Sarah Schneider Kavanagh is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Katie A. Danielson is an associate professor at the University of Portland School of Education.
Walk into a second-grade classroom today, and it may seem like little has changed over the past few decades: Teachers still greet students at the door. Classrooms still have colorful rugs and educational posters on the walls.
But the picture book the children are listening to isn’t being read by the teacher sitting beside them on the rug — it’s playing on an interactive whiteboard. The book itself isn’t even physically in the room. Instead, its pages (with added animations) are projected on a screen while audio narrates the text. Later, children wear headphones while clicking through individualized reading lessons. After lunch, they each complete their own adaptive math activities on Chromebooks instead of gathering at tiny tables to solve problems together.
These changes happened so gradually (and then so suddenly during the pandemic) that many parents don’t realize how different many aspects of elementary school have become. And it all happened with little public debate. Today, nearly 80 percent of school districts issue kindergarteners, first-graders and second-graders devices or allow them to bring them from home.
Screens are no longer occasional classroom tools. They organize the school day. This isn’t simply a story about technology. It’s a story about what happens when the medium through which children learn reshapes learning itself.
Elementary school always taught more than reading and mathematics. Children learned how to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements and explain their thinking. This was an essential aspect of growing up, it wasn’t just a nice byproduct of being in a classroom. When the relational aspect of learning is removed, the conditions that allow these skills to grow are also removed.
Developmental psychologists have spent decades showing that children’s thinking matures through interaction with other people, not just through exposure to information. In many classrooms today, however, children learn individually through personalized software designed to maximize efficiency, and the individualized data it generates is shared with the teachers.
These technological changes in elementary classrooms might look like progress. Classrooms are quieter. Adaptive software promises individualized instruction at exactly the right level. To many, these are real benefits. But every decision involves trade-offs.
When stories are delivered through videos instead of being read aloud by the teacher, something changes about storytelling itself. When mathematics becomes a sequence of individual clicks rather than collective problem-solving, children lose opportunities to hear different ways of thinking.
Even if some technologies improve some learning outcomes under some conditions, is this the type of education young Americans need? Do we want classrooms organized by continuous digital engagement? Or do we want schools where children spend substantial portions of the day interacting and creating?
The skills that will matter most in an artificial-intelligence-powered future may be the ones computers can’t cultivate: attention span, curiosity, judgment, empathy and collaboration. Attention span in particular is weakened when schools prioritize constant stimulation over intellectual endurance. As technology becomes more powerful, distinctly human capacities become more valuable, not less.
Norway, a country that gave all students iPads in 2016, has begun reversing course, following a decline in reading scores. Some U.S. school districts and states are doing the same. Adults are realizing that schools that don’t give devices to children in early grades give them experiences they cannot obtain elsewhere.
Children don’t need school to become more like the digital world. They are already immersed in that world for much of the time outside school hours. They need a place designed for other aims, such as conversation instead of consumption and collaboration instead of personalization. That isn’t resisting the future; it’s preparing children to be fully human in it.
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