Jared Cooney Horvath is highly critical of digital tools in the classroom. Horvath is a neuroscientist who studies learning, memory, and cognition. His most recent book is The Digital Delusion.
On January 15, 2026, he testified before a Senate Committee, where he linked the use of technology to declining academic performance, not just in the U.S. but in other countries.
Here is his written testimony with graphs, footnotes, and other evidence to support his thesis.
Take five minutes and watch.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is interesting that this damning study on Ed Tech has received so little attention from our elected representatives despite a presentation to a Senate committee. Horvath clearly shows that ed tech has failed our young people in every cognitive and academic domain, but it remains pervasive in our public schools. There has been no media outcry condemning ed tech that can compare to the endless claims the public has repeatedly heard about “failing public schools” for decades.
Hovath’s has many concerns about the future for young people that have been inundated by mindless ed tech. Horvath is worried about the implications of producing a workforce that is less adaptable with reduced ability to reason, a workforce and is less innovative, competitive, and less healthy. None of these concerns are an issue to the billionaires that matter in this country as their children will continue to get a world class education while most of our children suffer the consequences of being captured by Big $$$.
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We need to remember that claims of “our failing public schools” are a marketing ploy–to see Ed-tech and school choice.
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The conclusion of the article is that “Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.” Maybe try discriminate digital use in learning environments.
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The document and testimony are compelling but only one aspect of the detriments of screens. Effects on learning are real. Policy makers need to go deep into addiction, concentration, thinking (actual “thinking about” what one is seeing/reading), and other factors.
Screens (from this qualitative perspective observing classrooms and grandchildren) affect kids (adults) from much worse than television, cartoons, and games than previous generations.
The old adage about being “glued to the screen” is nothing compared to this.
Fixation and Addiction: Try to interrupt a child holding a phone watching anything – real visuals or cartoon-lie. They don’t hear you. Fixated. How many times do children ask for the phone? First moment of boredom or 100% worse – parents who need time give the kid the phone. Restaurants? Fast food? Any event? The kid learns nothing about social interaction (and parents oblivious to other people).
And fixation is not concentration. A kid won’t blink for watching a phone but watch how long they look at words on paper or in a conversation without looking up.
Dr. Rick LaVoie – special education guru (F.A.T. City and other videos) comment stuck: Two kinds of attention disorder: Kids who can’t concentrate on anything and kids who concentrate / attend to everything.
Jane Healy – researcher on the brain was possibly the only person to criticize Sesame Street when it came out. Flashing images, segments less than 30 seconds, constant shifting of content and topic.
My two cents – that was nothing compared to the detriment of screens today, especially kid under 5, kids in schools where publishers have gone website-link and short passage crazy, and kids socialization.
It’s good to see advice that for little kids parents should sit with them and ask about the story and break the fixation on the screen – – but for too many it’s either a silencer and worse, behavior modification.
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Excellent commentary in substack “A new bill gaining momentum would end Washington’s aversion to reining in Big Tech.” Addresses addiction, socialization, and much, much more
(Note – the author is a young man who started sending out his “Wake Up to Politics” emails to “subscribers” when he was in junior high! Everyday – all through high school and then college!
https://open.substack.com/pub/wakeuptopolitics/p/congress-never-regulated-social-media?r=268aue&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
His intro:
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), right, is the lead author of the GUARD Act.
The more American life has become wrapped around our smartphones, the less we seem to like it.
“Parents and children don’t always agree on much, but many are aligned on this. In a pair of 2024 surveys conducted by The Harris Poll, 55% of American parents said they wished social media had never been invented. 40% of Gen Z respondents said the same. Dissatisfaction was even higher with some platforms in specific: More than two-thirds of young Americans use TikTok, but almost half said if they could snap their fingers and eliminate the app, they would. (Ditto 62% of parents.) If only.”
(note – those of us MO hate it but sometimes fist-bumping Sen Hawley (the Jan 6 dasher) is right))
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I agree with his thesis that we are evolved to learn from other human beings. I agree that screen time does not help students for some reason.
Still, his viewpoint is bound to testing, which I consider to be the problem. He suggests that we can see drops in testing scores to prove that screen time is bad for students. I claim that 2010 as the break point in what scores he observed comes because that was when the emphasis on testing started its punitive phase.
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Most ed tech is electronic worksheets peppered with a few games to entice students. It is not generally engaging, challenging or interesting. It stunts students’ cognitive, social and emotional development. It may also have negative consequences for brain and eye development when students spend more than 4 hours staring at screens in school and sometimes additional time at home.
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Agreed. We are seeing a confluence of disastrous decisions made at the top. Turning over education to machines. Big mistake. Implementing Common Core tests–another big mistake. In the latter case, education in Math, to some extent, and ELA, to an enormous extent, devolved into test prep exercises related to particular CC “standards,” as opposed to coherent lessons. Why? Because all administrators cared about was that they were going to be judged on test results.
The data are in. These horrific mistakes (including the so-called state standards that are basically renamings of some version of the Common Core), the associated testing, and the over-reliance on computer instruction–all need to go. Until or unless that happens, we will continue to fall further and further behind.
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In regard to reading achievement, is it the poor quality of digital teaching materials in general or is it the content of those materials (e.g., mindless skill and drill on phonics). In the end, his data clearly illustrate a downward trend on standardized tests using large data sets and suggested by meta-analyses across many studies. Yet, any interpretation of that data is speculative about causes and about theoretical explanations. It certainly doesn’t mean unequivocally that digital teaching materials are the root cause of a decline. In the end, he argues that more research is needed. Thus, it is too early for any definitive interpretations and recommendations. But, at least we now have an alternative explanation for declines in reading achievement (poor quality online instruction) instead of a lack of “structured literacy” (phonics). Further, this scientific evidence adds perhaps inconvenient explanations for those who claim that the “Science of Reading” is a settled once and for all in terms of how reading is taught.
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The reading concerns with pervasive ed tech are both content and process related, IMO. Many secondary school students are no longer doing any sustained reading in literature. They are mostly reading excerpts from books on-line, both fiction and non-fiction, which are followed by bubble test questions. Students do not benefit from discussing the material, and they cannot benefit from something called the peer effect. In other words they do not get to hear what other think which helps them form thoughts about the work, perhaps draw conclusions, or even reject what another student thinks. These are cognitive tasks that a steady diet of excerpts and bubble tests do not address. In addition, they rarely get the opportunity to give a written response to what they have read. These types of tasks develop the capacity to become a critical thinker and skilled reader and writer.
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