The evidence is piling up. The receipts are coming in. And they are all saying the same thing: The digital experiment we've been running on students and children has been a massive disappointment and failure. Educational outcomes have not improved. People are not more connected personally with others. In fact, the opposite seems to be happening. For decades philosophers, theologians, and social critics have been warning about what happens when more and more of our lives are lived from behind screens and through media. All Saints Classical Academy is taking a very intentional approach to this issue because we care about the humanity of each child and the development of their full capacities, skills, and virtues--things that won't develop if we outsource them to a machine, computer, device, or AI. And, we want to foster home environments that are conducive to fruitful and joyful time together, being fully present with one another. This is good for all of us, not just children.

Schools have long had a complicated relationship with technology. Many times, technologies have been seen as solutions to educational problems. Yet, as Todd Oppenheimer documents in The Flickering Mind, techno-solutions have consistently underperformed. First radio, then film, then television, then the computer promised to revolutionize education, but failed to deliver in any significant way.[1] The great 20th century political theorist and social critic Russell Kirk saw this too. In an address given in 1983, he lamented:

One of the grave faults of American schooling, at every level, is the eagerness to embrace the newest gadget (mechanical or intellectual) at the expense of the tested tools of learning. Some will remember how, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, we were told that audio-visual aids would supplant the teacher for most purposes. At gigantic public expense, film-projectors, sound systems, and other impediments virtually were thrust upon every school. Most of this hardware soon was locked away in closets, where it reposed until obsolete.[2]

- Russell Kirk

Then came the computer--and now AI. And the same educational claims were recycled. Such a technocratic approach to education reveals an underlying problematic assumption prophetically addressed by Neil Postman even back in 1990, when he said, “through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better . . . . The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems.”[3] Education itself is turned into the consumption of a product, the processing of information, the measuring of grades and percentages—all more easily facilitated by new information technologies. But information access or consumption should not be, nor ever has been, the primary function of education. For centuries there has been access to more information than any one person could learn. The real challenge comes in knowing what to do with that information: how to organize it into a coherent understanding of the world. And that is what education helps one do. Kirk struck the same note a few years earlier:

Doubtless the development of computers will confer various material benefits upon us. But as far as genuine education goes, the computer and its Informational Society may amount to a blight. They seem calculated to enfeeble the individual reason and make most of us dependent upon an elite of computer programmers (at the higher level of the Informational Society, I mean); they may develop into vigorous enemies of the philosophical habit of mind.[4]

- Russell Kirk

At a time when information, data, and technology are the coin of the realm, Kirk reminds us that “information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom,” and that what education “used to endeavor to impart was not miscellaneous information, a random accumulation of facts, but an integrated and ordered body of knowledge that would develop the philosophical habit of mind—from which cast of mind one might find the way to wisdom of many sorts.”[5]

Such a humane and holistic education can still be accomplished today as we recover a humane education, where students and teachers, parents and children are fully present with one another, gathered around the perennial subjects and questions that form humanity’s great conversation. Where we use our hands and skin our knees, paint pictures and play music, look each other in the eye and hold someone's hand. And you don’t need a screen for that.

Families across the country are joining together to form communities that are resisting the infiltration of the machine into the sacred precincts of church, home, and school. We are part of that movement here, committing together as a community to minimize screen time and not give our children free reign with digital devices, and replacing with rich and robust real-life activities and events with each other. We have better things to do than stare at our reflection in a screen.

For more on this topic see:
Articles/Resources:
--The Postman Pledge (we encourage families to take the pledge; more about the pledge here)
--Jonathan Haidt, After Babel Substack
--Melanie Hempe, Screen Strong Substack and Podcast
--Emily Harrison, Dear Christian Parent Substack
--Matt Stewart, "Parents Take the Postman Pledge"
--Lenore Skenazy, Let Grow
--Joshua Pauling, "Reclaiming Humanity in the Digital Age Series" for Lutheran Witness
Books:
--Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
--Jean Twenge, Ten Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World
--Claire Morell, The Tech-Exit
--Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?

[1] Todd Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promises of Technology (NY: Random House, 2007), 3–61.
[2] Russell Kirk, “Education and the Information Revolution,” The Russell Kirk Center, Aug 22, 2010, https://kirkcenter.org/education/education-and-the-information-revolution/.
[3] Neil Postman, “Informing Ourselves to Death,” Oct 11, 1990, https://web.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/informing.html.
[4] Kirk, “Education and the Information Revolution.”
[5] Kirk, “Education and the Information Revolution.”
[6] Neil Postman, “Some New Gods That Fail,” in The Jossey-Bass Reader on Technology and Learning, ed. Roy Pea (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 294.