If we don’t scale back on classroom technology radically now, we risk turning high school kids like me into a bunch of attention-deficit zombies.
It’s just another day in my junior-year English class. At the front of the room, our teacher is talking about Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel “Persepolis,” which tells the story of a girl growing up in late 1970s Iran. I look around: instead of listening attentively or contributing, many of my classmates are fully immersed in their screens, doing math homework or mindlessly playing video games such as Minecraft and Valorant. The lesson is happening, but no one is present.
This is far from an unusual scene. I’m sixteen years old, part of the generation of kids who grew up with technology as a classroom staple. Whiteboards, iPads, and laptops: they were billed to us as ways to increase engagement with a broad variety of course materials and offer new ways to learn. But in my experience, I’ve found that all this classroom technology not only erodes focus but also undermines the bonds we’re supposed to form with our teachers and classmates. If we don’t scale back radically now, we risk turning kids of my generation into a bunch of attention-deficit and robotic-thinking zombies. My classmates and I deserve better than that.
Technology has pretty much always been part of my classroom, from the desktops on our home room table in fifth grade to the Zoom school days that have never really ended. School today still is a series of digital assignments, online readings, and Zoom group projects. We take notes on our iPads, annotate digital textbook copies, and complete in-class exercises online. Nearly every task involves a screen.
Over the past two years, I’ve slowly started noticing the damage to my attention span from the ten hours of average daily screen time, most of which is from school. When I pick up a book, I struggle to get through a page without wanting to look at a screen, and I can barely sit through a movie without getting distracted. However, the effects on my classroom learning have been particularly detrimental. During a lesson, I often find myself getting sucked into a vicious cycle: I zone out for a moment, and when I try to re-focus on the class, I don’t immediately follow where we’re at, so I get discouraged and turn to my iPad to escape. This takes me further out of the classroom experience, and when I tune back in, I’ve missed out on even more.
But the damage isn’t contained to learning in school. Getting my homework assignments done has become increasingly challenging, too. When drafting an English essay on Google Docs or filling out a take-home exam online, I’m hyper-aware that checking social media or joining my friends’ Minecraft game is only ever one new tab away. Plus, there’s the never-ending slew of notifications: pings from Snapchat, iMessage, or emails coming in that are vying for my attention. In class, when I’m taking notes on my iPad, it’s the same: I’m never not feeling the pull of YouTube.
The advance of ChatGPT, naturally, has further exacerbated many of these issues. Now, you don’t actually need the attention span to think critically or problem-solve; you can just plug it into your AI chatbot of choice and it’ll immediately give you an answer. Picture this: in that same English class on “Persepolis,” our teacher at some point asked us why the author chose to repeat a specific visual over the course of several panels. One of my classmates turned to his iPad and entered into Chat GPT, “why use repetition of visuals in comics” and answered the question within less than a minute. Neither he nor anyone else got to use their brains. We lost the chance to think critically and break the question down together.
When it comes to bonding with my peers, I’ve felt the impact of our tech-driven classroom, too. During a dull moment in class, we retreat into our devices instead of talking to the person next to us. When the bell rings, people silently walk out of the room, and at lunch, everyone is hunched over their phones. Yes, we’re on social media all the time and video-chat during online games of Minecraft, but technology is an inadequate substitute for the real-world interactions that help us bond with our peers or learn. Study after study has shown this to be true.
The only way to avoid these problems is a tech-free classroom. It may sound radical, but it’s exactly what’s needed to reintroduce focus, collaboration, and genuine engagement into learning spaces. Some states and cities are slowly moving toward this direction by banning cell phones in classrooms, but I believe that’s not enough. If we want my generation to become critical thinkers able to engage in a discussion that’s more than thirty seconds long, we need to stop relying on classroom technology and bring back pen and paper instead.
In 1979, Pink Floyd told teachers to leave them kids alone. Today, I say it’s time to leave them tech alone–lest we want it to become another brick in the very same wall that our daily screen time is already putting up around us.