Did anybody but the most fervent technophile really believe that damage wouldn’t be done?
Numbers for older students reinforce the trend. Students take the ACT as they near the end of high school, one part of which measures college readiness in reading. In 2009, fully 67 percent of test takers reached that goal of readiness (which measures the likelihood of a student earning a B in a freshman writing class in college). In 2019, however, only 59 percent of test takers passed that bar. For the SAT, we saw a similar fall in reading ability. In 2005, the average SAT reading score was 508. By 2016, it had dropped 14 points to 494.
That leisure choice tells us more about the deterioration than does the English classroom, curriculum, and teacher. No Child Left Behind and Common Core focused intensely on reading, and zillions of dollars have gone into literacy instruction, but those efforts were competing against the leisure habits of kids, and the winner was never in doubt.
The dismaying fact is that what happens in an eighth-grade classroom doesn’t come close to the words a youth consumes during the rest of his waking hours. The first is a drip, the second a flood. English teachers instruct them for four hours per week. Voices of their friends, the words of social media and text messages, and video and TV ... exceed four hours per day. The teacher assigns her 10th-grade students “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and most of the kids stumble through less than 30 pages of homework reading for the entire week. Meanwhile, kids race through sites and screens and games and videos all evening and night with the haste of tax filers on April 14. Their eyes and ears fill with youth chatter in nearly every free moment. It’s the air they breathe and the water they drink. The habit has been cultivated well by Silicon Valley, and it has turned the apostles of reading into nothing but the white noise of Charlie Brown’s teachers.
What lockdowns did was connect kids to the very instrument that hampers their intellectual progress. It wasn’t so long ago that tech journalists, Digital Age opinionators, and politicians described the personal computer as an education revolution, an unambiguous cognitive benefit for everyone. With kids on the screen, taught by or through or with the assistance of education software that could be customized to their needs and capacities, progress would leap forward. That’s what they predicted.
Well, now we know better. Kids need to be in a real classroom. The social meaning of the screen is simply too strong for the educational uses of it to prevail. They spend too much time on it doing leisure stuff, such as gossip and photos and music, for them to switch into learning mode while using the same tool. Messages from friends take priority over the teacher’s lesson plan. How are they supposed to finish their homework when the thing they wield to type up a short paper dings every five minutes with news from peers? The teacher can’t compete. She assigns shorter and shorter works—no more Gatsby, no complete Shakespeare play—but at this point, a Poe short story is as daunting as was “A Tale of Two Cities” 30 years ago.
A ban is the only solution. Parents should place their kids in schools that downplay technology and confiscate phones each morning when kids enter the building. Go for classical schools that proudly stick to the old-fashioned ways, such as memorizing poems and speeches and reciting them before an audience. Support teachers and administrators who don’t fear the label Luddite. Pick those who don’t buy the progressive prejudice against the past. Stay aware, too, of the fact that the very system that proves disappointing every time test results come out has been organized and administered by progressives who love innovation and frown at exercises in cursive script.
The system isn’t going to change, however, nor will pro-tech educators revise their views. Parents must vote with their feet. It may be a little frightening, but those who do will find many other parents who worry about the same things.
