Against screens — but what are you for?

An incredible number of people are getting active against screens and that's great, but what are you for...?

There are 100,000 parents in a group against iPads in school (which I support), but where are the parents who want to help make sure their kids get access to more culture than Bukkene Bruse på badeland?

From a letter to the artistic director of Teater Innlandet, August 2024

It's fascinating, by the way, that in my circle it's the people who work with technology at a high level, along with some academics I know, who are most worried about early screen use. While most of the regular families I know locally don't share that worry (and also often have a much more relaxed attitude to screen use at home).

I'm very worried that we're going to end up with a sort of "reverse" digital divide.

People used to worry that only the wealthy had access to computers and the internet, now it's more that only those with high social capital or whatever you want to call it actually manage to be strict about screens, still fill the house with books, etc. And yes, what parents do at home matters a lot, but then it really doesn't help when you force students to have 1:1 iPads with no restrictions from first grade, when they sit on the toilet during after-school care playing computer games together without parents having any control, or when the weekly plan and all the homework are only on the iPad, so that the damn iPad has to come out every single morning before school — and once it's out it's very easy to click on to something else, all of us adults know that.

What the research actually looked at

I have a PhD in education, and even though I myself researched the use of technology at universities, I was surrounded by people who researched it in elementary school, went to lots of conferences etc.

First of all there's clearly a "shiny" effect — you get results from almost anything new you test, because it's exciting etc, and most studies are so short that you never get to test how it works once people have gotten used to it.

On top of that there's an incredibly big difference between how "technology" was used in almost all the studies I've seen, and what happens in Norwegian schools. The projects that were carried out were ambitious, often with custom-written software where all the students could collaborate on inquiry learning, led by a teacher who had a dashboard and analytics, and tons of energy and motivation to pull off something special. Of course the students liked it, and surely learned something from it. Totally different from each person sitting on their own iPad doing individual exercises — or even worse, reading a textbook as a PDF (I guarantee there are no studies showing that's more useful! ;))...

And finally, one of the biggest problems for parents is the effect of students having 1:1 iPads, having them in their backpacks at after-school care, bringing them home, the iPad having to come out of the backpack in the morning to check the weekly plan because it only exists digitally etc. This has a huge influence on family life, the relationship to technology, distractions etc — but it's incredibly rare that researchers look at this kind of thing at all.

At home

We've always been very strict with our son when it comes to screen time etc. And I do think that's an important reason why he likes reading so much — that the TV is in the basement but the bookshelves are in the living room, and the whole family sits reading their own books in the evening, we read a lot out loud etc.

I think one of the ingredients is having parents who like to read, but who also show that they dare to challenge themselves a bit, try something new, learn something...

I've gotten quite involved in, among other things, the iPad issue (especially the fact that you have 1:1 iPads that get sent home with the student every day from 1st grade). A lot of the debate is often about iPad or not, practical or not, but I'm looking for more basic discussions about what should actually be learned in school, and how that should happen...

From a letter to a teacher and teacher educator at USN, May 2024

More on this: Never heard of Hirsch there