What Are We NOT Talking About?

Before we get to the question, “Why can’t we say no?”, I want to look at a few issues to which we are blind when stuck in the rut of the mantras.

1. The true meaning of attention

Many experts talk about attention with regards to children’s productivity: their ability to do homework, to listen and sit still in class. But we overlook the most important aspects of attention. Attention is fundamental to the very shape and vitality of our lives. Attention is how we engage with others, how we form deep bonds, how we show love. It’s a quality that needs to be nurtured in children in order to grow into adults able to relate without anxiety, to feel loved and to show love, to understand others and ourselves.

When we lose ourselves to ever-increasing distractions, we lose the capacity to understand the people in our lives. When the screens are on and off all day long, the minute interactions of daily life are reduced, forgotten, or overlooked. But a good life and a healthy society depend on these interactions, on how we treat each other in small moments. These experiences are fundamental to the quality of our life and loves.

Author David Brooks ¹ talks about the skill of seeing. The ability to accurately see another, to make others feel seen, valued and understood is one of our most important human skills.  This skill is a form of attention, of attunement, of presence. When we are seen, we grow.  Brooks says, “Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.” (p.32)

Another word for seeing others in this way is “beholding”.

“[P]ersonal encounters (…) are the sum and substance of our daily existence. The way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become.” ² 

On the first day of high school, I was shocked to hear that half the children spent breaks between classes and at lunch playing video games on their iPads. There was some outcry from parents, and now the children have to play their games in the central meeting place of the school, not in the hallways. These children and also those around them are losing the opportunity to interact, to pay attention to each other in small ways. Think about how we parents are with young children, always getting them to say hello and goodbye, to acknowledge others with a thank you. It feels vital. It’s part of the human fabric. But for our high school students, this basic human element is now optional.

2. Disrupted attention when the screens are closed

Did you know that when a human looks at a screen, it takes a full 20 minutes to come back into presence, for the nervous system capacity to re-expand to take in both the internal and external world? When there is a laptop or phone present in the room, even when not in use, we are distracted. In class, student eyes are moving from the teacher, to the screen, to a book, back to the screen, to the teacher, etc. True presence and connection are impossible in such a context, and thus learning does not occur on a deep level. We are kidding ourselves if we think that children are getting some sort of glamorous technological benefit. What we actually get is disordered attention.

The repeated looking at screens puts the nervous system into the autonomic survival state of fight/flight/freeze. Eyes rigidly looking straight ahead at the screen, along with the screen’s high flicker rate cause hyper arousal of the nervous system, which in turn shuts down much of the brain’s frontal lobe, thus negatively impacting language development, visual processing, memory and social cognition. This is not the ideal physiological context for the classroom. Then we wonder why so many kids are impulsive, restless, and/or depressed.

The fight or flight state is in marked contrast to the ventral vagal state of the nervous system. The ventral vagal state is dominant in contexts of eye contact, safety, presence, groundedness and peripheral vision. Learning and curiosity are easily available to us in this state, not to mention love and gratitude.

Professor Jonathan Haidt says “I banned the use of all screens in all of my classes at New York University several years ago, because it became clear that many college students can’t stay present in class when there’s a laptop or phone on their desk. I don’t see how we can expect eight-year-olds to do it.”

3. We put the burden of addressing the problem on the children.

We’re not giving children the context to learn deeply, to be fully human in the classroom. To add insult to injury, we are putting the onus on children to the fix situation by attending tutorials on technology, workshops on attention, more workshops on the dangers of social media, more workshops on anxiety. By not addressing the fundamental issues, the “solutions” proliferate, to the eternal financial benefit of the Education Technology Complex.

Last year, parents at my kid’s school received an email saying that children were throwing food at lunch and that the situation was out of control. There was no consideration of the fact that when a child is on and off a screen all day, he’s antsy and restless. And yet we admonish the child for not being attentive, connected and grounded!

When children are caught using AI to do their homework, they get called out in class as cheaters. We adults have not reckoned with our own fuzzy limits around tech use in schools, as we force children to carry addictive devices at all times. Then we get upset when the child isn’t able to set appropriate boundaries around gadgets. This is an abdication of our duty as adults.

4. Who’s behind EdTech?

Since the very beginning of the World Wide Web in 1991, EdTech has been worming its way into schools. Couched in dazzling terms such as “Innovative!”, “21^st Century!”, “Transformative!”, EdTech was here to redeem world of education! We are now in the midst of an EdTech boom because we all drank the Kool Aid.

Maybe the question should be less about what are we allowing children to access and more about who we are allowing to access our children. “Perhaps we thought we were giving children the right to access everything which might be good out there, but instead we’ve given everyone else, the good and the bad, access to our children.” ³

EdTech companies are among the most profitable corporations in history. The industry is expected to reach 800 billion in profits in the next 5 years. ⁴ The industry is essentially a financial feedback loop between a web of Big Tech corporations and their “philanthropic” educational foundations. The foundations are funded in part with public money and directed by the billionaires.  They do “research” to manufacture a need or demand, such as “Interactive learning!” or “Personalized Experiences!”. Then their own companies offer the “solutions”. Think of any big tech name, and they are involved in what are essentially greedy “predatory practices on the minds of children and educators.” ⁵

Silicon Valley curriculum developers both instigated and promoted the move from traditional print to digital formats because digital means more users and more “time on device”, which means billions in profits. Not because it’s good for children. We continue to fall, hook, line, and sinker, for buzzy, meaningless marketing language. For example, McGraw Hill, a highly profitable developer in educational apps and gaming (they go together), says “we’re working to expand the possibilities of content and technology to support learning in a connected world”. ⁶ Whatever that means.

“Personalized learning for all!” But “all” does not include the children of Silicon Valley developers who go to elite schools that use pencils and paper and are device-free.  When you build the EdTech to create dulled, compulsive users, you are less likely to allow your own children near it.

The leaders in Silicon Valley use paper and pens. In fact, it’s a status symbol in the upper echelons of society to not be a slave to technology. The leaders know what they have created for the lowly masses; they know the impact on the brain’s ability to learn, to think deeply, to connect and engage. They are familiar with the addictive nature of EdTech; they wrote the algorithms! Steve Jobs, inventor of the iPad, did not allow his own children access to his invention.

“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software”, says computer scientist Edward Tufte in the film The Social Dilemma. ⁷

It is parents who must direct their children’s learning, support their relationships, and nurture their growth, not big Tech. Why did we hand our kids over to the billionaires?

5. Does EdTech work?

Well that depends on whom you ask. If you ask the developers and all of the people who profit from it, EdTech has been a smashing success. Many careers are thriving in this Education Technology Complex. It is growing by leaps and bounds every year. The goals of business are profit and expansion and control. And so yes, EdTech works.

Funnily enough, when I ask teachers about the benefits of screens in class, no one ever says that they facilitate learning. They never say that “cutting and pasting some information from Google into a PowerPoint [is] superior to reading a passage in a well-researched textbook and handwriting a response”, or that “homework listed on Teams better than jotted down in a paper homework diary”, or that “digitally transporting a child to the Egyptian pyramids better than the child imagining it.” ⁸ They stick to the mantras .

However, the harms of screens for schoolchildren extend far beyond the poor educational outcomes, as this website is elucidating.

In 2013, Bill Gates said: “It would be great if our education stuff worked. But that we won’t know for probably a decade.” ⁹

Well now we know. It worked very well for Mr. Gates.

I really hesitate to put any “data” about the effectiveness of EdTech on this website because the “data” masks what we already know. We know it in our bones. We can look around and see that the children are not thriving academically or emotionally. We have already outsourced our responsibility for our children. We don’t need to continue to outsource our responsibility to data “experts” to find out if we’ve made the right choice. It’s time for a big course correction for parents and schools, and it’s not even a difficult one.

However, I will make a few comments about the “data”.

The data that supports EdTech is pretty sketchy. It’s funded by the very companies that make it. It’s unsurprising that most of the industry-funded studies ignore the negative impacts on attention and well-being. ¹⁰ Also, it’s difficult to properly evaluate the apps and devices because they change and evolve rapidly.

Let’s look at educational outcomes for children since 2012, the outset of the “digital revolution” in our schools. The test scores are dismal and getting worse around the world. ¹¹ Here is what “progress” in 38 countries looks like:

Image source: The Atlantic, from the OECD.

Take a look at one example of a broader report on the global use of EdTech: The 2023 Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report, which states that “There is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education.” This huge study finds almost nothing to recommend EdTech.

The UNESCO study itself is part of the Education Technology Complex. How many scientists, NGOs, government departments, granting agencies, administrators, and website administrators do you need to change a lightbulb? I mean, figure out that a voice activated laptop helps blind kids, or that if you simply ship millions of gadgets to remote students, learning does not improve, or that gadgets distract kids, even when turned off?

The Education Technology machine continues to grow, producing more meaningless reports, more science-ish data, more apps, more connectivity, more clicks, more consultants, more administrators, more pretending that serious people are taking our children’s school lives seriously.

 “Who has proven that this deluge of screen education is good for our children? No one has.” ¹²

6. What ever happened to more than a century of excellent research on child development and learning?

What shocks me about the issue of data on the effectiveness of screens in schools is that we have erased more than a century of excellent, slow and steady research on education, learning, and child development. Suddenly, it doesn’t exist! The child development departments in universities around the world are bizarrely overlooked, gone from our collective scientific memory. The literature in these fields is vast: how children develop through human connection, eye contact and embodiment, and the psychological impacts of being deprived of these elements. We don’t need Bill Gates’s personal musings or a UNESCO report on iPads in India to tell us what makes a good learning environment. We can use our own experience and knowing as parents, but if we must have experts, then we can turn to a century of outstanding research on how children thrive and grow. Children learn in connection, safety, slowness, and presence, through challenge, continuity, and steadiness, through unmediated play and multisensory exploration of the world around them, through art and dance and the teacher’s smiling eyes.

7. Screens generate passive learners.

When using a pencil and paper, children are able to use techniques that support comprehension of math or reading problems such as underlining important words, going back and rechecking answers, looking at a previous problem and then trying again. Children use their fingers and senses to interact physically with the material. These are critical learning skills which are lost in the online model. The majority of my son’s online work is clicking answers as quickly as he can, then feeling frustrated when he can’t figure it out immediately. He’s prone to just clicking on a guess and waiting for the app to spit out the right answer. He is passively learning. He is a voyeur of content, a consumer, rather than an active, embodied participant.

The screen flattens learning. With pencil and paper, there is a translation that happens. You read text, and it comes alive in your imagination, you form a mental map, which you then analyse and ponder and come to an understanding, a formulation, which you can communicate through writing or speaking. Writing on paper and speaking are also forms of thinking. We have to think through complexity. It’s a form of intellectual labour which involves “stress, mental trial and error, and time”. ¹³ With a screen and an app, you just take in the information visually and then spit it out as you type the answer in the prescribed format. There is less to figure out on your own. We do not become as emotionally involved. Nor do we retain the information as you would from paper. ¹⁴ An app is essentially a set of digital shortcuts to an end goal. When we digitize learning processes, we move from manual and slow to “repeatable, fast, and mindless”. ¹⁵

“The entire mental state changes when someone receives images from a screen. [rather than from a tangible book]. (….)  Rather than consciously directing its attention and producing the images necessary for thought by itself, the mind is semi-hypnotized—it lazily absorbs and follows the images that are presented to it on the screen.” ¹⁶ 

We transform what we read into something we can think about. Nowadays, as Roald Dahl’s Oompa Loompas sang, with screens and distractions, a child “cannot think –  he only sees!” ¹⁷

Children learn in an embodied world: holding a book, writing with the hands, reading an unlit page, turning the page, moving, touching, exploring in time and space. There is so much neuroscience and traditional knowledge about how children actually learn. But we seem to have completely forgotten that we are embodied beings who need bodies to learn in direct contact with our environment.

“The sensory dimension of print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of ‘geometry’ to words – which contributes to our overall understanding of what we read.” ¹⁸

8. Why are children no longer taught to write in cursive?

EdTech companies have convinced us that there is only one path forward in learning, that a child clicking on a screen is progress. Ensuring that fewer children can write on paper ensures an expanding market of consumers. But writing in cursive is an important sensorimotor learning process in and of itself. Cursive writing forces your hand to stay on the paper, to put your thoughts into words, and to feel the relationship between the words and ideas. Writing allows for elegance and complexity, which are forms of understanding, of structuring thoughts and of discovery.

What a pleasure to be in the flow of thinking! The word cursive comes from the Latin “currere”, meaning to flow, to run. Vivian Parra writes,

“This is why we should go back to writing in cursive, especially at school. Because this is not just about recovering a writing style, but about giving breath to our thoughts again. Everything that makes us live, that feeds the soul, that sustains the spirit, is connected to breathing. Without breath, as the ancient Greeks said, there is no thought. And without thoughts there is no life.”

The intricate multisensory dance of thinking and expression is lost when we force children to tap, scroll and flit between apps and tabs.

Most adults don’t write much anymore, but this is no reason to deny children the deep learning benefits (better focus, more flow of thought, higher retention, better spelling, the use of much more of the brain) and joys of cursive writing. Adults also don’t sing new things (like the alphabet) or use math flash cards, but that doesn’t mean that singing and flash cards aren’t important learning tools in school.

9. What do we lose when we lose deep reading?

Adults everywhere bemoan the loss of reading books. You often hear people say things like “I used to read a book a week. Now I can’t get through a book a year.” Years of skimming and clicking between apps and tabs are rewiring our brains, making it very difficult for anything we read to sink into working memory. Is this what we want for our children during their learning years? Deep reading of physical books cultivates slower, deeper thought, contemplation, ease with silence, sustained attention, deep understanding of ourselves and our world. Deep reading of physical books “expands us into a fuller, more rooted human being.” ¹⁹

What happens when we scroll“forever on the surface of things?” ²⁰ :

“the surface of time, by forcing too much hurry and efficiency; the surface of relationships, which will be shallower and more functional; the surface of information, which will keep us credulous; the surface of our own thoughts and feelings, which will keep us alienated from our own depths.” ²¹

When we lose deep reading, we risk losing our inner life, the capacity to inhabit our own imaginations, to be lost in thought. “[T]he less you think, the harder thinking becomes” ²², and thus we compulsively turn to algorithms to escape the void.

Real studying is a form of deep reading: slow, contemplative, laborious, and boring at times. It comes from within, unmediated by apps.

10. Through EdTEch, children grow less connected to real things.

“We are no longer touching the world, we’re only looking at images of it”, moving away from “the transcendent and the physical and the present.” ²³

Isn’t the whole point of childhood to touch the world?

When children spend their days (and evenings) on stimulating, gamified apps, the real world becomes much less interesting, too slow, too boring. They lose their capacity for wonder and beauty in the natural world. I see the impact of this every day. Montreal used to be alive with the shouts of children playing everywhere outside. Now? Most streets and alleys are eerily silent. There are several reasons for this, beyond the scope of this website. But the “boringness” of the real world and unmediated play is one of them.

Being connected to real things, to the reality of our shared human world is becoming more important, not less, as truth in our digital world becomes harder to discern.

11. Je ne me souviens pas. The homogenization of children’s worlds

So many aspects of our lives have been homogenized through apps. Airbnb makes travel easier in many ways but standardizes travel experience around the world. Facebook is a standardized simulation of (a much reduced) community; it’s the same in Sweden as it is in Kenya. Every sphere of our social world has been simplified, commodified and homogenized. The same top-down flattening is true for our children’s classrooms and school cultures. Classroom, Studyo, Google Docs, and their algorithms shape and order our children’s learning experiences, 40 hours a week. These apps are the same anywhere, stripping our children’s daily lives of autonomy and particularity. Classrooms and school culture everywhere have become homogenized. Children’s worlds are smaller and same-y.  When I was a child, my parents had a 1970’s photo book in the living room depicting children in daily life in every corner of the globe. I remember being entranced by the other kids and their different cultures, how families played, ate, were sad or joyous. The rich textures of their worlds came alive in those photographs! In contrast, we now offer children a culturally flattened world, teaching them to think, or not think, to scroll and click, in the same boring way. Rather than the touted Individualized Learning! we get blandness, a deadening of learning cultures.

We Quebecois pride ourselves on being a unique nation striving to stay alive in a sea of North American anglophone culture. But, when it comes to our children and their culture, our motto seems to be Je ne me souviens pas.

12. The tools are not tools.

EdTech is designed for clicks and behavior modification. Education is secondary. This is the sad truth. There are many organizations fighting to have actual tools, i.e. an app or device that is truly useful without being addictive, distracting, dehumanizing, anxiety-provoking, or a portal to porn, grooming, violence or fraud. Whether these advocates will succeed remains to be seen. It is striking to consider that in order to have some sort of educational gimmick, we have no choice but to bear these risks and harms. It’s ridiculous that this is something that parents and students would have to fight for. But it speaks volumes about the true nature of the Education Technology Complex.

If your child has a disability and may be helped by a device at school, you may decide to use it. Parents decide best for their own children. But again, this is not a reason for every child to be tethered to devices, or to need 30 apps to get through the school year. Even in instances where a device could help a disabled child, we still have to keep in mind that the apps and the devices are not primarily designed to be educational tools, so the same risks apply. It’s sad that parents have to weigh their child’s real needs against all of the harms that come bundled with the “tool”.

13.  Surveillance and the sale of our children’s data. “EdTech is Big Tech.”

The Internet Safety Lab ²⁴ reviewed the most common applications used in schools across the United States. What they found is disturbing:

96% of EdTech applications share children’s personal data with third-parties.

Surveillance of children through their school devices, both at school and at home, is the rule, not the exception:

… everything a student does on a school-issued device is subject to being monitored, logged, surveilled, and retained: their schoolwork, their communications with peers, and their browsing activity is all fair game to EdTech companies.²⁵

Then there is the sale of our children’s data on the dark web through hacking and cybercrime.

“The U.S. Department of Education found that a student’s educational record is worth $250-350 on the black market. There are nearly 50 million children enrolled in American public schools. Collectively, this means our children’s data is worth roughly $15 billion dollars, which is a market too large for hackers to ignore.” ²⁶

Here in Quebec, the government is getting in on the predatory action:

“The Quebec government says it does not require parents’ consent to give students’ personal information to an AI.” ²⁷

Parents and children have been stripped of the right to their own data. ²⁸ For “our own safety”, the Quebec government will kindly harvest the children’s data and feed it into the EdTech machine.  (Ironically, the government says that it is using the data to help with rising school dropout rates. I guess EdTech didn’t help with that problem either.)

If you would like to fight this aspect of the Quebec Education Technology Complex, please go here.

In other countries parents are fighting back in the courts. A recent ruling in the US states:

 “Collecting student data for commercial benefit without parental notice or consent plausibly describes conduct that is ‘highly offensive to a reasonable person and (. . .) constitutes an egregious breach of the social norms.” — U.S. District Judge James Donato, denying in part PowerSchool’s Motion to Dismiss in March 2025. ²⁹

Should we not know who has access to our children? Allowing our children’s lives to be mined for data and profit without consent is something we need to take seriously for many reasons, beyond the current scope of this website. One reason is that Edtech uses the data to make the apps more addictive, so that the ETC can expand. Another is that strangers can use the data to approach the child in a personal manner.

14. The A.I. question

I started exploring my questions around screens in schools six years ago when my son was in grade 3. It was then that I found out that his future high school uses iPads intensively. I wasn’t too worried because I figured that as the iPad was already an outdated tool, the gizmo would be gone by the time he got to high school. That the silliness would be over. I was wrong. Premier Legault has just budgeted another $15.2 million for school iPads in 2025. ³⁰

Now I think there is a good chance that the gadgets will be gone from schools for a different reason: artificial intelligence. If teachers want to know if a child can read and write they are going to have to return to pencils and papers and real-life interactions to avoid the exponential rise in cheating, not to mention the cognitive decline that is everywhere in our schools. There’s not really any other way.

Although, as I write this, I realize that, actually, the problem of A.I. in schools will mean increasing demand for technological “solutions”, for more apps, more “scientific” studies, more consultants, more IT, more administrative overhead. We can debate and worry about A.I. for years, while the Education Technology Complex proliferates. Perfect!

A.I. is already being folded very quickly into existing EdTech apps and platforms. They will be one and the same. There is no regulation. A.I. in the classroom will usher in very complex difficulties for our children as well as amplifying current EdTech harms.

15.  Children are losing intellectual virtues in the very place they should be cultivating them.

As previously mentioned, autonomy and responsibility are important virtues, but they are not the only ones that children need to cultivate in school. Intellectual virtues such as the “capacity for inner calm and order”, ³¹ fortitude, perseverance, and patience make up the foundation of learning, and also form the foundation of true freedom and agency. These virtues help us to develop our inner lives, they give us courage to try new things, to set goals and stick to our principles. They open us up to a meaningful life, the ability to do achieve what we want to achieve, to self-knowledge, to self-worth, curiosity, wonder.

Moynihan ³² says that fortitude in the context of school is the  “perseverance in the difficult tasks of study and the temperance to ponder matters throughout the day (…) the effort to forgo distracting entertainment to preserve the silence [emphasis mine] necessary to really learn.”

Through the twin disciplines of silence and contemplation, we can connect with the human pace of things. The pace and rhythm of using a stimulating app has nothing to do with the pace of thinking, learning, or of a real-life human friendship.

16. Most university students are now functionally illiterate.

Most university students cannot read a serious novel “cover to cover and understand what they have read. ” ³³ Speak with any CEGEP or university professor and they will tell you that there is a serious problem. Even Harvard has had to offer an introductory math course for incoming students, because few can do math at a college level. The issue is bigger than the use of screens, but it’s pretty clear that screens, at the very least, are not helping. Students test scores have plummeted across the world. ³⁴, ³⁵ Why is this not a huge issue?  Why are we having silly conversations about the utility of screens when reading and understanding are becoming burdens for our children?

Professors are shocked and demoralized by their empty classrooms. Some have told me that it’s only at the final exam that they meet many of their students. Students show up intermittently, with no understanding of the sustained relational effort involved in true learning, or of the joys of shared intellectual pursuits. They have learned to click and flit, to passively watch “content”, and their brains and nervous systems are wired that way. Going to class and participating in real life is but one (stressful) option among many in their crowded educational/entertainment milieu which includes EdTech platforms, YouTube, A.I. and social media. The kids are there to tick a box, to move on to the next level in the video game of life. And they are incredibly anxious. (Big surprise!) The professors have to dumb down the material and become mental health counselors.

The kids are not alright. And what are Quebecers doing? We’re buying more iPads! ³⁶

17. The real digital divide

EdTEch has been sold to us as a way of bridging the “digital divide” between rich and poor, giving a leg up to poor children who can then access the same educational materials as the rich. However, this argument conveniently overlooks the fact that you could use technology to facilitate access to materials for teachers and or parents in poor countries. There is no need for every child to be seated in front of a screen to balance this divide.

The reality is that the screens are amplifying the divide between rich and poor, or between the rich and ultra-rich. Between those who can afford to send their children to device-free elite schools, and those who send their kids to schools where they sit in front of silly apps all day. The divide is between those who can afford forest schools, outdoor activities, music, art, and sport, and those who must use the screen as a babysitter because they are working several jobs. The divide is between those who can think deeply, focus, and delay gratification, and those who are too tired and overwhelmed to do anything but mindlessly scroll, distracted and anxious. Between those who use screens to mediate their reality and those who don’t.

This divide will very soon be reflected in our universities as A.I. will necessitate a 2-tiered system. Many universities may continue in the current system, graduating anxious and depressed students who can only “write” papers using A.I., do multiple choice tests, and learn next to nothing. The other tier of universities will turn to something like the traditional Oxbridge model: the exams will be oral, in front of a professor or jury,  demonstrating the students’ grasp of the entire subject, and their ability to understand and synthesize the material and make it their own. To achieve this, students must read, write and communicate a great deal. These students will not be spending their days on apps, but together with other students and professors and tutors in classes and seminars, or reading and writing in silence.

Which type of university is your child prepared for?

18. When it comes to screens, why don’t we differentiate between different developmental ages?

In Quebec, why is the iPad/Chromebook policy the same for 12-year-olds as for 17-year-olds?

Well, because EdTech is not about the children, and never was. It’s about getting the most clicks. If you can get the 12-year-olds using it as much as the 17-year-olds, then you make more money, and have more kids dependent at a younger age. Cha-ching! 

The use of EdTech/screens is grounded in marketing scripts rather than scientific, psychological or pedagogical theory. Thus, developmental differences, which would be addressed in any scientific framework, are not a consideration. The only considerations are the profit and expansion of the Education Technology Complex.

We pretend that all knowledge about child development before the 2015 introduction of the iPad does not exist. If Bill Gates wants iPads for toddlers, then it must be scientifically valid. However, the scientific literature has a lot to say about children’s different developmental needs.

I think this question is related to our loss of connection to what is real. In the virtual world of everything at once, it’s harder to see the particularity of things. We have lost the embodied sense that children and adult are different, that younger children are different from older children. (We have also lost the sense of difference between day and night, or between work and home.) By foisting screens on schoolchildren of all ages, we are burdening them with adult preoccupations, adult ways of thinking, and an endless stream of adult problems.

Why we don’t distinguish between our own uses of technology and those of children? Many adults spend their days doing meaningless busy work: endless emails, Slack chats, Zoom meetings, resetting passwords, calling help desks to do even the most minor of tasks, etc. Why must children be forced to do the same? Why not allow them to be free from this hellhole? Why not have a learning environment that “reclaim[s] time as lived time”,³⁷ as childhood time?

19. PORNOGRAPHY

The rapidly eroding differentiation between children and adults brings us to the issue of Internet pornography. Children who are first exposed to porn before the age of 18 are much more likely to become addicted. Most parents are unaware of the fact that children’s brains are highly prone to addiction. It’s certainly not trumpeted by the schools or EdTech. As a psychologist, I work with people who became addicted to porn as young children, some at age 5, and many in the 9-10 age range.

 “Even if your child does not have a phone or has a controlled device at school, chances are other children will show him porn. Parents have no control while the child is at school. “A recent survey of teens found that not only had 30 percent of teens viewed por during the school day, but of those teens, 44 percent had viewed it on a school-issued device. Asking parents to put their faith in filters thus means defaulting to the lowest common denominator, with less vigilant households and hapless school administrators creating an environment of almost effortless access to pornography.” ³⁸

And I haven’t even touched on the issue of children being groomed by predators or by sexualized chatbots or blackmailed while watching pornography on school-controlled devices.

Montreal parents who restrict screens for their children are forced go against their own values once the child is enrolled in school. When I argued with my son’s principal for the right to put restrictions on his iPad so that he can’t see porn or violence, she said, “Well it wouldn’t matter because he can just look at anyone else’s iPad at school.”  She was right.

I question how blasé our society is about the children seeing porn. Sure, there is talk of governments putting age restrictions on websites, and occasional media coverage about children and porn. But it’s really not so long ago, say 10 years, that things were very different. If a parent found out that there was even a remote chance that that their child might view extreme sex acts at school, he would have rushed to the school and removed the child immediately!  There would have been absolutely no hesitation. None. Now, the attitude is like that of my son’s principal: well, that’s how it is now, nothing we can do. We’ll block sites here and there, but we’ll have to wait for Silicon Valley or the government to give us more technological “solutions” and guidance. The horror and the urgency are gone. 

Our world is so pornified that we have become desensitized to the extremity of what we see. Most Netflix shows have graphic sex or sexual violence, even the comedies. Pornography (and violence) has been completely normalized in every corner of our social and cultural worlds. Little shocks us anymore, including the fact that our kids have access to extreme porn at school.

Many parents watch so much porn themselves that they are desensitized to the reality of how horrifying and damaging it is for a child to watch a gang rape. Even the possibility of a child witnessing gang rapes is horrifying.

Well actually, we can control it, very, very easily, by making 8 hours a day, 5 days a week porn-free.  

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