In the late 17th century, Europe’s greatest intellectuals were consumed by the quarrel of the ancients and the modern, satirised by Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books. In the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked whether education should nurture children’s natural capacities or mould them to society’s expectations. The great educational dispute of the 21st century is rather less august: should children be reading books or collecting coins for cartoon robots?

In the past decade, a new divide has opened in Britain’s classrooms. Not between rich and poor, clever and dull, or private and state schools, but between children still taught by teachers using whiteboards, pens and paper and those being instructed by an avatar on a screen.

The great Educational Technology (EdTech) revolution began in Britain’s top private schools. Head teachers boasted to parents that they were creating the next generation of digital natives. Just months after Apple released the first iPad, a small independent school in Greenock in Scotland had already equipped every pupil with one. For a long time, governors fought to become ‘Apple Distinguished Schools’ in a bid to attract fee-paying parents.

Increasingly, parents are reluctant to sign an old-fashioned reading journal or check children’s reading homework

Increasingly, parents are reluctant to sign an old-fashioned reading journal or check children’s reading homework

This instinct soon spread into the state system. In 2014, Google Classroom was launched, a free platform enabling teachers to hand out homework online. Cheap Google Chromebooks soon offered state schools an affordable means of putting a computer in every child’s hands. By 2019, UK schools were spending an estimated £900 million every year on EdTech. Things accelerated during the pandemic, when schools had no option but to move learning online. Now, long after classrooms have reopened, the trend has stuck.

Around 960,000 pupils in the UK now use an individual device in nearly every lesson, according to polling commissioned by SafeScreens. This includes approximately 270,000 primary pupils. A further 2.6 million are estimated to use screens daily in school.

It starts young. On Mumsnet, a parent asks for advice after receiving a message from her reception-aged daughter’s school informing her that the practice of sending children home with physical reading books has been phased out. Instead, children have been furnished with log-in details for the Collins Hub app so they can read picture books on a tablet or phone.

The app is wildly unpopular with parents. In the app store it has a rating of 1.8 stars out of five. Reviewers describe it as ‘unpractical and user unfriendly’ with reports of regular crashes, failure to display pages in order and a series of bugs far too complex for a four-year-old to figure out.

Teachers know this. But they tell me they’ve faced huge pressure from both head teachers and the government to move reading online.........

© The Spectator