If EdTech in our schools is the answer, what was the question? 1
In this website, I laid out many different ways to look at the use of EdTech in our schools. The more I thought and learned about this issue, the more it was clear to me that the important question is not whether or not kids should spend their school days attached to screens. Nor is the question about how we can use EdTech more judiciously, or even how to achieve a balance between apps and paper books. The question that stood out amid the din of industry buzz words, psychobabble, techno-fantasies, mantras, and robotic denial, was simply, why can’t we say no?
We parents are the primary educators of our children. So why can’t we say no to something we simply do not need?
I invite parents to stop outsourcing our responsibility, not only to Big Tech, but to schools, administrators, consultants, teachers, i.e. the Education Technology Complex. No matter how well-intentioned, there is no administrator, workshop consultant, school principal, Californian philanthropist, or government minister who will put your child’s needs above their own more than you will. That is reality.
The so-called “digital revolution” in education has been a massive success for the Education Technology Complex whose goals are profit, power and expansion. Yet for children and parents, the promised era of emancipation and progress through 1:1 devices in classrooms has amounted to nothing but a fantasy. The vaunted benefits of EdTech are irrelevant or negligible in the face of its harms. Perhaps your child is thriving at school, but many, many are not. We need to break the illusion that everything is fine.
The Education Technology Complex is comprised of many good people, like you or me, who are trying to make a positive impact. But each person occupies a tiny corner of the Complex, from which it’s difficult to see the whole. A well-intentioned teacher who has her 12-year-old students use iPads to do math exercises may not have thought about the broader implications. She may be blind to the endlessly proliferating system in which she participates. It’s time to step back and see the big picture, to come to our senses, to reality.
If you want to teach a specific course in music editing software, or Excel spreadsheets, or computer programming, then go ahead and do so. We can have classrooms with computers for those subjects. There is absolutely no reason for the entire education system to be connected to personal screens. We adults know that the idea of “balance” is becoming more of a pipe dream in our own lives. Why on earth do we expect children to find this balance?
And now AI is here, already a part of EdTech, bringing with it a multitude of increasingly complex issues for children’s learning, morality, and thinking, for their psyches, emotions, relationships and safety. Even if you think that AI will be fantastic for your child, you can’t say for sure. The bottom line is that we are continuing to throw our children into something that we do not fully understand. Why? Good intentions are not enough. Why not wait until we know better, until we better understand the harms and impacts of these devices, until there are guardrails in place, or until we create tools that actually are better than paper, pencils and imagination for children?
There are many complex and divisive issues facing our society today. The world is moving rapidly toward an uncertain future and we may feel powerless. But the problem of EdTech in schools has two major advantages:
- All parents want their kids to learn and thrive at school, so we are starting from a shared reality.
- It’s really simple to fix the problem! We don’t need the government, or Silicon Valley, or legislators to figure it out with expensive studies, high tech solutions and more ridiculous “debate”. Parents can simply close the iPads or Chromebooks and send their children to school with notebooks and pens. En masse. The teachers can still project internet content in class if they want to.
All parents make mistakes with our children. Often! It’s hard, but it’s also part of life. When things go wrong, what we need to do is repair. We can heal, learn from our mistakes, and in the process teach and connect with our kids. It’s good for children to learn that they can make mistakes and change course. Let’s explain to our children why we thought being on and off iPad all day was good, and how we have come to understand differently.
The bureaucracy of gadgets in primary and secondary schools is incredibly costly, insane, and most of all, completely unnecessary. Schools should stop pouring our tax dollars into IT departments, administrators, specialists, and workshops about the problems created by screens in class, (online harms, cheating, anxiety, pornography; the list is profitably endless). Not to mention the potential costs when your school’s system gets hacked. Rather than profiting from the problems, schools could actually address the problems they purport to care about:
Let’s give the kids 40 screen-free and porn-free hours a week. Let’s create an oasis of learning, calm and freedom in a disconnected, screen-saturated world.
Let’s stop the corporatization of every second of our children’s day. Let’s give the kids back their childhood. It’s the wise thing to do.
“As we accelerate the ability to fool and imprison ourselves [and our children], those who profit from the emptying of our minds strive to convince us that the shallower we can become, the more we progress.” 2
Waiting for the Education Technology Complex to address their products’ harms is like asking pharmaceutical companies to focus on making people well, rather than keeping patients chronically ill, without actually killing them. The Education Complex keeps the EdTech “issues” alive through the appearance of serious (and increasingly expensive) attempts to address it, while never fixing the real problems. It’s the perfect scalable business model. It allows for endless expansion by creating “artificially manufactured appetites” 3 , lifelong “users”, and justifies ever-more careers and exponential profits. It’s a systemic problem. Our kids are the commodities.
Even if your child’s school is stricter with screen use, or allows parental controls, or uses just the “best” apps, or tries to police the number of screen hours, the momentum of the Education Technology Complex only moves in one direction: more, more, more. More problems will arise (A.I. anyone?), and there will be ever more “Innovative!” solutions that cost more and harm children. EdTech and the administrative machine that supports it is only here to grow, to feed itself and expand.
Sweden is the first country to kick EdTech out of the classroom, to have the courage and wisdom to acknowledge that the experiment on our children has failed. 4
“We need to press pause and in many cases rewind.” 5
As moderator of this excellent discussion on EdTech, actor Hugh Grant sums it all up: Screens in schools “are the last bloody things kids need!”
The good news is that children’s innate human capacities for learning, thinking and presence return remarkably quickly once they stop scrolling and clicking through corporately-mediated virtual platforms.
I hope that this website gives you ideas to think about and encourages you to stand together with other parents and simply say “no”. It’s a matter of numbers. If 25% of parents said “no” to screens in schools by sending their children to school with pen and paper, it would change overnight.
We the parents are the only people who are going to step in and make this change to protect our children.
No one else is coming to fix it.
- Winkleman, S. (2025, February 17). The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech In Schools. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88 ↩︎
- Bell, D. (2025, August 14-20). Reclaiming the Beauty of the Spheres. The Epoch Times Canada, p. B5. ↩︎
- Crary, J. (2022, April 18). The Digital Age is Destroying Us. Retrieved from Lit Hub: https://lithub.com/the-digital-age-is-destroying-us/ ↩︎
- Winkleman, S. (2025, February 17). The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech In Schools. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88 ↩︎
- Winkleman, S. (2025, February 17). The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech In Schools. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88 ↩︎