Do you feel like your abilities to learn and grow intellectually and emotionally increased when you moved from print to screen? Do you feel more regulated, more calm and connected after a long day of multitasking on screens? The answer is no for almost all adults. Yet somehow, it’s OK for our kids.
Why are we accepting so much less for our children?
I find our passive acceptance and resignation in the face of EdTech and screens in schools very strange. Why can’t we say no? Here are some possible answers that I have found to this perplexing question;
- We don’t want to admit that we believed the hype.
- Shame
- To acknowledge that we may be hurting our children is too painful.
- We feel some sort of desperate obligation
- We have become desensitized to our children’s reality.
- We have been neurologically rewired.
- We parents are suffering from a collective failure of imagination.
- Rather than using our imaginations, we rely on mediated thinking.
- Increasingly, we parents and teachers have never had the experience of deep, sustained effort and attention ourselves.
- Parents have the sense that this issue is too big and we are powerless in the face of it.
- Parental burnout
- Parents want to draw children into our adult world.
- It’s easier to focus on the children than on ourselves.
We don’t want to admit that we believed the hype.
We don’t want to admit that we were dazzled by shiny gizmos, that we were excited by buzz words such as engaging!, data driven!, adaptable!, and self-paced!, that we were deceived, persuaded, and influenced by those pillaging the daily moments of our children’s lives.
Shame
We don’t want to be denigrated as one who is needlessly in a moral panic, as Luddites who are averse to the god of progress. We fear being mocked by sophisticated “experts”, or by self-proclaimed “calm and reasonable” people who see things in a more “balanced” way than we do.
To acknowledge that we may be hurting our children is too painful.
Hurting our children is the worst nightmare for any parent. It makes sense that we would want to deny something so devastating. Perhaps the ambient denial in our society is partly a means of psychological survival in difficult, uncertain times.
Do we want to confront how we have ceded responsibility for our children?
Do we want to consider that we’ve offered up our children to be monetized, optimized, and maximized by Big Tech, like sacrifices to a false god? Or, that we’ve offered up our children to increasingly technocratic governments that seek to manage every aspect of our lives?
Do we really want to grapple with the fact that we are putting devices in the hands of children that are designed to be addictive, intrusive and distracting in ways that we have never before seen in history? 1
We feel some sort of desperate obligation
to maintain the illusion that everything is OK in Quebec schools. It’s not.
We have become desensitized to our children’s reality.
We have become desensitized to children’s excessive screen time through our own compulsive consumption. Part of this habitual acceptance and inertia stems from the activity of scrolling itself.
Strangely, we now see the omnipresence of screens in students’ hands as “the way things are”, even though it’s actually very recent and new.
We have been neurologically rewired.
Our brains have been repatterned to stay on the surface of issues (see mantras), as we scroll through content without landing anywhere.
We parents are suffering from a collective failure of imagination.
Jonathan Crary says that our own perceptions, thoughts and common knowledge are being swept away by an inundation of messaging telling us that our administered lives are immutable and that devices are indispensable. We feel that our only options are “adaptation and resignation”. We can’t even imagine saying no. We can’t even imagine spaces where devices might not be needed, and thus we seem to no longer be able to imagine our children learning with a textbook, paper and pencil. We have come to the “passive acceptance of numbing online routines as synonymous with living.” 2
Why can’t we imagine school as a place for children to be free of the devices that occupy every other moment of their lives? Why not give them a chance to feel happier and calmer as they learn, teach them to know the difference between virtual life and real life?
Rather than using our imaginations, we rely on mediated thinking.
Our thinking is mediated by Facebook prompts, or by clicking between simplified choices, or by A.I. It’s getting more difficult to stretch our minds to both recognise what is happening and to see other ways forward. It takes imagination (and humility) to course correct. We are dependent and impotent. It’s hard to see and respond to algorithms when our very minds are shaped by them.
When we outsource our judgment to Google, or to Reddit, or to teachers who have also outsourced their thinking, we lose trust our in own judgment or that of our neighbours. We don’t trust our parental instincts. And we have lost the fortitude to live by our inner compasses. This is a very dangerous place to be as a society.
Our children are watching us outsource our decisions and responsibilities. Perhaps we virtue signal about cultivating autonomy and responsibility in Quebec students because we know that these virtues are actually slipping away. How do we build self-reliance in an age of algorithms and A.I.? 3
Increasingly, we parents and teachers have never had the experience of deep, sustained effort and attention ourselves.
We parents do not have the fortitude and temperance to maintain our concentration. Perhaps we never developed the “interior intellectual faculties (imagination and intellect) [to operate] in an independent, self-directed, and active manner.” 4
If we’ve never had the experience of studying for extended periods of time, memorizing, thinking, analyzing, making connections, creating order, and expressing our discoveries through writing or conversation, then it is difficult to grasp what is missing, or to be overly concerned with what children are missing. I often work with young adults who go through university with absolutely no experience of the joys of studying, of grappling with deep issues, of mastery. University and CEGEP are becoming hellish experiences of anxiety, self-doubt, imposter syndrome. Which leads to procrastination and students losing themselves in scrolling and passive entertainment. This experience then carries over to the workplace. Increasingly, schools and workplaces have become places of superficial busywork, crafting emails, filling out forms, dealing with technology issues, Zoom meetings, editing PowerPoints, because we don’t know anything else. Nothing of substance. And this is what we are bequeathing to our children.
Parents have the sense that this issue is too big and we are powerless in the face of it.
We have no choice but to simply move ahead into online simulations of learning and community. Teachers and students can be managed like online accounts. We treat EdTech as an immutable god, that has always been here and will be here forever and has powers that diminish us.
“There is a palpable defeated feeling that we have gone too far and no way to reel it all back in. A shoulder shrug that we live in a digital world and need to adapt, especially since AI is here and no longer on the horizon.” 5
Many parents are experiencing disempowerment, separation, loss of community. But the school question is one area where the solution is straightforward, and also the most important. If we parents are feeling defeated, let’s give our kids the tools to not be resigned to whatever is on offer from Silicon Valley, to not live in passive conformity. What can help parents to better face complex issues and to maintain our agency: the cultivation of embodied learning, thinking, and living in the real world. It’s not just for kids!
Parental burnout
Parental burnout is a real thing. As “smart” solutions to “protect” our children proliferate, so do the opportunities for harm. We have less time for the increasing bureaucratic load of monitoring children’s technology. Apple Screen Time is frustratingly complicated and doesn’t always work. Each app necessitates further apps. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. But very, very profitable for the Education Technology Complex.
“Parents were assured that “parental controls” left them in control, but even the most dedicated parents found the technological ground shifting beneath their feet. Given the nonstop battles to protect their sixth-graders from body-shaming campaigns, deepfake sexting, gangbang videos, and “influencers” peddling self-harm, it is no wonder that we are facing an epidemic of parental burnout severe enough to warrant a surgeon general’s warning.” 6
Parents want to draw children into our adult world.
We parents and teachers have fallen into a culture of passive entertainment and useless “bustle”. 7 We feel angst in moments of boredom, desensitized to real life. Children don’t naturally feel this way. When I’m caught up in digital busyness, updating an app that feels vital, or filling out problematic forms that never work, it feels jarring to be around a child who is living a fuller, more embodied experience. We have difficulty tolerating lively children who are in the real world. So maybe we give them a phone or a screen as a strange way of connecting, of being together in our world, in our prison. We can no longer meet the children where they are.
It’s easier to focus on the children than on ourselves.
The students should behave! They should use A.I. ethically! They should pay attention! They should attend a workshop on social media. Kids in my child’s school are called out for using A.I. for their homework. We’ve pushed a drug on them with no real limits and no serious thought yet expect the child to manage the drug reasonably. We’ve taught them to outsource their brains when it comes to notes or scheduling, or anything laborious such as opening a dictionary, but then we punish them for outsourcing their essays to another algorithm like ChatGPT.
- Crary, J. (2014). 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Penguin Random House Canada. ↩︎
- Crary, J. (2022, April 18). The Digital Age is Destroying Us. Retrieved from Lit Hub: https://lithub.com/the-digital-age-is-destroying-us/ ↩︎
- India, G. i. (2025, March 16). Avoiding the Automation of Your Heart. Retrieved from SubStack: https://substack.com/inbox/post/159174188 ↩︎
- Moynihan, M. (2015). The Elephant in the Living Room: What Few Are Talking About But What Is Absolutely Necessary for Authentic Educational Reform. Retrieved from Humanum: https://humanumreview.com/articles/the-elephant-in-the-living-room-what-few-are-talking-about-but-what-is-absolutely-necessary-for-authentic-educational-reform ↩︎
- Champney, D. (2024, September 22). Who’s Behind the Explosion of Technology in Schools? Retrieved from https://www.realcleareducation.com/2024/09/25/whos_behind_the_explosion_of_technology_in_schools_1060930.html ↩︎
- Morell, C., & Littlejohn, B. (2025, January 10). Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone. Retrieved from First Things: https://firstthings.com/parents-cant-fight-porn-alone/ ↩︎
- Moynihan, M. (2015). The Elephant in the Living Room: What Few Are Talking About But What Is Absolutely Necessary for Authentic Educational Reform. Retrieved from Humanum: https://humanumreview.com/articles/the-elephant-in-the-living-room-what-few-are-talking-about-but-what-is-absolutely-necessary-for-authentic-educational-reform ↩︎