This website is about 1:1 “educational” screen use, or EdTEch, in Quebec schools, and why parents are strangely inert when it comes to understanding or speaking about this issue. (1:1 means 1 personal device for each child.)
In September 2023, my 12-year-old son came home and described his first day of junior high school: the corridors lined with fellow students staring at their iPads, playing video games between classes and at lunch on a beautiful day. During classes, he found it strange to see each child staring at an iPad, disconnected from those around, while the teacher surveilled their screens. It was not something he had experienced before. I was devastated. The following day, I arrived at his school at the end of classes, when the vast majority of the children whipped out their iPhones or iPads and sat or walked, necks bent at alarming angles, staring at screens, often with mouths hanging open. Each in their own sphere of reality. I felt a sense of deep loss – loss of childhood, loss of aliveness, loss of culture, – as well as panic: What have we done?
There is something happening to our children at school that we know is wrong and is not even that difficult to fix. Yet we are in a strange state of inertia about it.
This website aims to try to understand our strange passivity.
This website is NOT about children’s screen use in general, or families’ choices in their own homes. This website is NOT a conversation about device usage in society at large. It is not even about cellphone use in schools. This website is about 1:1 1 “educational” screen use, or EdTEch, in our children’s schools. From 8 am to 4 pm, Monday to Friday. It’s a serious problem with a simple solution.
My experience as a parent of a Montreal student has been one of confusion and at times disbelief around the issue of screen saturation in our schools. When I speak with other parents and teachers about this issue, I usually encounter one of 3 responses:
- The majority of parents are very concerned but feel there is nothing they can do. They are worried about screen addiction, social media use and children’s mental health. It is a diffuse, passive worry fed by sporadic scary media headlines like “Cyberbullying!”, “Anxiety!”, “ADHD!”
- A small group of parents and teachers admonishes me for asking questions because the experts have everything in hand and we need to have confidence in them! Am I an expert? Who the hell do I think I am to question EdTech in schools? Surely the teachers and administrators know what they’re doing!
- Many teachers and some parents offer half-hearted, predictable arguments (mantras) for screens in schools. These hackneyed arguments serve as a passive distraction from useful engagement with the reality of what is going on.
Interestingly, in regard to our own screen use, adults often talk about how difficult it is to not get sucked in to scrolling, how we can’t remember anything anymore, how we don’t go out anymore, how great the latest TV show is and how hard it is to get through a book these days. It’s very useful to have a YouTube video to teach us anything, if only we could remember what we learned. A few people are taking online courses at Harvard, but most of us spend more time sharing memes.
Writing this report has been more difficult for me than it would have been before Facebook MarketPlace, Twitter and online Scrabble. My brain is different now. I have less to work with. It takes me a lot longer to feel out big ideas. Sure, Facebook Marketplace is very useful, but I am more stupid, less creative, less motivated, more irritable, less gentle, and less connected to others than I was five years ago.
And yet we want to inflict this cognitive, emotional and interpersonal decline upon children at the very time and in the very place they are supposed to develop their intellectual and moral abilities, to discover what the world is like and find their place in it.
We parents know what screens do to our brains and our lives, but we seem unable to think together and address this issue for our children in an active and realistic way.
Some Montreal schools have opted for the Chromebook over the iPad, because it feels like less of a shiny gadget. With a Chromebook, it’s a little easier to maintain the fiction that screens and apps in class are essential, serious educational tools. But the reality is that EdTech, social media, phones, iPads, and ChromeBooks are all the same thing when it comes the lucrative business of dulling our children through clicks.
EdTech, which is really Big Tech, is a term that comprises “learning” devices like iPads or Chromebooks, and “educational” social media apps such as Classroom, Studyo, Desmos, i+Interactif, My CECZone, ClassDojo, among others.
I’m creating this website as a resource for parents to think together and for encouragement to speak up. Just because there’s some shiny gimmick from 2015 like an iPad, doesn’t mean that that children must have one in schools. Many families use iPads or other screens at home, as is their prerogative. But do children really need another 8 hours a day on a screen? Even when the iPad or ChromeBook is closed on the desk, the screens have a powerful impact on all aspects of learning, growth, and relationships at school.
There are so many “facts” that weigh against using iPads, Chromebooks – any personal screens, really – in schools. I go into some of them on this website. But at this point in the game, the issues are less about those facts and more about why we are sleepwalking through this very recent and very profound shift in what it means to be a child. Why are we allowing our children to be more anxious, less able to learn, to sleep, to connect with others, and to pay attention? What exactly are we offering our children during their most vulnerable and vital developmental stages?
This is less of a factual question, (even though the facts are staring us in the face), and more of an ethical question.
Why, as adults who know that being online makes us more stupid, forgetful, stressed and lonely, must we force zombie culture on children all day long, 5 days a week?
And why is it so taboo to talk about this?
- 1:1 means 1 personal device for each child. ↩︎