The degree to which an incessant virtual life is problematic for young children (for adults, too, really!) cannot be overstated. It may not be news to anyone that many of our apps are intentionally designed to be addictive in nature, or that online social interactions can’t provide the same type of satisfaction that in-person ones do. Worse, I believe the harm provided by screens goes beyond even that. Even so-called “educational” apps and programs are problematic and seriously detrimental to a child’s development.

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The goal of education should always be to teach children to think. This means not only teaching them to reason, but also to wonder, to ponder, and to be confused. Teaching children to think involves teaching them to spend time, often a significant amount of time, not knowing what to do. Technology goes very much against that. Technology presents children with both already-solved problems, and with constantly changing stimuli. This creates in their minds a need to receive ever-changing, easy sound bites, rather than thought provoking, difficult challenges. It makes it so that they become both uninterested in and also quite literally unable to focus for any period of time longer than a few seconds, which makes in-depth exploration of concepts and ideas impossible.

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The Importance of Boredom

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I am by no means saying that children should be scholars and spend their time sitting and reading. Children do have a shorter attention span than adults, since their natural curiosity often makes them lose focus on the task at hand when something else pops up. But teaching children must involve teaching them about perseverance in the face of difficulty, and technology does not allow for that. Persevering can be boring and frustrating, so if an easy, exciting option is at hand, it’s nearly impossible for a child to choose the boring option. But boredom is good! Great ideas come from being bored and letting our minds wander. Boredom that isn’t immediately solved by a mindless distraction can lead to new or deeper friendships, to inventing new games, to finding answers or finding gross new bugs.

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A lack of technology is also essential in helping children discover nature. I am a scientist by training and find nature fascinating, but even I think that a caterpillar crawling across a twig would have a hard time capturing a child’s attention when it’s competing against flashing lights on a screen. Nature is amazing and even exciting, but it’s slow and can be shy to show its wonders. Allowing children time to have nothing to do but look around means allowing them to be enthralled by the structure of a spider’s web, or curious about why clouds don’t fall.

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For the last several decades, there have been never-stopping attempts at creating content for classrooms that uses the available technology to improve education in some way or another. But what these tools tend to do instead is alienate students from one another and from their teacher, as they sit in front of a screen, oblivious of the world around them. This is not how the learning process works. Learning can never be a passive activity, more akin to watching TV than to exploring a cave. Learning must be about actively seeking answers, and this is not something that can happen by simply sitting in front of a screen, waiting for the answers to materialize.