Looking at screens,
listening to voices
in nonexistent distance,
seeing, hearing nothing
present, we pass into
the age of disembodiment
Wendell Berry, 2013, Poem XVII
Children are losing fine motor skills, literacy rates are plummeting, and even students at elite colleges are increasingly unfamiliar with reading books in their entirety. 77% of teachers today report that their students in grades preK-3 have a much more challenging time using scissors crayons, pencils, and pens as compared to just five years ago. Children are swiping and tapping on iPads, not holding real items, playing with clay, drawing, or building Legos; instead, with toddler headphones blocking out conversation, they scroll through video clips.
Between AI, cell phones, iPads, laptops, computer desktops, “smart” boards, and television screens, it should come as little shock that the average American is thinking less critically than ever (and even dropping IQ points). The human mind is declining as we sedate ourselves with 30-second-video clips and ChatGPT generated summaries.
In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. He promised a “revolutionary product” and shared his hope to “get rid of all the buttons and just make a giant screen.” We have moved far beyond that first 3.5-inch display, but “giant screens” have become wholly integrated into modern life. Over less than twenty years, with no great revolution and even less resistance, humanity has become reliant on tiny touch-activated pixels. We have unconditionally surrendered to a totally recreated world.
Alarm bells are finally ringing across the United States. The new movement to ban cell phones across all education levels poses a promising return to human knowledge, but one must deeply consider the costs of our frenetic passion for convenience.
Wendell Berry, a 90-year-old Kentucky novelist, poet, and environmentalist warned of the push to purchase a computer in 1987, and his reflections are deeply applicable today. Empires rose and fell, wars were fought, great multinational corporations grew and declined, children learned, and authors wrote, not all that long ago, all without the help of personal screens, internet, and computers. In his essay “Why I Am not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry offers a few good reasons for his resistance.
Berry has an environmental focus and identifies the usage of computers with support of the energy and computer industries. He decries their role in the “rape of nature,” and pledges to write in daytime, without the use of electricity. Shockingly, he is not from some by-gone, backwards era—his essay is less than forty years old. Beyond his conservationist concerns, Berry asks his readers to consider the deeper issues at hand when facing new technologies.
The social surrender to screens has had few opponents and even fewer critical analysts. We have embraced a new model of the world, but as Berry expresses, “Technological innovation always requires the discarding of the ‘old model.’” In Berry’s case, he considers the “old model” his careful editor–his wife–and her typewriting. It is worth considering what the “old model” was and what is being carried out as the “new model” in screens and education.
The purpose of any tool ought to be to serve the common goods of humanity—not to elude nature or subvert reality. Now we are inundated with messaging that our real world is outdated or even harmful. For the sake of efficiency and ease, we seem to have accepted a total revolution of education and relationships. We must find “new ways to connect and share experiences” as Meta claims on their virtual reality and AI glasses advertisements. In the rush to modernize, we have failed to consider what sorts of “new connections” may result in irreversible damage.
Are children who cannot read or write “connecting” since they can play on iPads? They cannot connect in real life, in the “old ways,” because nobody has taught them. Berry explains, “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”
Wendell Berry’s essay provides an interesting entry point to the current-day education crisis. State legislatures around the nation are flailing as they begin to recognize the severity and urgency of technological dependence. Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker joins eight other states in issuing bans and restrictions on cellphone usage in schools. As of February 2025, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia have all passed legislation on statewide restriction. Eleven other states have issued incentives and recommendations, and the effort is widely bipartisan across regions. It is clear that kindergarten to twelfth grade students are in a screen-induced crisis, with the Pew Research Center finding that 72% of high school teachers recognized cell phone distraction as a “major problem.”
The move to curb cell-phone usage is positive and valuable, but may be too little, too late. The problem is deeper than iPhones–it is the entire restructuring of education. I recently had a fascinating (and alarming) interaction with a professor. She questioned me about my printed readings and hand-written notes. I told her I learned better in class, listening, writing. She did not seem to understand and asked me if I was a kinesthetic learner.
“No, not necessarily,” I said, “but I am a physical being. This is real. When I take notes in class, I am listening to what you are saying and writing it down. I am here, now.”
She said she did not see a difference between me watching the lecture recording on my own time and then typing my notes. Really, we were debating the value of the physical world. The conversation ended with me saying I did not like the idea of being hooked up to the cloud. I was relieved to have another professor who mandated handwritten notes and purchased books.
I enjoyed a unique high school experience which did not allow cell-phones during the school day or laptops until senior year. Many of my Constitutional Studies classes at Notre Dame have had the same handwritten note expectation. These classes often result in more engaged, present students, and in lively discussion and focused attention. Even when courses are dry, by eliminating laptops, we eliminate the allure of so-called multitasking, which actually involves emails, texts, and projects wholly unrelated to the class.
Rejecting screens is not nostalgic, or backwards–it is a choice to embrace reality. Screens for children, even those which are purportedly “educational,” detract from genuine education and create a false equivalence between that which is happening and that which is out of time, out of space, and “located” on the internet.
A 2024 Newsweek article by Clare Morell from the Ethics and Public Policy Center pulls together the harms of screens in classrooms. She finds that despite increases in computer access, educational attainment has not followed. In fact, on exams, students who read text on computers still perform worse than reading on paper. Even MRI scans of 8-to-12-years-olds revealed deeper brain behavior on those who read paper books instead of screens. Literacy remains a concern. In 2023, less than half (43%) of American fourth graders read at or above a proficient level. The statistics broken down by race are even more frightening: only 17% of Black students and 21% of Latino students read proficiently by fourth grade.
Even in the pre-pandemic world, a 2019 article from the Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy found that children who used tablets “showed significantly lower scores than those in the non-tablet group for visual discrimination, visual memory, spatial relationships, form constancy, visual figure ground, fine motor precision, fine motor integration, and manual dexterity.” These are all essential skills–not only for the educational and professional world, but for a fulfilled, human life.
Screens enact more than educational or professional harms. Although it is widely reported that younger generations engage in less risky behaviors, they simply participate in less risky in-person behaviors. I would speculate that youths are as risky as ever, especially considering lack of privacy on the internet and the wide-spread exposure to pornography at young ages. Nearly one-third of teens report having watched pornography throughout the school day, and 44% of those students viewed it on a school-issued device, according to Common Sense Media.
Reliance on technology designed to commodify us into advertisement consumers and purchasers or addicted social-media users causes irreparable harm. Even a former Facebook executive admits that their product is “fundamentally addictive for people, and it’s causing all kinds of mental health issues, and I think it’s eroding aspects of society.”
Reading, writing, and complex thought must be achieved by reading, writing, and thinking. There is no short-cut to education. Students who reject AI-generated summaries are not at a disadvantage despite what their fear mongering, “efficiency” focused peers claim. Instead, those who are bold enough to advocate for comprehension in the “old way” will be at a huge advantage: the possession of knowledge. Berry understood that the revolutionizing computer must be carefully analyzed:
“My final and perhaps my best reason for not owning a computer is that I do not wish to fool myself. I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil. I do not see why I should not be as scientific about this as the next fellow: when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.”
One can replace his focus on computers with the more modern frenzy around AI or tablets. Far from making our lives “demonstrably better,” convenience-based technologies are slowing us down and resulting in the true loss of knowledge. State legislatures are taking notice, but ultimately, technology usage begins in the home. Laws and regulations can enforce standards, but formation must come from parental and familial choices.
A comprehensive Pew Research study on children and screens found that 80% of parents know that their child 11-years-old or younger is watching videos on YouTube, and 84% claiming that they allow children to use tablet or iPhone devices while riding in a vehicle and 29% while dining out at a restaurant.
Why? Why can children not look out the window at the world, or engage with menus, waiters, and their siblings? If it is an argument of ease or efficiency, it is merely a defense of poor parenting. Artificial distraction cannot be a genuine aid. Parents across the nation feel overwhelming pressure and are totally resigned to the inevitability of screens for toddlers and social media for teens. It does not have to go on. Each family can choose to value real life and support educational experiences and schools that emphasize knowledge.
Penmanship is one way parents can ensure their children are learning writing and motor skills. Humans have communicated with flowing script for centuries, and in just a few years, people have lost the ability to read and write cursive. The National Archives is searching for Citizen Archivists who can understand cursive script.
Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C, called reading cursive “a superpower.” What a tragic loss of skill and beauty, sacrificed on the altar of the supposed-convenience of print and typing. The search for practicality has resulted in the incredible impracticality of not being able to understand historical texts.
Take after Wendell Berry and refuse to fool yourself. Reject screens, especially for kids, and especially in education. Remove your Airpods or headphones and listen to your surroundings. Stop surrendering to screens, discover the world you are living in, and regain your humanity.
