Is Tech Making Our Kids Less Capable? With Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

**Mia Sorrenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Sorrenti. Schools have embraced laptops, apps, and now artificial intelligence in the hope of improving education. But what if some of these technologies are making it harder for children to learn? In today's episode, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, cognitive neuroscientist, author, and former teacher, joins Conor Boyle to discuss his new book, The Digital Delusion, and the evidence around screens in schools, attention, deep reading, and the growing use of AI in education.
Let's join our host, Conor Boyle, now with more.

**Conor Boyle** (0:35)
Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm your host, Conor Boyle, and I'm delighted to be here today with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, neuroscientist, educator, and bestselling author, whose new book is The Digital Delusion, How Classroom Technology Harms Our Children's Learning, and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Jared, welcome to Intelligence Squared.

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (0:54)
Thank you so much for having me on.

**Conor Boyle** (0:56)
Well, let's start with the big question. What is the digital delusion from your perspective?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (1:03)
So we've got this mistaken assumption that technology equals learning. So there's been a big movement since around 2010 in earnest to get more and more what we call ed tech, educational technology into classrooms. The idea being it's gonna give kids more information, it's gonna make them more creative, it's gonna free them up from the shackles of rote memorization and collaboration and all the data starts coming back and it turns out, no, it looks like human beings don't learn very well from tech. And in fact, the more we inject tech into education, the more learning development and cognitive skills actually start to decrease pretty significantly. So unfortunately, this might be a tool for production, but it doesn't appear to be a tool for the classroom.

**Conor Boyle** (1:45)
Yeah. And you spoke in front of Congress, I believe at the start of the year. One of the big quotes that came from that was that you mentioned that children today are less cognitively capable than our generation or previous generations were at their age.
That's a pretty striking assessment. How did you come to that conclusion?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (2:05)
So if you look at since the late 1800s, since we've been recording cognitive abilities, and largely where you're going to find them is in an IQ test. So a lot of people think of IQ is just a single number. Realistically, it's dozens and dozens of subtests that test different aspects of cognition, memory, attention, executive functioning, deep memory, all that stuff. And since the beginning of the 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents, fairly significantly so.
And the reason we always gave for that was school. Each generation spends more time in school than their parents. School is where we develop and cut these cognitive muscles, therefore more time in school, better cognition. Until right around 2005, 2010, Gen Z is the first generation in history to start going down on all of these exams. Literacy, numeracy, you name it, it's going down.
And the trick though is, is they spend more time in school than we did. So for the first time in history, we're seeing a decoupling between schooling and cognitive development. And we couldn't really figure out why. I mean, school hasn't changed all that significantly. Evolution hasn't had enough time to change our biology. And so what we're really kind of homing in on then is the tools we are using in schools to teach seem to be the biggest change and the biggest differentiator between cognitive development and cognitive kind of shrinking.

**Conor Boyle** (3:26)
What pieces of technology are you talking about specifically? Is it anything which is a sort of a screen based interface? Or what are the technologies that have come from 2000, which have really led to this decline?

**Jared Cooney Horvath** (3:38)
Yeah, you nailed it. So we define EdTech as any student facing internet connected device. So that would be one to one laptops or tablets. That will be any of those kind of online tutoring programs that will allow you to log on. So by all means, if you're using tech as a teacher, like you're the one driving it, like I use PowerPoint, since I'm driving it, totally fair. It's on the table. If you're using a haptic feedback machine to practice surgery, there's no internet connection there. You can't check your mail while doing it. So that seems to be fine. It's anything that faces the kid and allows them to then access the internet as well. That's where we're going to see these kind of problems.

**Conor Boyle** (4:14)
If we're to really understand how this technology is potentially leading to a decline in cognitive capability, I'd love to first of all get your perspective, especially as a neuroscientist. How does the brain optimally learn? And why is it that these physical forms of learning, physical text writing, why do they provide such an optimal environment for our children to learn?