Get Tech Out of Schools

One thousand: That’s approximately the number of instructional hours required of U.S. middle school and high school students each year.

Four thousand: That’s approximately the number of hours of digital media content U.S. youths aged 8 to 18 absorb each year. (If you doubt that’s possible, be sure you’re taking into account the near-universal practice of “media multitasking,” or consuming content on more than one platform at a time, as when a teenager listens to a song on his MP3 player while scrolling through Facebook on his smartphone while watching a video on his laptop.)

Parents, teachers, and education writers, myself included, think a lot about what our students are taught in school, the debate over the Common Core being just the latest example. But we think very little about what they’re taught in the blue glow of their screens. In fact, we likely assume they’re not learning much at all from their video games and their social networks and their celebrity news websites. Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist at UCLA and a longtime observer of the relationship between children and technology, begs to differ. There is the formal education that young people receive in school, she maintains, and the “informal education” they receive through their devices.