Reading, Writing, and Chromebooks

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I watched as he fumbled over his words, almost as if he knew that he was complicit in the damage. While children zipped past us to get in line for the bounce house and birthday cake, our friend, a fourth grade teacher, started the conversation with defeat on his tongue.

“The Chromebooks are ruining education,” he said.

His experience as an elementary school teacher over the past 15 years has taught him a great deal. He is old enough to have witnessed the benefit of a tactile education in the classroom and then see the recent trend toward a screen-based one.

I could sense his inner turmoil as he explained what the collective world is finally beginning to realize—that the overuse of screens in the classroom is changing the way our children learn. It is stripping them of their innate creativity and causing fractured focus. At the same time, schools have become reliant on them.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a digital deluge has flooded into American classrooms everywhere. Books are on screens, writing is done on keyboards, and testing is funneled through its own sort of algorithm—adaptive diagnostics. What was once used as a supplemental tool in the classroom has increasingly become a main player, and students are paying the price.

I think that physical interaction with the real world matters much more than we know. This is why grown adults with fully developed brains have become increasingly aware of the digital detriments tied to too much screen use. It is why we are logging off and plugging into the tangible world through long-form books and in-person meetups. We have explored the wild frontier of the World Wide Web and have come back riddled with anxiety.

Why, then, are our developing children forced onto the very screens that we are trying so hard to detach from?

When we began our homeschooling journey, I couldn’t have imagined how much mystery the tangible world held for us to behold. I set out for the rote standard of education I was accustomed to, and instead found a feast of life before us.

And we partake of it. Every morning, we slowly saunter toward our dining room table, but the feast we await sits just beyond our bacon. We find it in the study of fractions in the kitchen and the careful examination of ant colonies in our backyard. It is in the gold rush stories that flutter between our fingertips and then settle beneath our feet on the dusty soil of our local ghost towns. It is in learning about supply and demand at the gas pump and skip-counting apples in the grocery store.

Because the truth is that the world outside of the screen has so much to teach us if we let it. We have a sun that floods the Earth with life and waves that hold whole worlds beyond its shore. There are birds that sing and monarchs that multiply and trees that nourish.

The blueprints of God are everywhere, and yet we plop children in front of the blue light of their screens instead.

Home educating has taught me a lot, but perhaps the greatest lesson I am learning is just how much abundance we are missing by diverting so much of our attention to devices. The growing trend of teaching and testing through a screen falls painfully short of the rich education that presents itself to us freely every single day. It weakens opportunities for real-life connections and splinters attention, all while squeezing the immersive world around us into a two-dimensional lesson that must be memorized for a test.

So while the summer season lures the Chromebooks into hibernation, I hope that it will also lure us back into life, where the lessons are palpable and the learning is alive.

There is a living, breathing classroom just beyond our digital gaze. It is open for all to explore. You can find it through tales told on tattered pages and numbers found in nature. It is where the deepest form of education roots itself in the soul.

In the world. Right here. Offline.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.