Dear Students,

Plato once warned that writing would break the minds of learners. He believed that if people relied on text instead of memory, they would lose something essential. Adults have been repeating his warning for more than two thousand years. Every generation has been certain that the newest tool was the one that would finally undo young people.

I wish I could tell you we had learned from that history. I wish I could say the adults who designed your schools, your classrooms, and your curriculum paused long enough to understand how enormous the shift into digital learning really was. I wish we had planned for it. We did not. And now you are paying the price.

Recently, The New York Times published several articles arguing that laptops, smartphones, and school-issued devices are contributing to declining test scores, reduced attention spans, and the erosion of learning. Some of the observations are accurate. Many of you have watched classmates drift into videos, games, or even shopping during class. Many teachers are exhausted from fighting students for focus. The data on distraction is real.

But the real issue runs deeper than the articles acknowledge.

For more than a century, adults have blamed the newest technology for every challenge in education. In the 1920s, radio was supposed to destroy literacy. In the 1950s, television was going to eliminate imagination. In the 1980s, calculators were certain to end mathematics. In the 1990s, computers were going to replace teachers. In the 2000s, the internet was accused of ruining memory. In the 2010s, smartphones were believed to erase attention. Today, AI is the next villain.

The script has not changed. A new tool appears. Adults panic. A journalist writes a warning. Someone demands a ban. A generation later, the same tool is ordinary, and the next one is blamed for all our failures.

This is not to dismiss concerns about distraction or the challenges your teachers describe. It is to tell the truth about the research. The evidence does not say that technology automatically harms learning. It says something far more inconvenient for the adults who run your schools.

It says that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)