After the past few weeks, there can’t be many people left still unaware of the rapidly growing power of artificial intelligence. No one knows quite what to do about it or what to expect and when. Parents fear for their children and how they might survive in this new world. But they should rather look to their children’s schools, where right under their noses, AI and educational technology – ed tech – is already damaging students’ futures and stealing their ability to focus, to learn and to think.

You only have to look the latest PISA results, released earlier this month, to see that academic performance in America is declining fast. The reading scores of our 15-year-olds have fallen by 14 points since the last test just three years ago – and if students don’t or won’t read, then there’s not much else they can learn. How and why has it come to this? Covid was once an easy answer, but the decline carried on as schools opened up again after lockdown. What did coincide with the slump in performance, though, was the arrival of new technology in schools, designed to engage already screen-addled children. What has accelerated the decline is widespread use of AI. The PISA results showed that children who do not use AI for schoolwork score, on average, about 20 points higher than students who do – the equivalent of being an entire school year ahead.

Laptops arrived in schools as a status good, not a pedagogical one

Laptops arrived in schools as a status good, not a pedagogical one

The original sin was the introduction of the Chromebook. I once watched a ninth grade student spend 45 minutes writing a single paragraph. The task wasn’t difficult. She was a capable writer. I knew she cared about the class and the assignment, but she was drafting on her school-issued Chromebook, the word processor only one of dozens of open tabs, each tempting – and ultimately succeeding – to steal her attention away from a half-written sentence. She’d type a few words, switch tabs, check the shared document her peers had converted into a makeshift group chat, respond with a joke, return to her essay, reread what she’d written, and start again. When the period ended, she looked exhausted, not from intellectual effort but from the constant labor of resisting distraction.

This wasn’t a failure of her discipline. It was a failure of the environment. She was tasked with writing an essay, but wasn’t given the conditions needed to write it. How did we end up here?

One-to-one device programs began in our independent schools. As early as the 1990s, and accelerating through the aughts, schools with an imperative to market their prestige cast laptops as a distinguishing feature. Their prospectuses advertised access to personal devices, interactive smartboards were shown off during open tours and “digital strategies” were placed front and center of principals’ welcome letters. Laptops arrived as a status good, not a pedagogical one.

At the time, what amounted to little more than a branding decision was accompanied by unsubstantiated claims about the importance of digital technologies in the classroom: “We’re preparing students for the future.” Which future? In what way were they being prepared for it? And according to what evidence?

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