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REIn a conversation on C-SPAN, neuroscientist and educator Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath offered a striking critique of how technology is reshaping what we call “learning” in schools.
He describes how reading comprehension tests—once designed to assess deep thinking and inference—are being reduced to surface-level skimming to match the way children interact with screens .
And it’s not just a change in style. It’s a shift in cognitive development.
A global OECD study spanning 80 countries found that students who use digital devices for more than five hours a day in school perform significantly worse—by two-thirds of a standard deviation—than peers with limited tech exposure .
The more pervasive the tech use, the sharper the decline.
Developmental psychologists like Maryanne Wolf (author of Reader, Come Home) have warned for years that digital skimming rewires the brain away from deep reading and critical analysis—undermining the very skills education is meant to build.
What Dr. Horvath underscores isn’t an anti-tech sentiment. It’s a plea not to mistake convenience for cognitive growth. As he puts it, redefining education to suit the tool isn’t progress. It’s surrender.
And as US state-level data shows, the correlation is hard to ignore: standardized performance tends to decline right after widescale 1:1 tech adoption begins.
In an age when screens are everywhere, his message is clear: our kids don’t need more tech in the classroom. They need better thinking spaces—offline, slow, and built for depth.
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Speaker: @jared.cooney.horvath
Source: @cspan
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