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Schools Are Bringing Back Pen and Paper, and Students Are Thriving

A growing number of schools are reducing classroom technology, and early results suggest it may improve literacy, focus, and critical thinking.

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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........

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