NICK POTKALITSKY
JUL 30
Will a return to the tech-free classrooms really raise national test scores, improve student well-being, and strengthen the affective bonds between students and teachers?
In this piece, I respond to a book that is driving the conversation about technology’s place in the classroom in K-12. I enjoyed the opportunity to engage deeply with this work. My commentary is distinctive from those previously written in that I really try to understand what makes this work so persuasive rather than just saying his handling of research is selective or flawed. In essence, I don’t think such critique will move the needle of techlash. I think we need a holistic and persuasive alternative to Horvath’s deconstructive vision. This piece is an effort to build a foundation for such a response.
Diagnosing the Problem
Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion engages with and catalyzes a collective discontent with the way educational technology is currently shaping K-12 education. This book grounds its argument in a carefully curated body of research and at times shows flashes of rhetorical brilliance. As I read this work, I found myself pushed and pulled in many different directions. I questioned my assumptions and worked toward even more nuanced syntheses. Whether you agree with Horvath or not, reading his work is a worthwhile adventure precisely for these attributes.
Horvath’s book strives to penetrate the discontent many of us are experiencing, even seasoned AI literacy advocates like myself, by identifying its source. Against popular sentiment in AI + education debates, Horvath strongly argues that education is not broken. As argued in Part 1, traditional education has “for millennia” developed critical thinking, ethical orientation, adaptability, resilience, and creativity in students. That said, the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult for teachers to achieve educational outcomes. In other words, the tools, not the system, are broken.
But identifying the source of the problem turns out to be not so straightforward. In Part 2, Horvath works his way deeper into the Matryoshka doll of the present digital “crisis.” Horvath’s second chapter on artificial intelligence reads as a highly selective history of technology’s impact on society. At one point, Horvath characterizes the printing press as the technological source of modern society’s liberalism and pluralism, both of which he treats as harmful developments. From there, Horvath turns his attention to corporate greed, laissez-faire governance, and cultural relativism and pluralism as driving factors behind tech’s invasion of K-12. Combined, these elements gave rise to the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, with each new product or platform accelerating the de-evolution of modern society.
Rhetorical Brilliance
Throughout the book, Horvath positions his project as a well-researched, objective reexamination of the implementation of technology in K-12. And yet, this is not the book’s sole function. In addition, the book is intended to function as an activist manual. This second function becomes very clear when, after several chapters on research, Horvath includes a section instructing his audience on how to respond to the arguments of “ed-tech enthusiasts.” The activist objective becomes even more apparent in Part III, where Horvath supplies templates for petitions, tech-free manifestos, opt-out contracts, and parent coalition invitation letters. As a result, we must be careful in how to read the book’s curation of research and argumentation. Horvath understands himself not just as a source of information, but as the leader of a movement to strip away the obstacles to traditional K-12 education.
The rhetorical brilliance lies in how skillfully Horvath entangles these two functions of the project. Research seamlessly gives way to invective. Personal stories, narrative, and metaphor breathe life into evidence and statistics. Horvath also possesses great powers of argumentation. He expertly heads off counterclaims and “misreadings” of evidence, usually in the form of long lists of propositions. These lists deserve special attention from readers, as initial propositions usually appear quite fair and objective while the propositions that follow increasingly dip into the project’s selective history of technological and philosophical commitments. For example, his characterization of the “Ideology of AI” begins with the tenet that “Human Thought Is Best Represented in Language.” As a scholar of narrative, I can add that many movements and fields of study have regarded this claim as foundational to some extent. But then by the final item in this list, Horvath puts forward that AI enthusiasts believe that “Only AI Can Find the Hidden Patterns of Human Thought.” How far we have travelled from the initial starting point!
Three Appeals
Beneath this delineation of causes and conditions, a selective history of technology, and skillful use of rhetoric and arguments, Horvath makes three broad appeals to stabilize and animate his foundational proposition that technology disrupts learning. I will explain each appeal, what makes it compelling to his audience, and the questions it leaves open, questions I will return to in later posts throughout the 26-27 school year. It is my gut instinct that these appeals need to be taken seriously and cannot be answered the way many current commentaries about The Digital Delusion answer them, with a single research paper or anecdote that indicates otherwise, or a proclamation that Horvath is selective with his evidence (aren’t we all?). What I am trying to do in this piece is build the case for a broader, more balanced understanding of technology’s role in human development that might be used to develop a worldview, a cultural orientation, that is an adequate and persuasive alternative to Horvath’s operating system.
The Appeal to Biology
In many academic debates and public conversations, biology, understood as the way the human body or the world more generally “works,” translates polemical propositions into scientific realities. To claim that the brain works optimally under certain conditions stabilizes the foundation of a larger argument even as that argument drifts into philosophical, ideological, and speculative territory.
In chapter three, “Against the Brain,” Horvath provides a quick overview of the scholarly literature about multi-tasking. In a section titled “Attention,” he argues that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LatPFC) has a hard limit: “it can only hold one ruleset at a time.” Horvath follows up this finding with the claim: “In other words, humans cannot multi-task.”
In my own research, I find it fascinating how cognitive scientists actually arrive at such conclusions. To give an overly simplistic explanation: researchers study static and dynamic fMRI scans of the human brain; they develop theories about the precise location of particular functionalities through repeated, controlled studies; they examine how the scans change when these functionalities are complicated by listening to music with lyrics while trying to read, or working on two projects at the same time. Cognitive researchers themselves recognize the tenuous nature of the connection between these different kinds of evidence, namely that their conclusions always walk the fine line between causation and correlation.
Notably, Horvath does not surface any of these complexities in his argumentation. Rather, he boldly states that this is how the brain works, and then quickly moves on. But a hard limit on rulesets describes what the brain does during the switch. It does not describe what a student learns, or fails to learn, across a semester. And if the limit is biological, it was operating in the classroom as it existed prior to the advent of the computer. What did teachers do about it then?
The Appeal to Learning Science
With this foundation in place, Horvath makes his second appeal through learning science. If the brain cannot learn when distracted or multitasking, what are the conditions that support real learning? Here, Horvath follows a forked path, endorsing specific contexts and vehicles for instruction that follow from his reading of learning science. First, students need to work in environments that do not compound distraction. For Horvath, this space is the classroom as it existed prior to the advent of the computer. Repeatedly, Horvath characterizes such a space as the only one that can foster true relationships between teachers and students. Second, Horvath foregrounds empathy as the primary vehicle for deeper instruction, arguing that long-term transfer of knowledge only happens in the context of empathetic human relationships. Implicit in these lines of argumentation is a critique of instruction as a delivery system for pre-processed knowledge. Like many of us, Horvath leans towards a more constructivist approach when it comes to learning.
What is most curious about Horvath’s argument is the way it does not acknowledge that all classroom environments, even those prior to the advent of the computer, are home to myriad intermediaries between teacher and student. Students contend with other students for teacher attention. Students rely on textbooks as a source of knowledge. Students work through worksheets to practice and demonstrate knowledge. Students use pencils and pens to write down their thoughts and complete assessments. To this line of argumentation, Horvath would respond that these analog intermediaries do a better job of building deeper knowledge transfer than do subsequent technological developments. Perhaps. But that answer concedes that mediation is a matter of degree, and once it is a matter of degree, the question is which mediations help and which hinder.
But such a question is impossible for Horvath because of the way he interprets the decline of national standardized test scores over the past several decades. It is widely known that since the 1990s, American K-12 students have experienced marked declines in reading and math assessments, with modest gains in the 2010s, followed by even greater declines during the pandemic. For Horvath, the singular cause behind this decline is the incursion of technology into the classroom. Technology divides student attention, offers no empathetic context, and results in lower test scores. But here again, he confuses correlation with causation. Most scholars of these test trends are highly skeptical of singular or dominant cause explanations of the decline. Other factors include demographics, economic disparities, the number of students in a classroom, teacher training, access to HQIM, political pressures, national initiatives, etc. What I want to know is what would count as evidence against the technology explanation. Horvath does not say, and a cause that no data could disconfirm has stopped being a finding.
What remains after we complicate its evidentiary basis is a highly helpful overview of how learning takes place, one that most “AI enthusiasts” would agree with, and one that still needs a more complicated theory of causation. The empathy claim needs more than that. If long-term transfer runs through empathetic relationship, how would we distinguish its effects from those of class size, teacher content knowledge, or the years a student spends with the same adult? Horvath treats empathy as a mechanism. So far I can only see it working as a description.
The Appeal to Techno-determinism
In his final appeal, Horvath essentializes the nature of digital technology, here focusing primarily on the computers that allow access to the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. But what is most fascinating about this appeal is the careful way he works towards a unilateral reading of technology’s potential. At first in Part 1, Horvath admits that technology is protean in nature. Its impact depends on context, purpose, and implementation. But Horvath quickly moves to a strong concept of habituation. For Horvath, the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence were developed to capture attention, entertain, and hook consumers into habitual use patterns. In this context, students are geared up to relate to technology in a particular way, as a tool of distraction and entertainment, with no hope of rerouting this orientation through careful scaffolding, instruction, and monitoring.
This is what techno-determinism looks like in The Digital Delusion. The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no hope that students will resist the wishes it promises to grant. But habituation is an empirical claim. How long does the orientation last, and what would a classroom have to do to loosen it? Horvath needs the answer to be that nothing can, because a single documented case of redirection turns the appeal into a claim about difficulty.
Upon this foundation, Horvath builds a vision for a non-technological, human-centered system of education. This is where I have the deepest objections to Horvath’s project. Technology presents challenges, reroutes attention and even cognition, but human beings do have some agency over how those challenges are navigated. To return to Horvath’s history of technology, there is no greater disruption of human cognition than the development of writing systems. The shift from a memory-based to a discursive mode of engagement with the world radically transforms the way humans live, learn, and communicate. Even as Horvath appears to sympathize with Plato’s condemnation of writing, he also uses writing (and I am assuming some kind of word processor, research tools, and access to the internet) to communicate and complete his project. If writing rewired human cognition and schools then spent centuries teaching children to live inside the rewiring, what makes this technology the exception?
Once again, we need a more nuanced appraisal of technology’s impact, one that does not simply calculate gains vs. losses, but also explores the conditions that drive the calculus, along with an investment in the possibility of change and redirection. In essence, a belief in the power of education.
Troubling Metaphor
I want to close with a deeper exploration of one of Horvath’s great rhetorical powers: the use of narrative and metaphor. For most of the book, his metaphors are fairly harmless. For instance, in the “Against the Brain” chapter, he characterizes empathy in terms of a magnetic field: “A magnetic field doesn’t exist in the north or south pole alone; it only emerges when both poles come together. Empathy works in the same way.” This seems pretty straightforward. Empathy only operates when two people come together and form a relationship.
But this reliance on metaphor takes a dark turn at the end of his chapter entitled “What Can We Do?” There, he evokes the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. “Schools were closed and children were forbidden from studying…In response, Jewish families organized a vast network of underground schools. Amid starvation, surveillance, and the constant threat of death, educators in the Warsaw Ghetto kept learning alive.” Horvath’s reading of this situation results in the claim that “the only essential ingredients for learning are a curious child and a willing teacher,” but the emotional resonance here runs well past the claim. Isn’t it a logical step from this starting point to conclude that adopters of ed-tech are similar to the Nazis? Here, I very much pause on the use of the word “surveillance.” One of Horvath’s implicit claims is that the incursion of technology into students’ lives results in a kind of corporate-driven panopticon. But the mapping of Nazi surveillance onto ed-tech’s offering of access to student achievement data is deeply problematic because it instrumentalizes one of the darkest chapters of human history for rhetorical and polemical gain.
Such methods make me deeply distrustful of both Horvath and his larger project. While I find the evidence he surfaces to be thought-provoking, while I value the book to the extent that it has occasioned deeper thought about digital culture in schools, I find the structural mechanism of the book, built on binaries, reductions, and the radical diminishment of human agency in the face of technological developments, unsavory. As I pursue my own research and writing on digital wellness, I commit myself to seeing value in all sides of the conversation. I will seek to question conclusions and ask better questions. And I hope you, my dear readers, will join me on this adventure.