The noise around the vast damage technology causes in schools is growing louder. What once seemed like a revolutionary idea, changing how American children learn through laptops and tablets, has proven to be a bit of a disaster. Now, as reported by Minneapolis’ KARE 11, teachers across the country are taking it upon themselves to reverse the decline in literacy, attention spans, and critical thinking skills by ending the debate about what to do and finally doing something.
It’s the one sensible thing that probably should’ve been done years ago: get the tech out of classrooms. So far, it seems to be working.
Last school year, Maureen Mulvaney, AP Literature teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, banned phones and laptops from her classroom. If kids needed to do an assignment, they would need to get old-school and do it with pencil and paper. Her textbooks were no longer PDFs on a tablet. It was a real, physical book. The tools that were once the norm for older millennials like me, but now seem old and antiquated, were brought back as if they had never gone out of style, and things steadily started improving as they slowly rebuilt skills they had lost after years of tapping screens and clacking keyboards.
In September, only 46 percent of students reported feeling confident in their reading skills. By February, that figure had climbed to 95 percent. Students who initially struggled to write half a page by hand were producing six or seven pages. Nearly 80 percent said it was easier to think clearly and organize ideas on paper than on a screen.
A Teacher Banned Laptops and Phones. Her Students’ Reading Confidence Nearly Doubled
The changes didn’t begin and end in the classroom. Kids reported fewer distractions outside of school and more conversations with classmates. As tech was slowly weeded out of their classroom lives, so too was it weeded out of their home habits, as they relied less on Google and AI tools and found themselves multitasking less than they used to. Some even said they felt more connected to each other and more engaged in class.
It’s just one classroom somewhere in Minnesota, but it’s part of a growing global trend, with governments around the world moving to ban smartphones in schools and diverting school funds that were once lining the pockets of big tech into physical books for students.
This past March, Denmark did just that, banning smartphones in schools and investing millions in physical books. Sweden is on the verge of joining the ban-wagon by banning smartphones in school. The Netherlands, Finland, Australia, and Canada are all at some point in the process of cleansing their schools of tech and getting back to basic pen and paper.
The beauty of Mulvaney’s experiment is that it proves the damage isn’t permanent. It’s not too late to get kids back on the right track. Schools across the United States and around the world don’t need complicated solutions. They don’t need to turn to the tech industry to figure out how to solve the problems it caused. All they have to do is take away the tech, hand the kids a physical book, and just wait a little bit.
The results will speak for themselves soon enough.
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