School Time Has Become Screen Time

Parents, Beware: Lockdown May Be Over, But Education Is More Virtual Than Ever

A couple vignettes from my practice this past year:

A teenager with trouble falling asleep. We discuss all the usual ‘sleep hygiene’ recommendations (consistent bedtimes, no screens before bed, etc etc). I share my personal advice, as someone who falls asleep reading every night, to consider trying to wind down reading one of her most boring school textbooks. “But you said no screens!” she replies. Noticing my befuddlement, her mom explains: they don’t have physicals books in her school anymore. All readings, all assignments, are on their tablets.

A middle schooler sent to me for an ADHD evaluation. The child never had problems in school before, but this year he is driving the teacher batty with his inability to attend to the subject at hand. The parents explain to me that the flustered teacher is tired of yelling at the kid to stop fiddling around online during class. Another befuddled look from me, as I ask, “well, why doesn’t the teacher just confiscate his smartpone?” No, the parents, tell me, I don’t understand: the entire class has tablets on which to watch the lecture from their desks as the teacher gives it from the front of the class, making notations on all their screens, kind of like an interactive powerpoint presentation. The screens are an integral part of the learning experience. It is English class, after all.

These are but two of countless similar moments of befuddlement I’ve experienced the past couple years. Every time it happens, I keep meaning to write about it, but then dismiss the idea, figure it’s a fluke, one crazy school room, and y’all won’t believe me - but it keeps happening! So I did a little more digging, and the fact is that this is now the “new normal” in our public schools: all screens, all the time.

Remember when the whole world went mad and shut down schools? Of course you do. But I bet you also think you remember when sanity at long last prevailed, schools opened back up, and virtual school finally ended. That is, sad to say, a false memory - the school buildings may be opened back up, but virtual learning is still going strong!

I don’t know whether the schools used the lockdown to speed up an existing plan, or whether they invested so much time and money into zoom school that they couldn’t let it go, but let it go they certainly haven’t. My experience, talking to countless families these past couple years, is that school remains just as screen-based now as it was when the kids were all locked in their basements. I’m not relying solely on anecdotes - I’ve got the screenshots.

Think back to your own schoolday essentials: perhaps a pencil bag, with a rubber eraser, a backpack bursting with heavy textbooks, binders full of lined paper for assignments - is it coming back to you? Well, if you’re going to school now, the essentials seem to be ClassLink, EasyBridge, Blocksi, Schoology, and Compass.

What was that? What are those words? All, save compass, are unrecognizable to me, and I went to school for a long time. As for compass, no, it doesn’t refer to this old favorite of my schooldays:

what, no wifi capability?

Apparently, all those terms are names of various apps, learning platforms, and schoolwork electronic management tools, whatever on earth that all means. And you can’t go to school without them!

And no, this is not just reserved for computer class (I remember mine, we had to program a turtle to move around a screen, but mostly we just played SimCity…). Like I said, even English class doesn’t have any books, pencils, or paper anymore.

Witness the below screenshots I took from one of our local school districts. You may have seen them in the news for this, or for this (very nsfw!), but don’t worry, it’s not all grooming all the time. Their big learning initiative is to make sure every single child has a tablet of their own, 24/7.

As you can see in the highlighted portion from their website below, the idea is to make sure children have access to screens to improve their understanding of “our quickly changing world” and allow “anytime access to learning.”

So, we’re going to radically change education by giving tablets to every student, and justify that change by saying it’s to help the kids deal with change itself - do I have that right? Kinda gives you a headache, doesn’t it? Also: everyone knows you can’t open a book after 3pm, that’s why the pre-smartphone generations were so famously unlettered, they did not have “anytime access to learning”!

What does this enhanced understanding of the world look like when it comes to English class? Well, there’s an app for that:

And what follows are some screenshots of what this EasyBridge myPerspectives program looks like as used in English class, taken from the app’s own website:

Again, this is not my dystopian exaggeration of what the modern classroom is like - this is from their own promotional materials! And look, it’s English class - with every single kid looking at a screen!

More from myPerspectives:

Hundreds of online resources! Students can access online prompts, audio, and video! And to think all those illiterate rubes like John Quincy Adams needed was a book… Just imagine how much smarter Lincoln would have been with some instant video access in his childhood! So much potential unrealized.

As you can see, it’s basically identical to reading a book, except perhaps even simpler. No distractions at all. So uncluttered, so plain, learning from this platform is basically like a monastic retreat in your own classroom. Ok, I’m being a tad snarky - but now might be a good time to buy stock in ADHD meds…

Ok, that’s enough from, er, English class. Here’s another of the apps:

Schoology is apparently how kids do their assignments. It is, per below, accessed through another app thingie called Classlink - where you can find “almost all software and textbooks that students use.”

Here’s the ClassLink homepage. Like Schoology, they apparently borrow the McDonald’s advertising method of bragging about how many millions of people already use their product (20 million users! 21 million users!) without lingering over details of what happens long term to the waistlines - or minds - of said customers. Though at least in McDonald’s case, you actually have to choose to buy their burgers, whereas with ClassLink and co, I don’t think parents or students had much say at all.

One last screenshot, this one from Compass. This one is not, as far as I can tell, a product used by the above school board. I think it may be a competitor to ClassLink, or Schoology, I don’t know, but I heard a parent complaining about it. I just wanted to show that here, too, on the company’s own home page, their ideal depiction of education shows nothing but children looking at screens.

What to make of all this? Nothing good.

Over the weekend, I shared posts by Professors Gray and Twenge about the mental health disaster that has become modern childhood. Prof Gray tends to put more blame on modern factory schooling and its attack on free play, while Prof Twenge believes that the rise of screen time is the central culprit. I think what my post today shows is that the argument between them is moot. Today, schools = screens. Prof Twenge’s invaluable book iGen (much more on it here) shows that there is a linear dose response relationship between increased screen time and increased misery - and these schools are making kids use screens all day long! To say nothing of the entirely screen-based homework afterwards…

If you’re a reader of this substack, you probably already have a million and one reasons to fight to escape public school. For the few holdouts, I just wanted to alert you to this screen/school reality. I certainly did not know the extent of it until I started listening more closely to my patients. If you’d like a politically correct reason to pursue alternative education, without having to worry about your friends thinking you’re a closet domestic extremist, just tell them that if you wanted your kids to rot their brains watching screens all day, you would have sent them to the nearest TV, not the local public school.

One final anecdote, not from my patients but from a fellow doctor. I write a lot about the education of the founders’ generation, or public school textbooks a century ago, but one needn’t go that far back to find the beneficial effects of a good book or two. This week I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Ben Carson’s speech at the Agape fundraiser. He talked about what a terrible student he was in elementary school. His mother, desperate, turned to drastic measures: she turned the TV off. She made her kids read books instead. He hated it - at first. Yet since TV was now off limits, the books were all he had, and he soon gave himself up to them and fell in love. He was transformed from the worst student to the best and hasn’t stopped reading since. You don’t need to work three jobs to afford the best private school, you don’t have to spend countless hours finetuning the perfect homeschool curriculum. I’m sure those sacrifices could help, and if you’re up to it, go for them. But it really may be as simple, as easy, as turning off the screens.

Good luck!