internet connectivity- I mean, 'cause I can imagine- It gets Jared: worse Alix: Yeah.[00:04:00] Jared: 'Cause you could, in order to have the AI going, you're gonna need some sort of internet conne- connectivity. But a lot of people are now, I think an interesting thing is people are making in-house AI, so you don't need the internet. It's on some sort of server, say, in the back room somewhere in the school. In which case they're like, "Well, this isn't an internet-connected device." So okay. You can then say any d- student-facing digital technology that allows you to do basically more than one thing at a time. Usually it will be connected to the internet, but any parallel processor is gonna fall into that same definition of EdTech. Alix: So basically, this stuff has absolutely exploded over the last few decades to the point of seeming just it has saturated, um, most schools in developed economies, I would say. Um, give us the lay of the land of how much this stuff is everywhere for all kids. Jared: When we think about tech, we think about what we had, which was a computer lab. There was a room with computers. You go there, you type once a week, cool. It is not even close to that anymore. And now, over a quarter of our kids spend over four [00:05:00] hours a day on a screen for learning purposes every single day at school. And you thought COVID would've-- Of course, is when globally we went tech-heavy, because you had to. It was tech or nothing. But you would've assumed that that would've been the end of the story, because all the parents saw how bad it worked, all the teachers saw how bad it worked, kids didn't like it. That should've been the wake-up call to say, "Wait, we don't really learn from tech." Instead, the world doubled down. In the US right now, uh, nearly 90% of public school districts have a one-to-one computer program where every kid gets their own laptop to use, which is one of the worst things you can do with tech. Just give them a computer. That'll help, right? Eh, not necessarily. And even the, the least tech-using countries post-COVID went super tech-heavy. So here's a thing most people don't know. East Asian economies were the least educationally tech-heavy economies in the world. So places like Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, these places where tech is [00:06:00] the mainstay of their adult world, in schools, they were the four least tech-using countries up until COVID. Hmm. They just, their kids never touched tech. And it's 'cause they realized, look, that's a tool for production. It's not a tool for learning. But post-COVID, they all went tech-heavy because they had to. And so we're about to get new data, actually comes out in two weeks, where we're gonna see did they maintain their tech-heaviness? 'Cause when they went tech-heavy during COVID- Hmm ... learning dropped significantly. And so we're hoping maybe they will go back, but if they don't, that means globally we're now kind of stuck in this ed tech rut. Alix: I love that expression or observation that tech is for production, not for learning. Jared: Well, that's the big AI problem, is people are saying, "How do kids use AI for learning?" It's, it's not a learning tool. It never has been. I, I think w- a big problem we tend to make is we mistake the tool for the skill. We f- we... A tool isn't a skill. A tool is just a tool. A tool is how you demonstrate your skill, but the skill is something qualitatively different. And so the only [00:07:00] reason you can make a tool useful is if you bring your skill to it. So this is why, like, AI's a perfect example. If AI can be said to be good for anything, and I can make the case that it ain't, it's good for nothing. But you might be able to say that, okay, it's good for expert, what we call offloading. I'm really good at stats. It takes me four hours to do stats. I could use, uh, AI to do it in four seconds, but the only reason it works is because my expertise allows me to vet the output immediately. As soon as it spits out a number, I can go, "Yep, that's right. No, that's wrong. Did I type in something?" I am driving the tool. But the tools we use as experts to make our lives easier are never the tool a novice should use to learn how to become an expert. Mm-hmm. When a novice uses the same tool, they do what's called outsourcing. They basically plug things in, copy/paste the output. They don't know what's good, what's bad, and in so doing, they don't learn the skill. They don't learn the, the information. They learn nothing. So a lot of these tech tools which were built for experts to offload, we're now giving to kids, and we're wondering why they're not learning, 'cause they're [00:08:00] just not learning tools. Alix: You also, you say that in the book at one point, that learning about computers is not the same thing as using a computer to learn, which I just think is, like, such a powerful inflation. Like, how did we get to the point where people were confused by those two things? Jared: So good rule of thumb: in education, there is curriculum, what we teach, and there's pedagogy, how we teach. Curriculum says, and you can make this argument just fine, "We need to teach kids computer skills." Well, cool. That means we need a class. If you wanna teach typing skills, you have a typing class Through some weird, I don't know how to describe it, the twist of, of cognitive fate, the argument we need to teach computer skills has morphed seamlessly into we need to teach all skills through a computer. We need to teach reading through a computer. We need to teach writing through a computer. No, that's a pedagogy question. Now you're telling me how to teach something, and we have hundreds of years of data s- that show us how to teach these things best, and it doesn't involve a computer. So I think you could very comfortably say we need to teach [00:09:00] about tech, but s- without then saying we also now need tech in every single class and every single day. The two are not mutually exclusive. They can both work. It's just somehow they've become conflated, and people mistake what we're teaching versus how we're teaching. Alix: You have this section in the book where you kind of take us through a set of myths that is kind of an underlying set of assumed things that helps the ed tech case actually happen. There's, I think there's five of them. W- the one that really stuck with me is the myth that schools are failing, so we need some deus ex machina. We need some new way of dealing with all these issues. Can you unpack a little bit about the extent to which that's wrong and kind of how we arrived at this myth that school kind of sucks? Jared: The myth that education is failing really took root around 2008 to 2010 And arguably, that was education's golden age. That was arguably the best education had ever been. More kids throughout the world had access to it. More kids were [00:10:00] succeeding through it. More kids were graduating. Uh, well-being measures were higher than they'd ever been amongst kids. Um, f- uh, it, enjoyment at school was higher than it, uh, it's ever been. And if you wanna get down to brass tacks, is test scores were higher than they had ever been. Reading literacy and numeracy were peaking out in 2010. Why then all of a sudden did this message come out that education is broken? By what metric were they possibly saying education is broken? And there was no metric to use, so my-- the only thing I can draw this back to, and I'm, I-- this might sound flippant, and I'm sorry, but I blame TED Talks. Along comes this little red dot, and if you go back 2006 to 2009 is when TED Talks really explodes. Watch any TED Talk that concerns education, and the underlying message is it's broken. It's killing us. It's killing our kids' creativity right at the time when creativity was peaking out. It's killing knowledge right at the time when knowledge was killing out. Why would they possibly be saying that education is broken? [00:11:00] Because what's the T in TED? Tech. Cut to 15 years later, and now you probably could say education is broken in the sense that scores are lower now than they've been all century. Um, kids are le- less happy than they've been basically ever since we've been recording happiness and, and, uh, fewer kids are succeeding through schools. So what caused the break? Well, we can draw that back to the tech we introduced to it. So if you wanna say that education is broken, the only real argument you can make is tech broke it. It wasn't-- Tech didn't save it. Tech managed to somehow break something that was As good as it had been in history. Now, by all means, and let's be clear, was school perfect in 2010? Of course not. Nothing's ever gonna be perfect. We can always do better. But was it better then than it is now? Oh, yes. Across the board it was. Everyone seemed to be thriving a lot more there. Alix: It's also an area, it's a place, a forum where people that have sort of academic credentials will present information, but [00:12:00] oftentimes that information doesn't have much of an evidence base which is something I've seen loads of in those kinds of spaces. And I- Yeah ... this is one of those spaces where, um, EdTech in particular, where it feels like an evidence-free zone. Like, you hear these kind of vibes-based assessments that technology's gonna make kids' learning better. You hear that more and more with AI, that, like, can't you just imagine what the new sort of horizon of learning is gonna be like once we get these tools in the hands of all these kids? Can you talk a little bit about the kind of state of the evidence in terms of what works for kids and why EdTech maybe is this, like, huge problem that you're describing? Jared: All of the talk about EdTech is promissory, what it could do in the future, what it might be able to do. It's the same thing with AI right now. Anyone who talks AI is talking about what it might be able to do in 2030. Well, mate, I gotta deal with what it's doing right now. My- In 2030, cool, we'll talk about it then. But do you have evidence that it's doing anything meaningful now? And the answer is no. The evidence shows that it's harming our kids.[00:13:00] So you want me to go to harm my kid today under the belief that maybe tomorrow you're gonna do something better with it. I, I'm sorry, I don't got that time. My kid is not your guinea pig. And when it comes to EdTech, it's, it's funny how promissory it is. Your toaster undergoes more scrutiny than any piece of technology we've ever put into kids, in front of kids at school. You c- Basically, if you invent something, we can get it into schools tomorrow without any evidence base, without any proof. So what we can do, thank goodness, is we can go into psychology, we can go into neuroscience, we can go into deep research and say, "If we understand how learning works, do we have evidence that would explain why these tools are so negative?" And the answer is yes. So go with handwriting We have a lot of, of, of evidence now that says if kids take notes by hand versus typing notes, the exact same, change nothing else but that, they will learn more, comprehend better by hand than by typing. Now, why might that be? Because think about it. Most people think of note-taking [00:14:00] as something you do while you're learning. I'm in class and I'm taking notes. No, note-taking is the learning. What you're doing is you're transforming information into a way that makes it deeper, makes sense for you by then translating it onto the page. When you're writing by hand, it's a naturally slow embodied process. You can't go fast, you can't get everything, so you already have to parse meaning. Whereas when you type, most people can type about as fast as I speak, all you end up doing is transcription. You get every word that comes out of my mouth, but you get no depth, you get no understanding. You have no clue what I actually said. So this is one of those perfect examples of the data's very clear. Change nothing else, but do note-taking on pen and paper versus typing, you'll learn more. If you did nothing more but read from books versus reading from a screen, you will learn more. Buy a printer. If every school invested in a printer and printed everything out, learning will go up just because of the way the brain functions and makes sense of the world. Alix: Yeah. That's interesting. I really enjoyed that part of the book of appreciating sort of depth and [00:15:00] substance is where we kind of create almost like a playground for our other parts of our mind to, like, learn how to do things well, which makes a lot of sense. Jared: So most people think- On one side we have skills, on the other side we have knowledge, and when those two come together you get brilliance. And they don't realize that no, our skills emerge from our knowledge. Skills are not separate to them. They are literally, they grow from it, which means the more you know, the more creative you will be, the more critical you can be, uh, the better communicator you can be, the better your memory becomes, the better your attention becomes. So all of these cognitive skills are not separate from learning and knowledge. They grow from it. So as one goes up, the other will start to dance with it. So like one of the biggest questions you always get from kids when you're a teacher is, "Why do I gotta learn this? I'm not gonna use this in my real life." And the answer is, "Yeah. No, you won't." But learning compounds, so the problem is, like, the biggest predictor of whether or not you can do algebra is how automated you have [00:16:00] arithmetic. If you're still struggling with arithmetic, you don't have that on autopilot, you're never gonna succeed at algebra. And the biggest predictor of trig is how automated you have algebra. Mm-hmm. Learning compounds. So you might not use this skill, but if we keep growing, sooner or later you're gonna get to a skill that will define your career, that will define your life. And at that point, what most people do when they get that skill, they say, "Why didn't you teach me this through school?" Like, "Why didn't we do this the whole time?" Couldn't we go straight here? And the answer is, yeah, why didn't we just jump right in? The answer is we couldn't go straight right in. If we didn't do these steps up to it, you never would've gotten to this stage now. And that's just the, the tricky part about learning that most people miss is that because it compounds, we gotta go through the muck to get to where people want to eventually get. Alix: And if you try and explain the constituent components of a skill or a way of understanding the world, you can't, because it's basically this, like, nested set of so many things that sort of build on top of each other, and I imagine it's kind of hard to disaggregate. Jared: Always context-dependent as well. Yeah. So think about something like, [00:17:00] um, communication, right? You put me in front of a room of a million people and say, "Talk about learning." You'll be like, "That dude is a great communicator." Now you put me at a dinner table with one other person and say, "Talk about car repair," I won't be able to say a thing. I'll just be like, "Hmm?" And so you'll be like, "Oh, that guy can't communicate." Same thing creativity. Give me a brain, creative as hell. Give me woodworking, you'll be like, "Where'd your creativity go?" It's because all of these things are so contextually bound to the knowledge within each context that there is no such thing. No one has creativity that once they've got it, they apply it everywhere. We have creativity within fields dependent upon the knowledge we have. Alix: Um, so part of the book when you're sort of synthesizing all this research is you explain why it may be misleading to look at the effects in isolation of EdTech on educational outcomes, where there's, there's sort of studies showing that EdTech has, like, a positive effect. Can you explain why that might [00:18:00] not make any sense at all and be completely out of context, um, in terms of how to understand EdTech's role? Jared: In research, we tend, tend to, uh, show our results in what's called an effect size. Now, just to be simple, this will be a single number, usually between negative one and positive one, where negative means I'm harming the outcome I want, positive means I'm benefiting it, and zero means neutral. Now, that's true in every field except for education. Interesting. Education has to act different. Yeah, because what happens is... So this came from a man named, um, John Hattie, a researcher out of Australia. He analyzed 350,000 effect sizes across education, and over 95% of them were positive. Everything works in education. Interesting. Why? Because learning growth development is a biological process. If you grow from birth, if you locked a, a baby in a room, took them out at 15, horrible thought experiment. Oh my Alix: God. Jared: They would... I know, I'm sorry. But- That's okay ... [00:19:00] just for our purposes, they will come out larger. They will come out smarter. They will come out better without you having to do a thing because biol- biologically, we will always be growing. Interesting. So this means in education, if you're looking at zero as your baseline, literally do anything tomorrow. Change your hat, your kids will learn more. Put on shoes, your kids will learn more. Interesting. Yeah. Do nothing. So we need a different baseline. So- The arguments are, and depending on who you're gonna ask, in education, a meaningful baseline is gonna sit between positive .4 and positive .5. It's, it's who you ask, so a good kind of rule of thumb, just say positive .4. Let's be as nice as we want to. So now when you go back and you look at the research of ed tech, basically every individual study will report a positive effect size. And so that's their kind of argument to say, "Look, we're, we're benefiting learning," without realizing that no, in this field, we do things differently. When you aggregate all ed tech, they actually sit at a positive effect size of .29, which is below what we would call average growth in schools, which means you're actually slowing [00:20:00] learning compared to methods that we know are gonna work better. So- And, and when you start to kind of divvy it up, you see it gets, it doesn't matter. If you just look at ed tech, say, for science, it's still under .4. For math, under .4. For drilling, under .4. The worst was one-to-one computers. When you give kids computer programs, that has a combined effect size of .12, which is, I, I mean, you might as well just not do anything. It's about as bad for learning as, as we can expect to get. Now, what, and that, that brings up questions. What has effect sizes above these values? Yeah. That's a lot of the humanistic things. Uh, student-teacher relationships, con- connecting with your teacher, .68 positive effect size to learning. Handwritten notes, uh, positive point something like 72 occur above the... So all the analog methods that we were historically doing Surpass this threshold. Mm-hmm. It's all the kind of novel methods and technologies that are now dipping below this threshold. So that's, yeah, whereas the data might look good, [00:21:00] and in other fields it would be good- Yeah ... in education, we just play a different game. Alix: So interesting. I think, I mean, just to kind of go deeper on one of those interventions you describe, um, we had people on the podcast, um, uh, last year, I think, who wrote a paper about the therapeutic relationship and the extent to which, um, large language models can, uh, provide, um, something akin to therapy. The paper's authors basically concluded that without the therapeutic relationship, basically therapy is not happening. Like, that's, it, it, it requires that relationship, among many other interesting findings. We can drop a link to it in the show notes. Um, can you... I, I was surprised, but then in retrospect was like, "Why was I surprised?" That that same kind of link exists in education. Can you talk a little bit about the role of empathy and that kind of biological connection that you talk about, um, in terms of the role that teachers play, um, and the kind of way that EdTech may displace that? Jared: Therapy is, is so- a beautiful example. Believe it or not, the first err- therapeutic chatbot was from [00:22:00] 1966. It was a program called ELIZA, and back then, th- pundits were saying, "Well, that's it for therapists. AI is gonna take your job. If you're a human therapist, quit now. We got this tool." Well, cut to today. There are more human therapists alive today than at any point in history, and compared to the best AI, they're killing it. They are still three to five times better at treating basic symptoms- Yeah ... of anxiety and depression than AI. Why? Because in the term therapeutic relationship, the operative word was never therapeutic. It was relationship. Studies suggest up to 80% of all therapeutic outcomes can be boiled down to the empathetic relationship between patient and therapist. Same thing in a classroom. When we have a good empathetic relationship between a teacher and a student, learning necessarily goes up. So that leads to the question, what is empathy? I mean, if it's so important- Mm-hmm ... what the heck is it? And the joke is, is you don't have it. I don't have it. Nobody has it. Most people think empathy is like a personality trait or an emotion. I feel empathetic. No, [00:23:00] it's what we call a transpersonal emergent property. So what happens is when two or more pairs of biology come together, biology can start to resonate. So in a very real sense, when you and I start to empathize, what's happening is our hearts are starting to beat at the same time. We will start to breathe in synchrony. We will blink at the same time. If I could image our brains, our brains start to look almost identical. So you're not driving it. I'm not driving it. It is a biological mechanism that human beings have more so than any other animal we've ever seen. So now imagine why would this be so good for learning? Well, if I'm a kid resonating with a teacher, in that moment, I'm no longer learning from the teacher. I am thinking like the teacher. So interesting. I am in her head. We're making the same cognitive moves. Understanding deepens so much more. So this is one of those proofs, those mechanisms that say human beings have evolved 150,000 years to learn from other human beings. We can measure mechanisms that say if two pairs of biology come [00:24:00] together, learning will go up. Mm-hmm. Now, what's the problem with screens? Twofold. One, first- There is no biology in a screen. So by definition, you cannot empathize with a computer. By all means, you can love it, you can fall, you can marry it. I know some people are marrying their AI. Fine, you can laugh at it. Sure. But you will never get... Go to town. You'll never get the benefit of empathy because that literally cannot exist there. So I always kinda say it like this. Like, if I show you a picture of a sun, you will s- uh, subjectively feel warmer, but you will never get a tan because there's no mechanism there. Same thing. People might subjectively report feeling s- empathy with a machine, but you're never gonna get the benefit of it. The other problem is, is tech tends to kill human resonance as well. Interesting. So you've, you've felt this. Like, if you've ever been around a dinner table and everything's flowing, everyone's having a good conversation, as soon as someone pulls out a phone- Yeah you can almost feel this physical break. And it's like, "Ooh, what just changed?" [00:25:00] That's it. The, the screen broke the resonance between biologies, and now you all gotta start from scratch to try and get back up to that point. So screens also have this really wicked ability to just cut off. So if a teacher and a kid are flowing and everything's good, and then the teacher's like, "Get out your laptop," okay, that's gonna cut them off as well. So it's just, it... When, when you realize that humans are meant to learn from humans, you see bringing in the screen just doesn't seem to jive with how human beings are built to learn. At least, learn best. You can still learn from it, it's just gonna be a much s- shallower, much weaker than other forms of learning. Alix: So interesting, 'cause it feels like a lot of the kind of politics of around technology, around these ideas about how it could make life or society or our personal experiences better, is kind of predicated on this idea of, uh, connection, um, when really it feels like an attempt to, like, take people out of the equation. Like, I find it so... Like, the idea that a kid is gonna learn through a computer and that that's gonna leapfrog their understanding of [00:26:00] things, it makes it all feel more scalable, like less meat-based. Like it's less, just fewer people are required. Less training's required. Teachers unions can be annoying, so, like, we don't wanna have to deal with labor. We don't wanna have to deal with, like, all of these very people-y aspects of something that's as critical as education. And it just feels like such a It's a lesson it feels like we keep learning over and over and over again, that this attempt at sort of a scaled shortcut, um, where some company with a silver bullet comes in and solves these problems, it just never works And I don't know sort of how to break us through to, like, the next phase of understanding that, like, social problems will not be solved in this way, and in fact, it will be just, like, multiple steps backwards. Like, do you have thoughts on that? Jared: We keep waiting for the next phase. The next phase is gonna be worse. We forget that whatever the hottest tool is, we use that as the metaphor to understanding humans. So way back in the day, humans were [00:27:00] understood to be, um, uh, what you call hydraulic creatures. Why? Because water hydraulics was the best we had. We then became understood to be, uh, binary computers because that was the best tool. Now we're talking about how we're cloud-based creatures. None of this is real. All of this is metaphors we are using as researchers to help us make sense of data, but we know the brain is not actually a computer. You are not actually a computer. You are far more than a computer. But the metaphor just helps us talk about it. But people mistake the metaphor for truth, and then we start to act, how would a computer learn best? Download information. So how would a kid learn best? Download information. Next. Interesting. And it just, it leaves us, uh, the just floundering. Most of our identity formation happens, or a big chunk of it happens during adolescence And what we do, what we have historically done, is we externalize a lot of that identity formation. There are different groups of people. We put on different masks. We s- we [00:28:00] act in a way. We see what's reflected bla- back to us, and we start to internalize that. That's the myth of Narcissus, right? Narcissus doesn't fall in love with himself. He falls in love with a reflection of himself, and that's the idea of externalizing identity and the dangers of doing that too much. So historically, we maybe had 100 friends. We externalize some, but every night you'd go home, you'd have two or three hours to yourself where you just have nothing else to do but think, and that's when you start to personalize this, make sense of who you are. Along comes the internet, and what do we do? Now we externalize our identity tenfold. Instead of a th- 100 people, we have a million people sending things back, and we no longer have any downtime. So at no point- Interesting ... do we start to integrate this and say, "What matters to me? What patterns do I like best?" It all starts to become externalized. A kid writes a song, puts it on the internet. It's neither good nor bad until they see how many likes it got, and that must be who I am, what I'm good at. Now, if the internet made that process worse, [00:29:00] AI- Alix: Gosh ... Jared: kills that Alix: process. Yeah. Jared: Because now, not only am I externalizing my identity, at least back in the day, you wrote the song you put on the internet. You, you painted something that you asked other people to tell you if it's good or bad. Now, you don't even do that. You ask AI to write you a song that you put online. Someone votes it back, probably their AI bot. At no point do you ever stop and consider, "Who am I? What do I value? How does all this make me?" And so we're, we're seeing some big issues at university level now of lack of identity formation. When we say kids are more narcissistic today than ever before, we're not saying they like themselves more. We're saying they have no clue who they are anymore because they've externalized their identity so much that they've never taken the t- time to say, "Who am I?" And what does, what does Narcissus do in some versions of the myth? As soon as he realizes he's not the reflection, he kills himself 'cause it's easier to die than it is to face the difficulty of determining what do I genuinely believe. And so that's what I [00:30:00] think a lot of this is coming back to, not just learning. It's how are they socializing? How are kids interacting at schools, and how is that changing their identity? Alix: Essentially, that's one of the core processes of schooling- Mm-hmm ... is that you are, you are in relation with other kids while you're going through the process of identity formation yourself. So obviously, mediating that through technology is gonna have a really big impact on that. Jared: Graham Nuttall was a researcher back in the '80s, and he estimated 60% of everything kids learn at school does not come from the classroom. It comes from the socialization- Interesting ... aspects of schooling. I totally believe that. And that same thing- Absolutely, and, and it's, and that's where, like, a lot of institutions went personal. They said, "Well, every kid should have their own stream of learning." No, no, some of the best impact we have is the social learning, is when 30 kids learn the same thing simultaneously. Some already know it, some don't, but it's the discussions that that then brings up, where they see other kids behaving in certain ways. They're learning through all of that. It's a social endeavor, and that's how we learn together, as opposed to just becoming individual computers, which I- [00:31:00] maybe that's what ed tech wants, everyone alone. Who knows? Alix: If it's this clear, which it sounds to me like you make a fantastic case that it is this clear, that technology as the primary mechanism of education is not only not positive, it is negative in terms of a kid's development and a kid's educational attainment. If there's that evidence base, like, how did we get to this juncture where schools are just gobbling it up and kind of accepting it as this inevitable way of doing things in the future? Jared: I, I could, I could definitely see 15 years ago, we didn't know. It sounded good, so we- Yeah ... we bought in. Um, I was hoping COVID would've been the wake-up, but it wasn't. But we, we definitely know now that this has been a failed experiment. Not just failed, a harmful experiment. This was a, we, we, we gave an entire generation of kids to this, and they're now paying the price for that. Um, b- but so for, from the teacher's point of view, from the school's point of view, I'm usually just very, "We didn't [00:32:00] know, so, but now that we know better, we gotta do better." Yeah. So that's, I put the onus there for us. F- from the higher-ups, what you're gonna start to see, the decision-makers, the boards, the administrators, they're now stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, is they've already devoted so much time, effort, and energy to this, and money, that to go back would m- make the, it would basically just put egg on their face. And we you don't make it to the top of a board because you don't have any ego. Totally, yeah. You, you want to be seen as competent and meaningful, so I think a lot of people at that level are just afraid to admit, "Mea culpa, we screwed up." But they got to. And so now it's just like, well, now we're gonna chase bad money after good money, and we're just gonna keep going down this rabbit hole. But what was the big thing that sold them? It's tech. Tech came in. You gotta remember, the very first laptop given to kids, the very first Chromebook, was a very, it's a small laptop that Microsoft made for business people. They thought, "Smaller laptop, now you can travel with it. Everyone'll love it." No one bought it. It didn't sell anything. Everyone [00:33:00] hated it. So in order to recoup costs, they said, "Who might use this? Kids. Hey, it's a small computer. Give it to kids. Makes sense." At no point did that tool have anything to do with learning. Did they even consider schooling or education? It was just a way to recoup cost. So from the very beginning, the evidence is clear: tech never cared about learning. This was just another customer base for them. And f- from that point of view, of course they're gonna sell their tool any way they can. Y- education's broken. Did you know that? Is it? Oh, yeah, your kids are less creative now than ever before. Are they? Yeah, but I've got the tool that's gonna solve it. It's this m- my MacBook Pro here. Okay, I'll do it. And the weirdest thing is they lied, and they're getting busted for it now. There's-- they're getting fined a lot of money for the social media stuff. I promise you ed tech is coming next. The first court case against an ed tech company has just been filed. It's-- this is coming down next. But I can't fault them for lying because they're a business. [00:34:00] Name one business that doesn't lie to sell product. Alix: I guess it's, it's Jared: marketing. Yeah. I, I am-- I, exactly. Yeah. I am more surprised that we fell for it than I am the fact that they're now being found out that they lied to us. Of course they did. When you realize that their interest was never in our students, was never in learning, was never in society or development, it was just in money, then every move they made makes perfect sense. I don't like it, I don't condone it, but it makes sense to me why we were so willing-- And this is the same thing is happening now with AI. Why we are so willing to believe people who are like, "By the way, AI's gonna kill you, but not mine. Oh, but it's unsafe. Oh, but it's not unsafe. But it's gonna take your job. Oh, but it's not gonna..." Shut up. Alix: Yeah. Jared: They're gonna say whatever they gotta say to make money. Totally. Do not listen to any of it. The good stuff, ignore it. The bad stuff, ignore it. Do not pay attention to anything any company says. Th- this is w- so I lived in Australia for 12 years And I love this. So every advertisement is basically just a lie. Whenever commercials come on, I hit [00:35:00] mute 'cause I'm just like, "Shut up." I- you could say the best thing and the worst thing, doesn't mean anything. But there was one company called Bunnings. It was basically th- Australia's version of Home Depot, and every commercial is exactly the same. They have someone from Bunnings who works there saying, "Come down to Bunnings. Here's our deals this week." And the rest of the commercial is, "Hammer, 9.99. Ladder-" "... 12.99. Bucket, 6.99." I'm like, "There you go. That's a commercial." You're not lying. You're not trying to convince me I need joy in my life- You're communicating facts ... and your bucket will bring me happiness. Here's a fact. Here's how much- you need a bucket, here it is. There's- That's the kind of advertising I can get behind. Alix: It's so funny. Jared: Shoes, 10.99. There you go. You need it. You don't, don't come here. Alix: I'm into it. Um, okay, I mean, that all makes loads of sense to me, and I, I could tell in the book that you are actually optimistic that the tide is about to turn, as you just said. Um, what I also love about the book is that basically you lay down the evidence base, and then you're like, "Okay, now what are we gonna do about it?" And then you kind of pick three groups and give very, very [00:36:00] specific, um, and structured recommendations for how to approach it. I had a real expert vibe to the book. It was basically like a really well-structured workbook, um, focused on what teachers can do, what parents can do, and what students can do. What should I be doing? Like, what should students be doing? Like, take us through it. Jared: A good rule of thumb from anyone's angle is anytime you can, you make learning analog. We need to differentiate entertainment-based tech and learning, because right now we're trying to conflate the two, and it just ain't working. So if you're at home as a parent, the best thing you can do, buy a printer. It, it sounds so silly, but buy a printer, and then anything that concerns learning at home, is it homework? Is it a reading your kid has to do? Is it a worksheet? Print it out. The more they get used to learning analog in your home, that's how they're gonna start to mentally separate this tool is for fun, learning is a little bit harder. They're gonna start to bleed some- Interesting ... of those behaviors into school, where there's a little less control, and they're gonna start making decisions. You know what? I think I'm gonna write this instead of type it, or things [00:37:00] like that. Um, from a student angle too, I'd say remember, learning is hard That's kind of the point Yeah is what you're doing is you're forcing your biology to do something and understand something that it doesn't already have, and changing biology requires a lot of energy and a lot of discomfort. So I always, like, if you go to the gym and it was easy for you, you didn't work out. If you go to the gym and you're huffing and puffing and you're like, "Man, that sucks," good, you're working out. You're pushing your biology somewhere new. Learning is the same. So when you think about studying at home or driving your own learning, remember, everything is effort. The more effort you put into it, the better results you're gonna get. So think about something like memory. One of the worst things you can do when studying is put information back into your brain. "I'm gonna reread my notes. I'm gonna reread this book chapter." Memory deepens when you access it, when you force yourself to recall it. So take a practice quiz. Try and rewrite your notes from memory and then check them back for [00:38:00] accuracy. Try and tell somebody else about a topic. Mm-hmm. Anything that's getting you ripping ideas out of your brain, that's where you're getting your bang for your buck when it comes to studying. Interesting, yeah. Now, what is, uh, what is one thing tech demands we never do? Recall anything. Yeah. One of tech's biggest- It's kind of the best part of Apple ... arg- biggest selling points. Exactly, is you don't gotta sell... I, like, the biggest joke, this won't work for kids, but it works for adults, is ask your parent, "What was your best friend's phone number growing up?" They will rattle it off. 740-7857. I haven't dialed that thing in 35 years. I know it absolutely. Then ask your parent, "Hey, what's your best friend's phone number today?" Mate, I don't even know my kids'. I don't know your number. I don't know mine. I, I know where it is. I don't know mine. Yeah. It's... I know what buttons to press to access it, but I don't know what it is. Now, what do you think is gonna be more important for you as you grow and develop through your life? Knowledge of actual facts, or knowing where to look up those facts, how to access them? Accessing information isn't the [00:39:00] skill you're here to, to, to develop. You need to have the n- the knowledge. Mm-hmm. So that's why as much as you can when you study, you lock down. And then at the school level, too, I always just say, look, it's not about banning tech. But two good rules when it comes to tech. One, people say, "When do we bring it in? When's a safe time to bring it in?" When you don't need the tech is probably the moment when it's safe to start using that tech. Alix: Interesting. Jared: So if you know how to do arithmetic, now maybe we can start bringing in a calculator. Once you know how to format an essay, now we can start bringing in a word processor. Once the skill is set, then we can discuss bringing in tech, because what tech is gonna do is just basically run that skill in the background for you. So you need to have enough to be able to vet it. So when is tech good? When the kid doesn't need it. That's when it's good. The next thing is remember, always have a reason for tech. So the easiest thing you can do in school is reinstitute the computer lab. We still have computers at school, it's just there is a place you [00:40:00] go if you're gonna use it, which makes it very specific. Rather than being the default, where every teacher's like, "All right, get out your laptop," it is now a conscious choice the teacher has to make. Is tech relevant to my session today? I only have 30 minutes in that lab. What can we do? Ca- can I keep kids focused on that? If the answer's yes, there it is. What you can do as a teacher is you know what you think is gonna work, or you know your kids better than anyone else. Do it, but collect data. So if you decide, you know what? For one week, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have my kids write notes by hand instead of typing. Collect data. At the beginning of the week, ask a survey questionnaire. At the end of the week, ask a survey questionnaire. Maybe give a little quiz. Compare that to how they were doing with the week before on typing. Maybe one week you're gonna say, "You know what? I'm gonna print out all worksheets instead of doing them online. Let's see what happens." Get data in your own classroom. That's when you can go to your leaders, your higher-ups, and say, "By the way, thanks. Th- here's all the data that shows tech shouldn't work." Uh, that's, that, [00:41:00] I've got you covered on that. I got your back on that. You can now bring your data to say, "By the way, I now have data showing that analog does work with our kids when used in this way. Can you allow, would you allow me to expand my experiment and include other teachers, maybe in our year level?" And so if you can bring your data to support the data that is in the book or online elsewhere, that's how you're gonna start to get there a year. Alix: Thank you so much to Jared for this conversation and the book, which is a breezy, if slightly stark summary of all the ways that, um, the choices that schools, school districts, nation states are making to put screens in front of kids is setting us up for some real pain as students struggle to learn, uh, the basics and develop cognitively, all because tech solutionism is just a hell of a drug. So next week, we are going from the science of [00:42:00] bad ed tech to what parents and communities can actually do about it. If you missed it, be sure to check out our conversation last week with Stefan Turkheimer, who's the guy actually passing good tech laws in all this, um, environment of hemming and hawing about how hard it is to do any meaningful legislation, and instead we're just gonna have to rely on strategic litigation and these big court cases. Um, there are people that are actually writing laws and getting them passed, and Stefan's one of them. So do check out that episode. Thank you to the podcast team, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout for all their work making this podcast happen.