Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens

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Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens

Zvi Mowshowitz<br>Jul 08, 2026

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We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens. GPT-5.6-Sol drops tomorrow, and the Fable agents are hard at work.<br>I’ll start with the other screens, then finish with the phones.<br>Table of Contents

EdTech.

NonEdTech.

Do Not Ban Social Media Outright.

Some Modern Kids Media Is Pretty Great.

Ban Phones In Schools (1).

Your Offer Is Acceptable.

Ban Phones In Schools (2).

Screen Time.

Inappropriate Content.

EdTech

Increasingly, when you pick a school, you are picking EdTech. The school will put your child on a tablet or computer, and expect them to learn that way.<br>In theory, with sufficient assistance and bespoke design and incentive structures, this is The Way. It sure seems way better than ‘sit and listen to a lecture.’<br>I am especially excited for Alpha School’s version of this, with its bespoke designs and high level of both expectations and continuous human support.<br>Alas, most people are getting a much worse version, that is much worse than what you could easily improvise at home. I’m less concerned with ‘EdTech provider is bilking the system with its torment nexus’ and more concerned with ‘children assigned to spend their days in the torment nexus.’<br>Ryan Moulton: When you chose a school for your kids, you probably didn’t realize you were choosing educational software, but that choice of software might be more consequential for your kid than the choice of school.<br>Kelsey Piper: A very well-written, very justifiably angry parental reflection on edtech:<br>Ryan Moulton: When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention.<br>Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours.<br>Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?<br>His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready.<br>If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears.<br>I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.<br>I have no disagreement with i-Ready’s goals. The problem is that the software simply doesn’t work.<br>i-Ready assumes that the student cannot read, that they must be read to very slowly, that they must listen to the same instructions hundreds of times, and that they cannot ever be allowed to have any control over this.<br>Kelsey Piper: The article explains why it was particularly bad as employed in this particular school system, but I don’t think iReady is uniquely bad, and a lot of the things that are wrong here are just things about how edtech in general gets used in schools:<br>Ryan Moulton: “Being bored” in school is now an entirely different experience than it was when I was a kid. Software enables the enforcement of arbitrary rules that no human being would have the heart or foolishness to enforce.<br>A teacher, faced with a bored student, would not force them to pay rapt attention to an identical lesson 30 times in a row, 5 days a week, for the entirety of the school year. Software can do that easily. A teacher would not demand that all students take an identical amount of time to finish an assignment regardless of how well they’ve mastered the material.<br>Software can do that easily. A teacher paying attention to a class will adapt to what is working, what is holding their attention, and what is serving their needs. Software is by default thoughtless, and that allows it to be thoughtlessly cruel.

The full article is even worse.<br>Dissproportionately: My 14yo daughter read this article and then showed me what iReady looked like for her. Even though she’s in the 8th grade it STILL read everything aloud to her at a slow pace, unskippable.<br>Alec Stapp: This sounds like torture<br>Everything Price Sufferer: The CIA literally experimented with a form of psychological torture that was repeating a recording of the same sentence for...