Books Return to Swedish Schools; Achievement Goes Up

 Surprise, surprise!  From the BBC:

Schools in Sweden are returning to more traditional learning methods - such as reading from physical books - after seeing their reading standards drop while ipads and laptops were used.

There is now a focus on using more printed textbooks, handwriting and less screen time in early education. Experts say reading levels are getting better because of this.

Some teachers have said students are asking for more books and paper based learning in schools, saying they learn more quickly and retain information better than using a laptop. 

This isn't a total ban on technology in the classroom and digital devices are still used, but the government is spending millions buying physical textbooks, and library books. . . .

The Push Against Screens in Schools Heats Up

 

We Have to Get AI and Screens Out of Schools and Out of Kids' Hands by Jill Filipovic

Not just to save their brains from the zombies of Big Tech, but to save our country from a descent into the un-human.

Read on Substack

Why Is Lower Merion School District Ignoring Its Own Technology Policy?

Established in 1834, the prestigious Lower Merion School District in leafy, middle class Ardmore, PA is one of the oldest public school systems in Pennsylvania.  LMSD’s 8,700 students attend 6 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 2 high schools. Ardmore’s poverty rate is less than 5 percent, and the median home value is almost a half-million dollars.

LMSD has been working for over fifteen years toward fully implementing 24/7 access to free computer screens for all children in its middle and high schools.  In a community where over 90 percent of homes have broadband access and over 70 percent of its population have college degrees, this plan had overwhelming support 10 years ago, just as the first peer-reviewed evidence began to surface that heavy doses of screen time are toxic to normal child development. Even as the science on the evidence of harm continued to mount, the LMSD continued to move forward with building its curriculum around 24/7 access to computers. 

Then, in 2025 the American Psychological Association concluded that "spending too much time on screens may cause emotional and behavioral problems in children—and those problems can lead to even more screen use. . .”  

APA’s sweeping conclusion is based on in part on an international meta-analysis of research studies on the effects of screen time on children. From APA’s Press Release last year:

. . . The findings suggest parents might want to be cautious about what screens they allow and use parental controls to manage time, said Noetel. He also noted that kids who use screens heavily might need emotional support, not just restrictions. Parents could benefit from programs helping them handle both screen use and emotional problems.

“This comprehensive study highlights the need for a nuanced approach to managing children’s screen time,” said lead author Roberta Vasconcellos, PhD, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales who conducted the research while a doctoral student at Australian Catholic University. “By understanding the bidirectional relationship between screen use and socioemotional problems, parents, educators, and policymakers can better support children’s healthy development in an increasingly digital world.”

Because every study in the meta-analysis followed kids over time, the research is a big step closer to cause‑and‑effect (as opposed to correlation) than the usual snapshots done at a single point in time, according to Noetel.

“It’s about as close as we can get to causal evidence without randomly cutting screens for thousands of kids,” he said. “But still, we can’t completely rule out other factors—like parenting style—that could influence both screen use and emotional problems.” 

Given the growing body of evidence recommending caution in screen exposure for children, LMSD has doubled down on its technology plan for 24/7 screen access, even as over 400 parents have signed a petition put forward by the grassroots group, “Pencils Over Pixels” (POP).POP considers itself pro-child, rather than anti-technology, and parents of the group demand that LMSD examine the scientific evidence on the effects of screen exposure on children.  

Citing LMSD School Board policy (Administrative Regulation R137, Attachment D), POP is requesting that their children be allowed to opt-out of the District’s technology requirements. 

In the event that the parent/guardian of a student, or the student themselves if the student is over 18, decline to participate in the One-to-One Electronic Device Initiative by refusing to sign an Agreement for Electronic Device Use, the building principal shall be responsible for making necessary accommodations for the student to ensure that the student’s education is not adversely affected. Such accommodations may include access to printed resources and access to building based electronic devices in areas such as Libraries and Help Centers.

Apparently, LMSD Superintendent Dr. Frank Ranelli sees no reason to abide by the Board approved Regulations.  During a March 2026 policy meeting, he told parents requesting to opt out their children,  "We do not have that opportunity for you to do that. Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices.”

If I were an LMSD school board member, I would be questioning this position, particularly in light of the potential legal exposure that could result from ignoring published scientific evidence regarding the harm to children associated with screen time.

 

Tech Bros and Hos Beware: The Learning Counterrevolution is Here

From an excellent essay in the NYTimes on the impending demise of gamification in schools and the return to learning:

. . . . Ms. Drygas [NC history teacher] is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screens came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.

This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education. . . .

. . . . Researchers have begun to correlate falling test scores in wealthy countries around the world with aggressive adoption of devices in schools (88 percent of American public schools now follow what’s known as the 1-to-1 policy, providing one laptop or tablet for every student). In the United States, math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 and have declined since. . . . .

Why Parents Want Their Kids to Stay Out of Teaching

This year's annual PDK/Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public education found for the first time a majority of American parents unwilling to advise their children to become teachers:

Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay, according to the 2018 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. 

Even as most Americans continue to say they have high trust and confidence in teachers, a majority also say they don’t want their own children to become teachers, most often citing poor pay and benefits as the primary reason for their reluctance.

Here are just a few of the good reasons that the majority of parents have made the right call:

• The level of teacher demonization for student test score performance over the past twenty years turned teaching into a pressure cooker that stews teachers and students before blowing up schools entirely.  In order to increase the number of corporate charter schools and other "choice" options, politicians and corporate reformers cynically designed No Child Left Behind in 2001 to "hold accountable" schools and teachers for not reaching federally-mandated proficiency targets that were known at the time to be impossible to achieve by the vast majority of children across America.

• Over the past two decades, corporate reformers and politicians have put in place teacher evaluation schemes that are invalid, unreliable, and unfair to teachers.  Untold numbers of teachers have lost their jobs as a result, even as many other teachers fled to other career fields to escape the unrelenting pressure.  Those who have stayed now focus on producing test scores by any means necessary in order to survive evaluations, which, in turn, results in moral breakdowns, nervous breakdowns, and miseducated children.

• Targeted mass killings in schools with weapons of war threaten the safety of all school personnel and children.  Growing numbers of politicians and corporate lobbyists make the case for arming teachers in schools, and kevlar book bags are now prominent on schools' mandatory supply lists for parents.  Who can blame college students and their parents for thinking of their safety and that of their children?

• In an effort to make teaching teacher proof and to reduce the number of teachers, corporate reformers and politicians continue to deprofessionalize the field with lucrative programs that turn over significant and increasing amounts of student learning to screen time governed by computer algorithms.  

• The metastasizing of the corporate cancer known as "rigor" has turned schools into training grounds for the increasingly alienating and disaffected corporate adult workplace.  Teachers are expected to function as efficiency-driven managers who increase the bottom line (test scores), and their own creativity and ingenuity have been sacrificed on the alter of standardization and quantifiable results that ignore the sociological and psychological realities of children.  

• Teachers have continued to lose economic ground to other career fields over the past decades.  With a wage gap larger today than it was in 1980, teachers work two jobs to maintain some semblance of middle class living standards.

Teaching Kids About Personalized Data Collection

The emerging story of Facebook's marketing of 87,000,000 users' data is finally beginning to register in the minds of Americans who, otherwise, have remained somewhat blase about the threat of personal data collection, archiving, and selling.  It is not ad sales or click counts that's driving social , or anti-social, media; it has finally dawned on a distracted public that it is their personal data that is the now and future currency of FB, Google, and the other Silicon Valley high priests who have no respect for the customers they would happily turn into compliant drones and make a profit at the same time. 

This other-worldly scheme is no less apparent in the personalized data business being pushed into schools under the banner of personalized learning and competency-based learning. Of most interest to oligarchs like Gates and Zuckerberg are programs to neurologically rewire children to make them assets for capitalists like themselves, and to collect and market data on individuals from pre-K through grad school.  Every man or woman with a comprehensive digital dossier immediately accessible to anyone for a fee.

One of the prime examples of this is Summit Learning, which enjoys massive infusions of public and venture philanthropists' dollars to build a demonstration project of how you can have education with a minimum of teachers, schools, or even books.  Just think of the savings, and think of the collected data when kids are handcuffed to their laptops and iPads.

Now small actions to counter the cyber-capitalist dystopia have begun, and WaPo has an interesting piece on an new emerging curriculum being implemented down the road from Seton Hall, where it was developed by law professors.  The goal is to re-establish some connections among people and to limit the connections between individuals and servers that dish up just what we seem to want even before we know we want it.  A clip: 

The classes are free, folded into kids’ daily schedules and taught in the classrooms where the fifth- and sixth-graders typically learn about the scientific method and the food chain. Gaia Bernstein, director of Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection, which designed the program, said each class includes about a half-dozen lessons taught to the kids over several weeks, as well as a separate set of lectures for parents concerned about how “their children are disappearing into their screens.”