The new school year is fast approaching, and with it, the now unavoidable arguments over children refusing to peel their eyes from their screens, put their devices away, and turn their attention to what matters: the screens forced on them by their schools.
That’s right. As politicians nationwide are tripping over themselves to rush through privacy-eroding age-gating legislation in response to a Helen Lovejoy-style moral panic concerning screentime, schools continue to maintain policies that ensure no child can write an essay or learn math without interfacing with a seemingly infinite number of apps on a school-issued iPad.
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Now, for those who completed any part of their education in the horse-and-buggy days of before 2012, this might sound a bit odd. For generations, children learned reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic quite adequately without the gadgets gifted to us by Steve Jobs and our other tech Prometheans.
Furthermore, reports from higher-ed don’t provide any indication young people have become better at school since tech’s classroom takeover. Research suggests antique educational instruments such as books, writing utensils (e.g., pens), and something called “paper” may facilitate learning better than computer-based alternatives. Plus, practically anyone who’s taught in a tech-enhanced environment can tell you having to constantly coordinate, troubleshoot, and police device-use by dozens of already bored and distracted young minds, while also managing a couple of software programs of your own, doesn’t exactly aid instructional flow. And, even if the mental health harms of screentime probably are overblown, that doesn’t mean there needs to be more of it in classrooms. That’s probably the one place there should be some bans against it.
Yet, despite all indications that superfluous classroom tech (a.k.a. EdTech) is an unnecessary burden on students and teachers at best and a hindrance to learning at worst, there’s little evidence schools or districts are tripping over themselves to change course.
The reasons for this are complex. Since the early 2010s, the integration of EdTech into day-to-day classroom operations beyond a few fundamentals like PowerPoint for teachers, Word for students, and a computer lab for the school has become a goal for principals and other educrats. The quantity of EdTech in a school became a proxy for the quality of the education the school provided. There was also a fair amount of techno-fetishism among educators embracing assumptions that infusing tech into something inherently improves it and that modern students, through some rapid form of de-evolution, lost the capacity to read the printed word or manage a pencil.
However, when teachers informed their superiors that practical reality failed to support initial assumptions about EdTech, not to mention financial investments and administrative decisions, the general response was something needed to be done to mitigate the problems caused by EdTech without actually getting rid of it. The education of students and EdTech’s further integration into schools basically became two separate and sometimes conflicting goals that needed to coexist.
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Jump ahead to the present. Now EdTech is considered so enmeshed in day-to-day classroom operations that any talk of reining it in can sometimes be seen as out of the question. Plus, it probably doesn’t help that EdTech has become big business as endless tech companies now treat student learning as a prime source for data collection, especially given that once a school administrator is sold on a product, students, families, and teachers can’t simply opt out of using it.
Yet, in a time when education has already failed students through lowered standards, fluffy pedagogies, and the lingering effects of COVID-19 school closures, maybe enmeshment and corporate interests shouldn’t serve as permission slips for EdTech to continue dominating American classrooms.
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.