The Netflix series Adolescence has sparked a wave of moral panic over children’s use of technology. This surge of concern could lead policymakers to address the wrong issues in the ongoing debate over edtech.
When Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation this time last year, it inspired innumerable hot takes on the issues facing children. These include online bullying, TikTok toxicity, Instagram predators, addictive gaming and hardcore porn.
This week, Sir Keir Starmer convened a roundtable with Adolescence’s creators, charities and young people because he is ‘worried’ about social media influencers. Meanwhile, a growing number of parents have been joining the Smartphone Free Childhood movement since the show’s release.
Actress Sophie Winkleman is a leading voice in the campaign against technology. In a speech in February, she described edtech as ‘neurological junk food’, citing distracted children, a lack of human connection and profiteering companies as reasons tech has no place in schools.
Haidt went on to amplify this speech. Then, last week, he published his own essay, ‘An Edtech Tragedy’, arguing that digital learning during the pandemic was ‘largely a disaster’.
As Schools Week’s ‘lockdown legacies’ series shows, the ongoing impacts of school closures are clear. And Haidt raises valid points about our over-reliance on screens.
Blaming edtech, however, overlooks the reality of digital poverty facing many students, for whom phones were the only means of accessing education at that time.
It’s for equally valid reasons that many schools are now banning mobile phones. We know, for example, that they can distract students even when they are not being used.
But conflating smartphone use in schools with thoughtfully deployed edtech is a fear-driven mistake. And this is turning legitimate concerns about phones into blanket opposition to technology in education.
Conflating smartphones and edtech is a fear-driven mistake
Recently, our local school’s Smartphone Free Childhood group sent parents a message referring to edtech as ‘the next battle’. The tone was alarmist and failed to mention any benefit of technology.
Campaigners like Winkleman nostalgically recall a childhood of landline phones and screen-free classrooms. But like any modern workplace, schools rely on digital infrastructure for everything from shared planning and parent communications to trips and timetables.
Let’s not pretend that bad lessons didn’t exist before edtech either. Death by worksheet, ‘chalk and talk’ and mindless copying off the board were not unusual. The only difference is that students passed paper notes rather than IMs.
Now teachers have access to shared, real-time data and analytics to support each child’s progress, while digital tools open new possibilities for interactive learning experiences. The issue, as ever, is not the tech but how it’s used.
Winkleman asks if ‘cutting and pasting from Google into a PowerPoint’ is ‘superior to reading a passage in a textbook and handwriting a response’. Either, of course, can be passive and low value. Poor pedagogy is the problem, not a failure of edtech.
In 2025, it makes no sense for a teacher to spend an hour manually marking and recording 35 sets of multiple-choice answers when any number of edtech tools can do this in seconds. Students get instant, targeted feedback while their teacher can easily see strengths and development areas.
And while unrestricted YouTube access is inadvisable, sometimes a carefully chosen, two-minute video (like an excerpt from Adolescence, which was made free to all UK schools this week) can break down a concept more effectively than pages of text.
Really, there’s no debate about whether technology belongs in schools. There are only choices about how to use it strategically to support learning and minimise distraction.
There’s a solid argument for drastically reducing children’s screentime overall, and for banning phones from the classroom, but the real problem is the unregulated, unsupervised time spent on screens outside school.
The danger is that the current wave of moral panic may lead the Prime Minister to focus on the soft target of schools rather than addressing the wider challenges posed by technology.
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