The Elephant in the Classroom: Screentime in Higher Education
Recently, a university professor told me his colleagues are reluctant to ask students not to use their phones during class time. This is surprising, given that ample research shows the benefits of distraction-free learning. In a setting where the intended purpose is to build knowledge, why allow such interference?
Letting students access their phones during class is the elephant in the classroom that we need to discuss.
Technology has promised us less friction, more convenience, and faster access to information. When it comes to checking the weather, scheduling an appointment, or looking up a fact, our lives may indeed feel smoother.
But the nature of learning requires the opposite of all this. True learning is slow, difficult, and relational. Information is not the same thing as knowledge. Wisdom isn’t acquired quickly. A search engine cannot know a student’s heart. As Professor Gayle Greene at Scripps says, “teaching is an art, not an algorithm.”
As a movement towards phone-free K-12 schools sweeps the globe, we cannot lose sight of the value similar policies could have on higher education settings as well. For a college generation born in this millennium who have only known a world with easy internet access in the palm of their hands, a break from phones during class time has the potential to provide a novel experience for them: relief.
No one learns when they feel stressed or anxious. As Jonathan Haidt has well-established in his research, young people of today are highly stressed and anxious. Saying no to devices in class might make students uncomfortable or unhappy, but that is precisely the point. If they are so tethered to the digital world that they cannot be present in the real one, there is no chance that meaningful learning will occur anyway.
It is an old trope to say that the “children are the future” but they are indeed that, and now more than ever do we need an electorate that can think critically, solve problems, and relate even to those with whom they may not agree. Excessive classroom-based technology and student personal devices, especially in the younger years, threatens to displace critical development of skills needed to thrive in a modern, even highly digital one, and higher education is no exception; it could, in fact, be the model.
To raise tech-intentional™ leaders of the future, who align their technology use to their values and who work to protect their mental, physical, cognitive, and emotional health from harmful algorithms and manipulative design, we need leaders to open a path to this possibility by establishing protective boundaries around screen use in class, and not just student personal devices, but educational technology too.
Higher education is facing a similar crisis to K-12 schools with EdTech in the form of learning management systems, online curricula, and AI tools. On a flight recently, I sat behind a young college student completing her homework on her college’s digital learning platform. She had opened a second browser where she cut, pasted, and copied questions into a search engine, then cut, pasted, and copied the answers back to her platform. For her short-answer assignment, she opened ChatGPT and let AI write the essay for her. Homework complete.
It is not possible to filter, block, monitor, or control our way out of this problem, in spite of what many may argue. Middle schoolers with 1:1 Chromebooks and elementary school children with iPads are doing the exact same thing and it has nothing to do with an institution’s IT department or the tool itself and everything to do with human development. The prefrontal cortex, where higher order cognitive skills like focus, planning, organization, and emotion regulation are housed, is not fully developed until we are well into our twenties or even thirties. Which means that most higher education students are not much more able to resist the ease of a tool designed to do their homework for them than a kindergartener. Why would they choose hard work and struggle over a quick and easy solution? Developmentally speaking, they will never make that choice, and we cannot be surprised when they do. We offered them the tools on which to do it.
Unfortunately, as long as the extractive business model of EdTech mimics that of Big Tech, such tools will never be in alignment with human development. It is time for educational leaders to acknowledge that student device use– both personal phones and educational technologies– in class is an impediment to learning; handwriting notes increases retention better than typing notes; learning happens in the context of human not virtual relationships; and discomfort and struggle by setting limits on access to students’ personal devices in class is not only good, but necessary.
