After the first day of middle school, John’s son, Jordan, arrived home with a new toy: a school-issued iPad. Of course, it wasn’t given as a toy. It was given as an educational tool, but to your average 12-year-old who’s never owned a smartphone or an Apple product—well, it’s cool.
Curious about what Jordan could access on the device, John took the iPad to his room. He knew the district promised to filter explicit content, but he also knew it was his parental responsibility to ensure his son wasn’t traipsing about with a pornography portal.
Within three minutes, John accessed pornography. He was shaken. But he assumed the best: Jordan’s iPad must be malfunctioning.
So John returned it to the school and the filter was reinstalled. But the filter still didn’t block pornography. It turns out it wasn’t malfunctioning. For at least the last year, the school’s filter hadn’t been able to block a significant amount of illicit material. And the district knew it. But they chose not to inform parents. Instead, they dealt with it on a case-by-case basis. The taxpayer-funded district was happy to allow children to stumble onto pornography until their parents found out—if their parents found out.
This isn’t fiction (although I changed the identifying details), and it’s not an uncommon story. It can happen in your city. It probably already has. So if you haven’t thoroughly tested your child’s school-provided device, drop this article and do so immediately.
As a pastor, parent, and taxpaying citizen, I want Christians to recognize what’s happening in school classrooms. I also want you to have credible, secular research to share with school administrations—for the sake of your children and your neighbor’s children (Mark 12:30–31). This act of courageous truth-telling may well be one of the most important acts of love our generation will undertake.
Starting in the early to mid-2010s, Big Tech companies like Apple and Google began to distribute their devices cheaply to schools in a bid to get children hooked on their products young—like tobacco companies of yore—and collect their data to sell them ads.
It’s hard for perennially underfunded schools to resist free money and products. Add to that the average American’s unwavering faith in technological progress, and you’ve got a wicked cocktail. Perhaps that explains why our educational landscape underwent an unprecedented technological revolution in a single decade with almost no research or analysis.
I experienced this as a board member of my daughter’s Christian school. We were offered tens of thousands of dollars in grants to pay for one-to-one devices in our classrooms. Saying no felt like stealing something from students. It felt like resisting progress. But we said no anyway, because our pressing question wasn’t “How can we restructure our curriculum around new technology?” but “What technologies are best suited to serve our educational mission?” Technology wasn’t our master; it was the servant. And there wasn’t enough research to prove it was a good servant.
Most districts are taking a different tack. They’ve doubled down on a dangerous bet: techno-optimism will pay off. They’ve created entire departments to manage classroom technology and keep technology in classrooms. These are the district-level decision makers whose careers require the existence of one-to-one devices. That puts concerned parents and wary teachers at a disadvantage because, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
If research shows their technology harms students (more on that later), will district-level administrators turn back the techno-tide? Even if it means losing their jobs? I’m not optimistic. Parents will have to apply pressure, and Christians should lead the way with gentleness.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation shows a causal link between social media; school-provided technology and smartphone adoption (or what he calls a “phone-based childhood”); and rapidly rising rates of teenage loneliness, social disorders, anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. But teenagers don’t need Haidt’s book to see the problem. A recent Pew study found that 44 percent of teenagers believe it is harder to be a teen today than 20 years ago. Their number one explanation? Technology.
Ironically, those parents who claim it’s easier to be a teen today believe this is the case because of technology. Our children know they need less technology—even as they’re addicted to it—but adults inside schools don’t see it and are requiring them to use screens more.
Jessica Grose, writing for The New York Times, explains, “There’s little or no evidence that the [screen-based educational] products actually work.” That simple fact should be enough to make us question why schools deploy tremendous resources toward devices and device management. As an Associated Press analysis of public education documents concluded, “Many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games, and tutoring websites. Schools, however, have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”
But recent research reported in MIT Technology Review suggested in-class devices aren’t merely neutral: they’re holding students back. This may be because children learn significantly more using paper than screens. New research suggests the national reading comprehension average dropped by four points among 13-year-olds not because of COVID-19 but because of screens. Researchers found that when students read text on paper, deeper reading was easier; when they read on screens, “shallow reading was observed.”
All this fits with a broader trend in educational research: technology is useful when training students in rote, constrained skills (like multiplication tables and phonetics) but relatively useless when developing complex, unconstrained skills. This is even true of the most popular education apps, which researchers at Penn State, Harvard and Boston College, and the University of Crete have all described as low quality described as “low quality.”
Unfortunately, many media personnel in schools will trot out the few positive studies about tech in classrooms as justification for their policies. This is misleading, because most studies argue the good is limited and show negative correlations between learning and tech. So it’s important to gently push back and share some meta-analyses that give the full picture.
Sometimes the distractions are social. Haidt shows that students ably work around school filtering systems to use devices for bullying. But the problem is often far more innocent: screens are just distracting. A recent Programme for International Student Assessment study found that two-thirds of American students report being distracted by digital devices in their mathematics lessons, and 54 percent report being distracted by others’ devices.
Educators see firsthand how scattered the attention of their students is, and this is why many are sounding the alarm. Even students are admitting to parents that they’re watching YouTube—including videos with tremendous violence and softcore pornography—instead of paying attention in class. According to The New York Times, students and parents are crying out for help. But these cries often fall on deaf ears. I’ve heard of district administrators who reply that YouTube is necessary for the educational journey.
The truth is the opposite: one study on the educational uses of YouTube found that only the most educationally motivated students benefited from the platform. Indeed, for most students, any and all smart devices in the classroom hamper their educational journey. One Rutgers researcher found that students lose “anywhere between a half and whole letter grade if they are allowed to consult their phones in class.”
There’s a reason many elite private schools are removing technology: they can afford the resources they need. But in lower-income schools, devices often become a form of classroom management and seem to be increasing the educational divide between the wealthy and the poor. The negative effects of screens are also more pronounced in children from broken families.
Despite increased diagnoses of ADHD, few people discuss how school-provided screens not only exacerbate ADHD’s challenges but may even worsen or cause symptoms. If Jesus’s mission was to “set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18, NIV), we too can care about oppression in the large and small places where we find it, including the effects of technology on the poor and needy (Matt. 25:40).
Always remember this: Despite your school’s most sincere efforts, updates break filters. And kids are smart. When Apple or Google updates their devices, filters fail. Kids know this, even if parents don’t. Even when filters function (and given the story about John and Jordan, I use “function” loosely), there are easy workarounds. The internet is chock-full of guides for students wanting to jailbreak their devices. Even if your child chooses not to break the rules, her “filtered” device will still show her YouTube ads and banner ads littered with softcore-pornographic and highly suggestive material.
Of course, it’s a parent’s responsibility to talk to his or her children about pornography and disciple them. But part of a parent’s discipleship might entail limiting device access until children are prepared to handle the temptation. Many schools aren’t giving parents that option. Instead, administrators are telling parents to deal with the problem the school’s device created at home. This not only ignores the fact that parents cannot monitor their children at school (or other children, who may share pornography) but also minimizes pornography’s tremendous damage.
It’s not a small deal. Research shows that early access to pornography is “connected to negative developmental outcomes, including a greater acceptance of sexual harassment, sexual activity at an early age, acceptance of negative attitudes to women, unrealistic expectations, skewed attitudes of gender roles, greater levels of body dissatisfaction, rape myths (responsibility for sexual assault to a female victim), and sexual aggression.”
The simple truth is that once a school gives children devices with access to pornography, they’ve given them a destructive drug.
The tide is turning. This summer, the U.S. surgeon general called for social media to carry a warning label. Haidt’s book helped elevate the problem into popular consciousness. But it’s not enough. Institutions must be reformed, and reformation almost always requires both external pressure (parents) and internal pressure (educators and administrators).
I’ve seen this locally: since the advent of one-to-one devices, there has been a quiet, respectful, but bold group of Christian parents, educators, and administrators resisting district-level adoption of technology. They’ve made slow, halting progress over the years, and they’ve discovered that as they add more voices, their influence increases. District officials can no longer ignore their concerns.
The Spirit has uniquely equipped and empowered believers to combat unjust systems with love, mercy, kindness, and grace—precisely the character required to make lasting institutional change. So this isn’t the time for cowardice. It’s the time for Christian parents to push back against educational excesses, fight for higher digital security, and seek to reduce screen use in class. If possible, they should push schools to follow UNESCO’s advice and ban smartphones. If that’s not possible, they should argue for screen limits in high school and the removal of one-to-one devices in middle and elementary schools (where such devices are, according to research, most educationally harmful).
What we cannot do is sit by passively and hope that kindness (without speech) will win the cause. The truth is that most districts want to educate and care for children. They want to do what’s right. But the financial pressure from tech companies is heavy, and internal incentives to preserve a district’s vocational media apparatus are strong. What districts need are parents, teachers, and principals willing to present the evidence in a way that respects the dignity of all involved parties. Together we must heed Jeremiah’s command to “seek the welfare of the city” where God has sent us by following the research and encouraging schools to stay focused on their core educational mission—not digital distractions (Jer. 29:7).
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