It was a promise too good to be true.
Imagine every fourth grader on earth having the world’s best teachers, every classic book and instant access to any field of study right at their fingertips. While that sounds like the current buzz around artificial intelligence, futurists in the early 2010s used those exact words to sell us on cellphones and laptops in the classroom.
We were told the “sage on the stage” teacher was a relic of the past. Software would customize learning for every child and high-speed internet would make anything possible.
But something happened on the way to “education heaven.”
Now, in 2026, so many of us are desperately trying to go “back to the future.” Our rush to digitize every second of the school day has landed with a dull thud. Across the country, states are rolling back the constant “ding” of notifications and the lure of social media that distracts everyone from young students to adult learners.
Are phones the true villain? None of us long for the not so golden days when we had to kick a sibling off the landline just to dial into the “knowledge superhighway” on a clunky Windows 95 desktop.
Perhaps we’re blaming technology for our own social anxiety — or maybe we should focus more on government overreach in the classroom.
Since Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist, first popularized the term “human capital,” economists have studied the role that education plays in boosting human achievement, developing our workforce and growing our economy. Given that education is key to human flourishing, it is incredibly important that we get the way we teach right.
Education has the potential to increase wages, health, social capital and family happiness. However, reduced quality in education can damage or limit a student’s prospects before they even reach adulthood.
Can technology replace teachers?
Economists think of education as a recipe: Ingredients like teachers, desks and student talent produce an outcome such as high test scores or a good career. The key is figuring out which education ingredients blended in the right way yield the best improvement for the public dollar.
So did adding laptops or cellphones to our stew of classroom ingredients help a teacher reach more students, or are they a poor replacementfor the teacher?
For a decade, well-meaning policymakers and stakeholders have essentially replaced teachers with screens without any proof it actually works. Many in the edu-tech industry pushed “one laptop per desk” or moved students to online programs absent compelling evidence that kids were actually learning more, developing more positive character or getting better jobs.
Now rigorous research is finally trickling in, and the results are sobering. At West Point, researchers randomly split cadets into two groups: one that used laptops and one that banned them. The cadets who stayed offline showed much higher learning gains.
A similar study during the COVID-19 pandemic found that West Point cadets in online courses performed significantly worse. In fact, their learning loss was as severe as the disruption students faced after Hurricane Katrina.
Why? Because students lost the connection between instructors and peers. Similar studies from large lecture halls to for-profit colleges to middle schoolers show the same thing: Online learning often hurts the very students it’s meant to help.
Social media adds another layer of harm. One study compared college students who got access to Facebook early to those who got it later. As soon as social media arrived on campus, depression rates spiked because of “unfavorable social comparison” — the act of feeling worse about your life while looking at someone else’s highlight reel. This mental health blow directly tanked academic performance.
These harmful comparisons happen when youth see (mostly) clothed people online. But abundant sexually explicit media only adds the body blow for teenagers. Over 280 studies on adolescence and porn from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, along with 17 different literature reviews, show evidence of the pervasive effects of pornography on adolescent brains, emotions, relationships, cognition, and overall well-being and mental health.
Needless to say, compulsive use of screens for a variety of reasons can be an enormous drain on any education.
These results should worry every parent and administrator. Outside of the home, teachers are the most important mentors a child has. A high-quality kindergarten teacher can boost a student’s lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wherever children find it, that human connection is the “secret sauce” of success, and technology is thinning it out.
Fortunately, some policymakers are pushing back. Florida recently implemented a “bell-to-bell” cellphone ban with a similar bill now proposed by lawmakers in the Utah Legislature. While discipline issues initially ticked up — mostly from teachers catching kids with phones — test scores improved dramatically by the second year.
This doesn’t mean all technology is bad. Computer-assisted learning that helps students “catch up” after school when a teacher is not available can be incredibly effective. Technology is a powerful tool when it complements a great teacher, but it is a miserable substitute for one.
In a nation pulled apart by algorithms designed to keep us in silos, the best place to start “de-digitizing” is the classroom. It is time to put the screens away and focus on each other again. It’s a good move for our kids — and probably not a bad idea for adults, either.
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