[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program for the third time Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Dr. Horvath is a neuroscientist educator who's conducted research and lectured at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and in over 750 schools on six continents. He has published seven books, over 60 research articles, and his work has been featured in popular publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's science show, Catalyst. Jared currently serves as director of LME Global, a team dedicated to bringing the latest brain and behavioral research to teachers, students, and parents.
[00:49]
And he is the author of the new book, The Digital Delusion, How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again.
[00:58] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[01:00] Justin Baeder:
Jared, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[01:02] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Thank you so much for having me back. It's awesome to be here.
[01:05] Justin Baeder:
I'm excited to speak with you about the new book, and I felt like I had to order it in hard copy, like reading it electronically just would have been wrong. I don't even know if it's available electronically, but you make a pretty compelling case about EdTech in this book. You say EdTech is a $400 billion industry. How did we get to this point? How is it possible that we have this EdTech industry, and what are some of your big concerns about that industry that prompted you to write this book?
[01:33] Jared Cooney Horvath:
So you can imagine the EdTech industry really started in the U.S. We could tag it basically 2002. That was when Maine introduced the first one to one computing program across their middle schools. So every kid gets a laptop. Now, why would they do something like that?
[01:47]
Because tech companies were starting to reach out to them and say, we'll give you free laptops for your kids and that will help them learn. And so that spread and spread and spread right around 2012 is when things got really, when ed tech as a field started to really kind of pick up and people started realizing, hey, we can build software that teaches kids math. We can build hardware that teaches kids science, whatever it's going to be. And then, of course, comes COVID. And so I think everything is kind of slowly chugging along. COVID hits.
[02:14]
Everyone has to go digital. And when COVID was done, rather than ditching the tools, which were supposed to be a Band-Aid, let's just get through this period of time, rather than ditching them and going back to what we knew was going to be good, we just kept the tools. And now an estimated 88% of school districts in the U.S. have one-to-one computer programs for their kids. So it's just been this beautiful...
[02:33]
process of slow growth, slow growth, and COVID was the miracle grow that basically made it happen. And now, like you said, estimated $400 billion market. That includes $85 billion per year just here in the U.S. alone.
[02:47] Justin Baeder:
It's interesting to trace that to a couple points in time. Obviously, COVID, we would all recognize that we permanently went digital on a lot of things. We all got used to Zoom meetings as a result of COVID. But to go a little bit further back, it strikes me that 2012 was kind of the iPad and app store. And 2002, which was the year I started teaching, was presumably a year that desktop computers got just a lot more affordable. I remember my school district actually bought teacher's computers for the first time in 2002.
[03:14]
We got them in early 2003. And I think that was just kind of a mass wave of adoption. I don't know if you see other key points in that evolution, but certainly, you know, like edtech wasn't invented at those points. Technology was not invented at those points. They were just, you know, pivotal moments, it sounds like.
[03:30] Jared Cooney Horvath:
I mean, the first meta-analysis on EdTech, quote unquote, would be in 1962. Back then it was information computing technologies. And when we were at school too, we had math crunchers and Oregon Trail. These are all versions of EdTech that just kind of solidified and became a unique, specific field over the last couple of decades here. And so that's what our kids, rather than, I always say when we were kids, Technology was always an adjunct to our education. Like once a week, you'd go to the computer lab and you do paint or you do MS Word, whatever it's going to be.
[04:01]
It was never the key feature, but today it is the key feature of most kids' education. So it's been a wholesale shift from cute curiosity in the library to it's in your pocket, it's in your backpack every day.
[04:12] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, and I think that spatial shift is a big one, that it's not just one or two, you know, Apple IIe computers at the back of the classroom like we might have had in the early 90s. It's not just a lab that you go to for, you know, one period a day or maybe once a week if you're not taking a class in the lab, but it is with us all the time. You said 88% of school districts now have one-to-one programs. My kid has a Chromebook. that I just saw her using for a project just a minute ago. And this stuff is everywhere.
[04:39]
And as you noted, as an industry, it's drawing $400 billion a year. What are we getting for that money, in your view?
[04:48] Jared Cooney Horvath:
And I won't even say this is in my view. This is in the data. The data is very clear that what we're getting is less learning across the board. We're getting a reduction in what we would call traditional academic skills and abilities. That'd be things like reading, arithmetic, all that fun stuff. And we're getting a decrement in basically every cognitive thing we measure.
[05:07]
Memory, attention, creativity, critical thinking, all these things that we kind of pin humanity's hopes on. you can track back to the adoption of tech lowers all of these, significantly so. And then if you wanna take it beyond learning, kids today are unhappier than our generation was. Kids today are unhealthier than we were before. None of this seems to be going in the direction we want. I always say every generation of parents wants their kids to be healthier, happier, smarter than they are.
[05:33]
And since the 1900s in recorded history, that has been the case. Every generation has outperformed their parents until Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation we have in recorded history to underperform us and Gen Alpha looks like they're underperforming them. So we've somehow gone in the wrong direction here.
[05:49] Justin Baeder:
And it's your argument in the book that educational technology is central to that trend, that it's not just the smartphones that students are using outside of school. It's not just COVID, but that actually the technology that students use during the school day at the direction of their school is a causal factor in this.
[06:08] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Absolutely, 100%. So this is where the anxious generation discussions about smartphones, that's really good for the mental health. Discussions about the over-medicalization of childhood, again, really good for the mental health, for the physical health stuff. But none of that would explain the decrement in all levels of cognition. Why would our thinking go down? And that's got to track back to, wait a second, this tool is also being used in schools exceedingly more and more and more.
[06:32]
And if you take a look kind of at the graphs and the research, what you see is the more it's used, the worse kids do. You almost have a nice what we call in medicine a dose response curve, more tech, less performance. So we start to get these inklings that it goes back. But I always say I could talk your ear off about data. Data, especially in the social sciences, will always be what we call correlative. We cannot run random control trials the same way you can in a lab with rats.
[06:58]
So all of our data is correlative. So in our field, what we always say is in order to make correlation causation, or at least causative inference, you need mechanism you need to be able to have a clear biological mechanism that says this is why that data looks like that and not like anything else and so that's what i tried to do with this book is we bring the data in sure the data punches you in the face but it's all meaningless until i can tell you why we're looking at that and the biggest underlying rule we can look at some specifics here though is digital technology is inherently anti-human biology. The way we have evolved for 150,000 years to learn is very specific and it's the same for everyone. 20-some years ago along comes this tool and it simply doesn't align with how we naturally learn. By all means we can learn from it, we learn from it all the time, but we don't learn from it well, we don't learn from it quickly, we don't learn from it deeply.
[07:51]
So what we're doing, the more we use it, yes, we're learning, but we're redefining learning to mean something lesser. We're re-terming everything to mean what I can do on this tool rather than, wait a second, there's a deeper thing I could be doing if I just left this tool. So I always say it's just kind of against biology, unfortunately.
[08:09] Justin Baeder:
And you give the example in the book of learning styles, that learning styles were something that we kind of chased after in past decades. Even today, learning styles are kind of a popular neuro myth that there's this idea that if you design your lessons to match students' learning styles, then they'll learn more. And that turned out just to be flatly false.
[08:29] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Extend that too. You've got kind of learning styles and you've got what we're going to call like academic strategies, right? And one of the big driving characteristics of ed tech is student choice. It gives kids agency. You can choose how you want information to come at you. You can choose how you want to interact with that information.
[08:46]
So in one you've got learning styles, choose what you want to see, how you want to hear it. On the other you've got practices, techniques, choose your own study techniques. And what we've known for a long time is allowing free choice in both of those realms reduces learning now this is one of the selling points of ed tech our tools will do this to which anyone who understands learning says that's not what you want to do when we align pedagogy to student preference let's just say just pure content learning goes down when we see learning goes up is when we align pedagogy to content when i align my teaching to what it is I'm trying to teach, everyone will learn better, irregardless of their specific preference there. Now take it into study strategies. When you give kids free reign to pick their own adventure and decide how they want to interact with material, they fall into what's called the fluency illusion. Human beings are really bad at knowing what helps us learn, but we're really good at knowing what feels good.
[09:43]
And when we do something that feels good for us, our confidence in our learning and abilities goes up. But almost invariably, that does nothing for our learning. Because if something feels good, it's like going to the gym. You work out. If you're feeling good, you didn't work out. You better be huffing it and puffing it.
[09:56]
Now, how many kids are going to purposely self-select the huffing and puffing route where when you're doing it, it looks horrible. You're not gaining any traction. It looks like you're going backwards. All of that stuff is what teachers have always done. I know you as a student have preferences, but I understand how learning works and I'm going to make you walk a very clear path that we all have to walk to get to where you need to get. But the second we let kids choose, they fall into the fluency illusion and this learning styles kind of preferences idea and learning starts to go down because they simply don't understand what it takes to achieve expertise.
[10:27]
They just they know what feels good and what it takes to make them think they're learning much. Does that make a lot of sense?
[10:33] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, that we can, you know, feel good using ed tech. Teachers can feel good, students can feel good, you know, district decision makers can feel good. It's nice to have the shiny technology and people might report enjoying it, but if we measure the learning, we're going to see things going in the wrong direction.
[10:49] Jared Cooney Horvath:
You have them predict their learning. Give a kid a computer. So I was talking to a teacher a couple months ago. She was all analog, all analog. She finally brought in these digital programs because her principal made her. And she knew hands down her kid's learning is down.
[11:02]
but her teacher rating that year from her students was higher than it's ever been. In a very real sense, they learned less, but they must have been having fun, so they liked her, so she's like, what am I supposed to do? It's funny when you realize as a teacher, your kids are gonna like you less when you're doing what they need for you to teach them and to help them kind of grow. But that's when you get that call five years later from that student who said, you know what, at the time I didn't get it, but thank you for having high expectations, for getting me to do things that I might not have preferred. And we do it with a prediction. So there was a good research study, right?
[11:34]
Give one group of kids something to read and say, just reread this passage four times. That's the fluency illusion. That feels real good. It feels easy. I get it. Then ask them, I'm going to give you a test next week.
[11:44]
How well do you think you're going to do? They'll say about 80%. I get it. Give them that test. They'll perform about 40%. Now flip it.
[11:51]
Give another group of kids the passage. Say, just read it once, only one time, and now you have to do three rounds of hard recall-based practice. Or I'm going to ask you quiz questions. You're going to have to pull the answer out of your head. Ask those kids, how well do you think you learned? They'll guess around 55% because it's hard.
[12:05]
It's not fluent to them. So they think, I must not have been learning. Given the test, they'll score around 60%. So we've got this issue of we don't even recognize what is helping and hurting our learnings. And oftentimes what we think is helping It just ain't when we get down to it.
[12:19] Justin Baeder:
It seems like perhaps as in the realm of physical fitness, learning is hard work. And if we find a way to bypass that hard work or just not do it one way or another, then we're just not going to see results just as we wouldn't see results in the gym if we keep weights light and fun.
[12:35] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Does that analogy hold up or- It really holds up when you think about something like AI. The entire function of AI is to do what's called cognitive offloading. It's for experts to not have to do something that they know how to do. I know how to do stats. I don't feel like doing it for the next two hours. I'm going to use AI offload it.
[12:52]
And the only reason it works is because as an expert, you can vet AI's output immediately. Because I know everything about stats, when I don't do it, if AI spits out a number that's correct, I'll be like, yep, that's the one, thank you. But if it spits out something stupid, I immediately recognize and go, what? I must have typed in something wrong. When we use technology to offload as learners, now you never develop the skill that you hope to offload as an adult. So rather than becoming an expert and using this tool to make your job faster, you will never become an expert.
[13:20]
You simply become tied to these tools. So just go back to the gym analogy. AI to me is kind of like building a machine that lifts weights for you. It's great. It gets the job done. But you better not think that you have personally done anything or should expect growth in any way, shape or form.
[13:37]
And that's one of the hardest things that a lot of people making these digital tools are trying to convince us that you can skip the work and go right into the depth. Skip the work. There is no depth. There is nothing left for you to do. You can't touch the bottom of the pool without going through the surface. And that is absolutely true with learning as much as it is exercise.
[13:53] Justin Baeder:
I wonder if part of our confusion on this point comes down to the difference between adults who know stuff and are using tools to do that stuff more efficiently. Like if you're an accountant, you're going to use software, you're going to use calculators, like you're going to use those tools. If you're an author, You're probably not handwriting all of your books. I mean, I've written three books and I have not handwritten a single one of them. I don't know about you. What's going on there in terms of adult use of tools to be efficient versus the learning side?
[14:23]
You're spot on.
[14:24] Jared Cooney Horvath:
This is where we mistake productivity for learning. Digital tools are there for production. They're there to make life easier for people who need to do stuff. Students, by definition, are not experts. They're not doing stuff. They're learning how to do stuff.
[14:38]
When you use the same tool to produce as you do to learn, you're gonna get stunted learning. And it's just, that's absolutely true. And if this, so go back to what we were saying, how digital technology basically goes against human biology. This is a great example of that. In education, we have a concept called transfer. And that's the biggest issue we care about.
[14:58]
How do you move knowledge, skills, abilities between contexts? I'm glad you can do math in my room, but I need you to do it at home with your checkbook, whatever it's gonna be. Two levels of transfer. One is called the contextual level. Where we do our learning will confine how we can perform that learning in the future. So as a simple example, if I do all my learning in a red room and now you have me practice or do a test in a green room, I'm going to do worse simply because the context has shifted.
[15:25]
When we learn online, digital contexts are wickedly narrow. They are highly specific, and trying to move off of that context into the real world by contract is highly varied. Every time you pick up a pen, you have to do different movements to write a letter. Every time you use a keyboard, it doesn't matter how you press it, you're getting the exact same outcome. So the more we learn on a computer, the harder it becomes to move it off of a computer. To which people say, yeah, but that's the same way the other way around.
[15:52]
If I learn in the real world, it's harder to move it onto a computer. That's the context issue. Absolutely. But that's going to bring us to level two of transfer called additive versus subtractive. Sometimes when you move a skill to a new context, you have to do more than what you initially learned. Like imagine if you grew up learning how to drive in an automatic car, and now I put you in a manual car with a stick shift.
[16:14]
you never develop those skills. So you got to start from scratch to build them up. But flip it. Subtractive transfer says if you learn more initially and now you need to transfer into an easier realm where you have to do less, now transfer is almost automatic. So if you grew up driving with a stick shift and I pop you in an automatic, you're going to be just fine because you have to do less than what you know how to do. Computers, as we were just saying, by their definition are easy.
[16:38]
They are built to make life easier. No one made a computer to say, let's make life harder. Bill Gates or Steve Jobs flat out said when he brought out the iPhone, I built this so a baby could use it. This is not supposed to be hard. When kids learn on a computer, not only are they putting their skills onto a very specific narrow screen, they're also doing it, learning it in the easiest possible way, which makes it almost impossible for them to transfer those skills into a real world setting. And we've had data on that since 1929.
[17:07]
The easier you make learning, the worse that learning is gonna perform anywhere else. So this is a good example of the tool is simply not aligned with what kids need for learning to develop into healthy, effective adults, unfortunately.
[17:20] Justin Baeder:
Well, let's talk about the promise that we're hearing a lot these days. I'm hearing a lot about just the efficiency gains that are possible with EdTech. I'm hearing a lot about Bloom's Two Sigma problem, that finally now we can solve this problem and help the average student start to perform at the 98th percentile or whatever specific claim. Just these huge promises about acceleration. And we're seeing huge promises about individualized pacing, individualized instruction. And I think there's a lot of appeal to parents that, hey, your kid can learn faster, your kid can get an edge by using these ed tech tools.
[17:56]
What do we know so far about those tools and kind of what track record they have to show for their?
[18:02] Jared Cooney Horvath:
99% of all that is myth. It's propaganda. It's salesmanship. The two sigma problem from Bloom. That was the argument that if you have one to one tutoring, you will score two standard deviations higher than someone who doesn't. Which if you even just remotely think about what that means, is literally impossible.
[18:20]
No one scores two standard deviations above anyone no matter what you do. Even if you didn't do any learning, you wouldn't find someone two standard deviations above somebody else. It just doesn't work. And in fact, what happened was that whole number came from two of his research studies. His PhD students published similar numbers. He said it.
[18:36]
Since then, we've tested the impact of personalized one-to-one learning. The effect size is closer to 0.26 standard deviations. So that's an order of magnitude lower than what it once was. Now, just to put that into context, that's nowhere near where we need. In education, we tend to say you need to have an effect size above around 0.42 in order to be considered meaningful and worth investing in.
[18:58]
So that kind of idea just isn't carrying any water. But when I say it's about 99% not true, there is 1% of it that is true, is if a kid drills, just kill and drill on a computer. Here's a math question. I got it right. Here's a harder one. I got it wrong.
[19:14]
Here's some feedback. Here's an easier one. Go to town. We can see gains there. But there are two very important things to recognize there. One, that will only work in highly narrow surface-based fields.
[19:24]
So you have to have a right or wrong answer. Good for math. Bad for... calculus good for spelling bad for writing one of the researchers justin reich always says these kind of digital tools really good for learning how to write really bad for writing i wouldn't even say it was how to write it's the the sub skills of how to spell not what you want to spell how to put in a period but not what the hell that actually means The other thing then is the transfer issue is where they test these tools is on the tool itself.
[19:54]
So if you do a tool for 10 minutes a day, seven days a week, and then I say, are you better on the tool? You better be. As soon as they test kids offline, they take them from the screen and they put them in a pen and paper test. All their skills disappear and they go, why can't you do it over here? Transfer issue. I just did it in the easiest way humanly possible in the most narrow context possible.
[20:16]
So that's the 1%. It can work in very specific narrow domains so long as you only care about surface learning and then explicitly practice transfer later. But beyond that, like this whole alpha school movement, that was cute. That's going to collapse in the next five to 10 years. Easy.
[20:32] Justin Baeder:
And it's interesting, it often seems as if part of the advocacy for edtech tools is based on a criticism of the status quo in traditional learning that, you know, it's outmoded, factory model, everybody moves at the same pace, teachers don't always know their stuff, it's inefficient. You know, there's this criticism of schools that basically says schools are broken, we have the solution. And the solution is, you know, personalized pacing, you know, AI tutor, use our app, buy our subscription, that kind of thing. How do you look at that criticism of traditional schooling?
[21:05] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Whenever somebody says education is broken and that argument really started to gain traction due to TED Talks, TED Talks and especially Ken Robbins is where that we're all like, yeah, education is broken. Anytime someone brings that up, I say, by what metric? Show me the metric by which education is broken. And the trick is you won't see it because by any metric we typically use, access to education, success through education, gaps between the haves and the have-nots, gaps between men and women, all of these things are shrinking. And they always, they have been through traditional education. In fact, since 2000, there are only two hard metrics you could possibly use to say that education is broken.
[21:44]
And that is kids today are less happy in school and kids today are less successful. smart in school. They are less cognitively developed. But remember, those two metrics we can track back to tech. So all these tech people making the argument school is broken. If you really want to go that far, tech broke it.
[22:04]
It was your tool that broke it. But you got to remember, it's real hard to sell a solution if there ain't a problem. So, of course, they're saying this is a problem. If you go back to the 90s, that was probably peak industrial education model. That was also peak human cognitive ability. We were more creative, more critical thinking.
[22:20]
If you graduated from school in the 90s, congratulations, you were kicking butt. And that was because it works. It always has. We try all these different things. You've got to imagine we've had school in the same basic format for 2000 years. There's a reason why we keep going back to it.
[22:35]
There is a way that works for how human beings develop. Change the model. It will fall apart. You will come back to that model. Now, I am willing to have some people think education is broken from purely ideological standpoints. You can't prove it.
[22:48]
There is no data point that can help you prove that. But you can just say, I don't like it. Fair enough. There's nothing I can do to push back against that. But at the end of the day, I can't make educational decisions based on beliefs. I got to make it based on what we got.
[23:01]
And everything we got says we've been going in the wrong direction with most of the stuff for the last 20 years. And we'd be better in any school that reverts back to what we were doing in the industrial model. Scores come back. Hey, learning gains come back. Hey, we were probably doing it right before.
[23:18] Justin Baeder:
Anecdotally, it seems to me that a lot of people who become EdTech developers, EdTech boosters, are probably people who are particularly motivated to learn certain material, maybe studied some advanced math or computer science on their own, maybe taught themselves to code early on, don't recognize the degree to which they're atypical in that way. And they think, well, if I learned all this stuff on my own, I learned faster at my own pace, surely school is broken because everybody should be doing that. they don't really think about the fact that you know most people don't use their free time that way you know often devices what are they doing with their devices well mostly they're playing games they're watching videos they're streaming music they're not using them for learning and if you as an individual did great good for you i'm not sure that's a net positive for everybody though and that's it so kids who can learn well from tech
[24:06] Jared Cooney Horvath:
have what are called self-regulated learning skills. And most human beings will not learn self-regulated learning skills until they have completed a K through 12 education. That's where we cut our teeth on that stuff. And that's why if you take a look at the impact of ed tech in tertiary level, undergrad, grad, and beyond, you start to see more and more benefit. But when you bring it down to K through 12, It's just unless you have pure agency over what you want to do and how you want to do it and you know everything about your own learning and memory and how it works, you're not going to be able to use it effectively. Exactly as you said, you're going to spend six minutes on it and then immediately go to YouTube and assume I just learned something.
[24:40]
And so this is why one of the another and I don't talk about this in the book, but I think it's a very interesting fact is a lot of people say that. ed tech is going to close digital divides like think about when moocs came out these large massive online community classes they said now a kid from zimbabwe can learn from the best professor in harvard when you track the data of moocs 85 of people who graduate who finish courses already have an undergraduate degree and 50 of graduate already have a graduate degree why because in order to successfully make it through learning on your own on a screen you better already have developed self-regulated learning skills and the only way you do that is if you get through a k-12 education So basically, this tool that was meant to bring everyone together is just another tool for the haves to continue to progress faster. And the have-nots don't know how to use it well, so they can't quite finish it, unfortunately.
[25:33]
That brings us back to the alpha school model. The alpha school model, I don't know how much you know about it, but they claim they're only in the top 2%. Everyone graduates as magical and we 10x learning, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. No. If you go track those schools, what you find is they kick out any kid who's not doing what they need them to do. And the kids who remain are the kids who have parents with $40,000 per year salaries to pay for that, which means they probably came from academic households, which means they've probably been forced to develop self-regulated learning skills earlier than other human beings.
[26:05]
You can develop them earlier. Most people need K through 12. Some people can get it by year nine, some by year eight. So what you're seeing is basically a selection process. Alpha school works. But to be fair, you let me pick the top 2% of kids in the country.
[26:20]
I don't care what you do. Throw a shoe at them. They're still going to be the top 2% of kids in the country because they're driving their own learning at that point. It's not your magical system. It's your magical ability to pick kids and then put out data that makes it look like your tool is somehow doing something it certainly ain't.
[26:36] Justin Baeder:
Well, Jared, let's talk about the reality in a typical public school. Obviously, there are very few public schools that are advertising, hey, we'll put your kid on devices all day and they'll learn faster as a result. And you say in the book, a lot of parents would be shocked to learn how much time their kids actually are spending on devices at a normal, typical, traditional public school. Yeah.
[26:56] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Over half of our kids are on a screen for one to four hours per day in a classroom, and over a quarter are on screens for over four hours a day in a traditional classroom. And I just don't think like I didn't know that till I started doing the research. It's one of those things where you would assume school is kind of the haven for this stuff. If you pick up a screen, it's going to be for a reason. And I think that's because that's how we grew up is it was never a part of it wasn't the main course of education. It was a side dish.
[27:22]
Cool. It is now the main course. course and kids are doing they're spending entire class periods online and during those class periods we have data showing between 24 and 38 minutes of every hour they'll be off task you put a screen in front of them about half the time they ain't gonna be learning they're gonna be doing other stuff they're gonna be doing youtube they're gonna be doing netflix and that doesn't include the time that teachers have to now spend saying get back on task hey i told you to put that away put that tab close netflix go over to this Once you actually get your boots on the ground, you start to realize this is a much deeper thing. A lot of schools have kind of built their identity around the tech question. And I don't think it was out of malice. I think exactly this.
[28:02]
We've been told that these will personalize learning. These will enhance. These will speed learning. All of these are great sales points. It's just the data doesn't match it. And we now have the biological mechanisms to show that there's a reason why it doesn't match it.
[28:15]
It's never gonna work. You can't continue to personalize the way you have. That's not a good way to learn. Go back to what we were talking about with the two sigma problem. The argument for them was one-to-one tutoring is the key to learning because you get the right idea, the right information, the right question at the exact moment you need it. Congratulations.
[28:34]
The reason why it's 0.26 instead of 2.0 now is because we realized the tutoring itself doesn't really matter. The biggest determinant on whether or not one-to-one tutoring is going to work is the relationship the kid has with the tutor. So in the term tutoring relationship, the operative word was never tutoring. It was relationship.
[28:53]
More specifically, if a kid has an empathetic relationship with their tutor, they will learn more. That usually bumps up to around 0.68. That's huge when it comes to learning. Remember, 0.42 is our baseline.
[29:03]
0.68, now we're in the category of that works. So what is empathy? Just to put this simply, I could talk about this for hours, but I won't. Empathy is basically a biological resonance between two human beings. If you and I were to empathize with each other right now, our breathing would start to synchronize.
[29:19]
We would start to blink at the same time, breathe at the same rate. Our brains would start to sync up and look almost identical. In a very real sense, we can measure empathy because it's synchrony between two pairs of biology. Go to a computer. You could have the best digital tutor in the world that's gonna give you the right question, the right moment you need it, exactly when you need it. But that tutor will never have biology.
[29:41]
You cannot synchronize with a computer. So if an entire aspect of learning is synchronizing with the person you're learning from, and you simply cannot do that on a screen or a computer, the biggest argument we have for saying one-to-one tutoring works is now gone. So I always tell my kids, if you can have the choice between having a computer that gives you exactly what you need when you need it or liking your teacher, pick the teacher you like. You will learn more every step of the way because biologically that is how we learn. So this is another example of the tech and biology simply do not align. And we've spent 150,000 years developing a system that helps us learn from other humans.
[30:17]
Humans learn from humans. We do not learn from monkeys. By all means, we can, but we're not gonna learn as well. We do not learn from cups. We can, but it's not gonna be as well. We do not learn from screens.
[30:27]
We can, but it's never as well as when we do it with other people.
[30:31] Justin Baeder:
You know, I'm sure that there is a developer listening to this who's thinking, okay, so my AI tutoring platform has to have an AI-generated human face. The pupils have to dilate to match the student. We have a webcam on the student so we know how fast they're breathing. We know what facial expressions they're making. And the AI has to mimic them. So, like, I'm just going to say, please don't do that.
[30:51]
Don't. If that was your takeaway for me.
[30:52] Jared Cooney Horvath:
And please, the biggest correlations you can't do on a screen, it's heart rate, it is, and it's neurological patterning. In a very real sense, when two people empathize, if I could do EEGs of both of them, their brains start to sync up. So what's happening is we don't know the mechanisms by which Brains can communicate over space, but my gosh, we see it all the time, is when I'm resonating with you neurologically, I am now thinking like you. So in that moment as a student, I'm no longer just learning from you. I am learning like you. I am thinking.
[31:23]
So when you make the argument, I was already thinking about that in my head. When you go to this next step, I'm 100%. There's nowhere else for me to go. You cannot do that on tech because there's no brain here. That's another reason why about 80% of people who do digital learning MOOCs and stuff will drop out because they just, once you get to that struggle spot, it's much harder to follow tech than it is another human being. And so you can't, it's not mimicry.
[31:46]
It is synchrony and you cannot mimic that on a computer.
[31:50] Justin Baeder:
I don't know. I think we will definitely see people want to literally connect electrodes to kids' brains. I mean, there's Neuralink. You know, this is the group of people that would absolutely jump at that chance if they were allowed directly to happen. Do yours. So for those of us who are not eager to plug our children into the matrix, how do we start to roll some of this back?
[32:10]
Because we've seen that already start to happen pretty successfully with smartphones. You know, we're starting to realize, OK, we should not be giving our young children smartphones. There's starting to be some kind of public awareness of that. There are laws about smartphones. students being on phones during the school day. But EdTech has different forces at work.
[32:30]
We have some sunk costs. We have some potential embarrassment to consider that we've, some districts have spent a billion dollars on iPads or millions of dollars on different one-to-one initiatives. And there are also some practical reasons that maybe we're not going to get rid of Chromebooks. And I'll tell you, my kids' situation, I think, is largely that the Chromebooks are put away. They get them out about as often as we got out calculators or went to the computer lab to type up the paper. And I don't know that it's going to get rolled back much more than that.
[32:58]
But as parents, as educators who are interested in maximizing learning and the well-being of our kids... How do we start to push back and roll back some of the overreach of the EdTech industry?
[33:12] Jared Cooney Horvath:
So the last three chapters of the book are specifically this. It's a chapter for parents. What do we do? It's a chapter for teachers. What do we do? Chapter for leaders.
[33:19]
What do we do? And if I had to kind of pick the top thing for each of those levels, I'd say for parents, the top thing to do is buy a printer. I know it sounds so simple, but it is. Human beings learn more from paper. When we read from paper, we learn, remember, comprehend better. When we write on paper, we learn, remember, comprehend better.
[33:36]
So if you can just buy a printer and any homework that comes your child's way, is it a worksheet? Print it out. Is it a reading? Print it out. The more we get them at least on home on paper. there's a chance they can start to carry those behaviors.
[33:48]
They'll definitely take that learning into the classroom, but they might start carrying those behaviors into the classroom too. And then we get some pushback there. So in the home, we make our home as analog as we can. And I'd also say as a parent, ban AI from your home. By all means, if you need to use it for work, go to town. But it is not a learning tool.
[34:05]
It is an offloading production tool for experts. Our kids are not experts. I love them to death. I'm not being mean, but they're kids. Kids aren't mini adults. They're kids.
[34:13]
Our job is to raise them into adults. And if we use a tool that short circuits that, then we're doing a disservice. No one drinks when they're pregnant because we know that tool is going to short circuit development. AI during childhood will short circuit their thinking. That's what it does. Doesn't do it for us, but it will do it for them.
[34:31]
From the teacher level then, I typically say this is where the more you can dive into learning, the science of learning, that's how you're going to learn to kind of push back against this stuff. So example, like one of the key aspects of human learning is that memory is constructive. We only build memories by recalling them. It doesn't matter how many times you put information into your head. It's every time you think about it internally, that's when memories get deeper. Computers, digital tech, we basically offload recall.
[34:58]
Why? And here's an example for all teachers. What is your best friend's phone number growing up? 7407857. Haven't dialed that in 40 years. What is your best friend's phone number today?
[35:08]
I have no clue because I never had to recall it. I know where it is. When we use digital tools, most kids offload recall so they can tell you where to find information, but they don't genuinely know that information. And then when things like creativity, critical thinking, those are higher order thinking skills. They depend completely on what information we have in us, not what we can access. If access was enough, man, when the internet came out, we would have cured cancer.
[35:33]
As soon as ChatGPT came out, I would have folded every dang protein. Access isn't enough. We can only do our deep work when it's in us. So find ways. So that's an example. If I know that learning works through recall, how is tech harming that process and where do we start to replace tech so we can bring that kind of concept back in?
[35:49]
And then from the kind of school level, I would say almost exactly what you just said. Re-institute the computer lab. I know it sounds totally stupid. Letting kids take home computers, unnecessary. The problem with tech in most schools now, at least tech usage, is it's the default go-to because it's so widely available. Hey, reach in your backpack, pull out your cell phone.
[36:10]
Hey, reach in your pocket, pull this out, whatever it's gonna be. if you have a dedicated lab or a dedicated cart with your laptops or computers whatever it is now choosing to use tech becomes highly deliberate now as a teacher i have to make the choice okay is it worth signing that out so that no other teacher can use it today and then getting my kids up traipsing them across school five more minutes to come back is all of this worth doing this on a screen. If the answer is yes, congratulations, there it is. But you're going to find 90% of the time the answer is going to be no. You don't need it. You're just using it because it's there.
[36:43]
And there might be a better analog method you could use in your own classroom. So the second you put friction in the decision for teachers, that's when I think you're going to find much better use of these tools.
[36:52] Justin Baeder:
Very well said. That we can be more purposeful, more thoughtful, and not just default to the one that's at hand. What do you think about curriculum? Because I think the conundrum that a lot of schools are in now is that it's not just a tool, it is where their curriculum lives. They literally stopped buying paper textbooks, which, you know, if you talk about paper textbooks, often, you know, textbooks are brought up as the archetypical outmoded factory model, you know, we're so behind the times, technology for learning. You know, we don't have the curriculum anymore in a lot of cases.
[37:26] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Thoughts on that? Guess what's making a comeback? textbook market is going to hit the highest it's ever hit in history in 2026 because people realize wait a second we learned better from these things for those who this is where the buy a printer at your school level comes in as teachers if we're using tech in the background to organize our thinking to like you said print out the right readings to make sure we're going down the right path that's fine it's when tech becomes student facing when they now have a play with it that's when things are going to start to go haywire. So if we need it, cool, but we figure out ways to translate what we need from it into analog methods for our kids if learning is the outcome. Now, learning might not be the outcome you're going for. You might be going for pure engagement or relationship building.
[38:08]
I don't know. In which case, man, maybe that tool is better suited. But if your outcome is learning, we always find ways to get kids off of a screen and learning will be better. And the joke is, so I released this book. I've worked with a lot of schools. This book came out recently.
[38:22]
Everyone assumed the number one opponent would be tech people in schools. The number one proponent have been IT tech people at schools. They're the ones who say, man, we've been saying this for years, that there is a right way to use this machine and very rarely is it gonna be shoving it in a kid's face and say, go to town. But it's just, it's become the obvious go-to. So I'd still say as teachers, use it. I think IT people use tech all the time, but that doesn't mean our kids need to be using it for us to walk them through that curriculum.
[38:51]
If you kind of stick on that curriculum front, like a big apology everyone has is, well, then how will my kid ever learn tech? That's the curriculum pedagogy distinction. If you think it's worthwhile to teach kids tech, and I can make an argument that it's not, believe it or not, the more you try and teach kids tech, the lower their technological literacy becomes. The best way to learn tech literacy is to live in life. Develop life literacy, you'll have tech literacy by default. Learn tech literacy, you're stuck on the tool I taught you.
[39:17]
So it doesn't really transfer to other digital tools. So unfortunately, but for sake of conversation, let's say we want to teach kids digital skills. Cool. That's a curricular question. That's what to teach. That is very different than pedagogical questions.
[39:30]
How do I teach? So somehow in the ed tech sphere, the argument we need to teach tech has morphed into we need to teach all skills through tech. And that's the problem. So I could still imagine a school would say, hey, we need to teach coding. Cool. That's why we have a computer lab.
[39:44]
That's why we have a computer cart. We're going to teach coding on a screen if you need it, go. That doesn't mean we're now going to teach math through a screen. We're going to teach science through a screen. We're going to make sure kids use AI to learn how to write. Nope, that's pedagogy.
[39:57]
And now you're stepping on my feet as an English teacher in what's the best way to teach kids how to write. So long as we can keep that distinction between curriculum and pedagogy, I still think people realize, look, you can teach kids tech all the time without that completely throwing the rest of the school function into disarray.
[40:12] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, I recall having a number of friends in college who were computer science majors and some of whom became you know professors of computer science i had some of my classes in the same building as the computer science classes and if you walk by a computer science class in a university it is not the case that the students are on computers the whole time you know they are learning concepts they are learning content not simply sitting at a computer the entire time so yeah that argument that we need to teach kids on technology so that they know technology, I think, does not hold up. No.
[40:41] Jared Cooney Horvath:
The best way to learn tech, it's the weirdest thing. And if you worry about jobs, it's the same thing. The best way to prepare kids, because I always found that funny. People like, we need to teach kids tech, otherwise they won't get work. Those people who say that are the exact same people who will then say, we don't know what work is going to look like in the future. There will be no jobs from today.
[40:57]
Well, how are you going to prep someone for something you don't know by training them on something that exists today? That doesn't make sense. So ironically, the best way to prepare students for an unknowable future is through a general K-12 education. We do not teach you tools. We teach you how to think. The idea being that now when the world changes, you have adaptability.
[41:15]
You know how to find patterns and move with it. So it's one of the biggest ironies I always say is we were training kids for work better when we weren't trying to train kids for work, when we were just trying to teach them how to think and learn. And that still remains the best way to prep kids for a weird future.
[41:30] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, very well said. So the book is The Digital Delusion, How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, if people want to connect with you, find your organization online, where's the best place for them to go?
[41:45] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Yeah, check out our website, www.lmeglobal.net. So that's Learning Made Easy. Or you could also take a look for me on YouTube, Jared Cooney Horvath. I put out videos about learning every couple of weeks.
[41:56]
So if you just want to kind of keep up with new learning research, that's another place to kind of find some stuff.
[42:00] Justin Baeder:
Wonderful. Jared, thank you for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[42:04] Jared Cooney Horvath:
Thank you. I'll see you next time.
[42:06] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
