Students across Canada need a digital detox

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Over the past several years, to make kids “digitally literate,” we’ve plopped glowing laptops and tablets in front of many Canadian school children, starting as young as Kindergarten. Yet there’s good evidence that this isn’t helping our kids, who are too often distracted, addicted to onscreen dopamine hits, and in need of a digital detox.

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The experiment began in earnest during the pandemic. As provincial governments closed schools and forced the shift to at-home learning, they bought more devices for students. Consequently, schools replaced much physical book-reading with tablet screens and audiobooks, writing with typing, and math facts on paper with digital apps and tempting calculators one click away. The extent of the replacement varies based on the teacher and school. But in many classrooms, it’s meant hours on screens. But at what cost?

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According to neuroscientist and educator Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, who in January testified at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on screen time in schools, technology has spawned a “mental health crisis” among kids and hurt their ability to learn and grow. One of the hearing’s key points was that today’s most successful tech CEOs did not have laptops in their classrooms nor tablets at home. They learned “analog skills” as children and used them to build new technological platforms.

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While schools should teach computer skills (typing, coding, Excel, etc.) on computers, and all schools should be free to innovate and find new best practices, there’s no evidence-based reason to replace pen and paper with screens for much else.

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We know smartphones in classrooms distract kids. Laptops and tablets do, too. As Cooney Horvath notes in his book, The Digital Delusion, students are distracted for an estimated 38 minutes of every hour on a classroom digital device. And students who use computers more than six hours per day dropped the equivalent of two letter grades below their peers who didn’t use computers. Math scores fall. Reading scores fall. Science scores fall.

Here in Canada, not surprisingly, student achievement across Canada is already trending downward.

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Canadian math and reading test results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the gold standard of student testing among countries, have declined steadily and significantly since the early 2000s. The Canadian Paediatric Society has also flagged that one in seven Canadian students scored at the lowest reading level (in 2022, the latest year of PISA testing) and that nearly half of Canadian adults now have literacy skills below the level “required” to graduate high school or work most basic jobs.

In line with Cooney Horvath’s findings, there’s also a large body of research showing screen time negatively impacts youth mental health in Canada, and the ability of young Canadians to learn. One recent study of thousands of Ontario students, which analyzed provincewide student assessment scores with health data, found a strong relationship between increased screen time and lower academic performance. This is part of the reason why every provincial government has introduced smartphone restrictions in schools.

Technology opens a world of possibility for Canadian classrooms. For example, the use of artificial intelligence, despite the potential for abuse, might merit further experimentation. But evidence matters. And the evidence does not support a wholesale shift to digital devices for little kids in classrooms from coast to coast. We should close the browser tabs and rethink our approach.

— Paige MacPherson is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

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