There is a backlash against screens in schools. It even has its own name: the “techlash.”
I have watched technology move steadily from the edges of the classroom to its centre over the past two decades. At first, students made scheduled visits to a computer lab. Then laptop carts began rolling from room to room. Tablets, interactive platforms and digital assignments followed, each claiming a little more of the school day.
COVID accelerated everything. For many students, a personal device became the classroom, the library and the connection to their teacher. When students returned to school, the devices came with them. Technology no longer waited in the corner until it was needed; it sat on every desk.
Now the mood has shifted. Parents, educators and researchers are taking a closer look at the consequences. That scrutiny is overdue. But if the debate becomes simply “screens versus no screens,” it risks overlooking a more important issue: what a particular activity requires the brain to do.
The latest PISA results place global student performance at its lowest recorded level in reading, mathematics and science. Research has linked heavy or poorly structured screen exposure, particularly media multitasking, with weaker attention and greater distraction. My team has also been examining both the risks and the potential of screen-based learning.
Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has become one of the most forceful critics of digital classrooms. He argues that schools should sharply reduce screen-based academic learning otherwise students will fail to develop the deep knowledge needed for independent thinking. UNESCO has reached a similar, if more measured, conclusion: some technology may improve some kinds of learning in some contexts, but excessive or poorly chosen use can harm it.
I support that scrutiny—even as the founder of a cognitive program that makes extensive use of screens. In fact, our use of technology makes the scrutiny more necessary, not less.
When I first developed the Arrowsmith cognitive exercises, the technology was secondary. The exercises were designed around the precise demands needed to target and stimulate specific cognitive functions.
As technology developed, we adopted computer-based delivery, which could increase the efficiency and precision of that design. Our technology now gives facilitators a remarkably detailed, moment-by-moment view of each student’s cognitive performance. Across thousands of interactions, it identifies patterns in how the student responds and allows the level of challenge to be continuously recalibrated as cognitive capacity develops.
This precision is not an added convenience. It is fundamental to producing meaningful cognitive change. The right cognitive function must be placed under the right demand, at the right level, and at the right time—then the task must change as the learner changes. Technology allows us to maintain that exacting and dynamic relationship between challenge and capacity, keeping each student at the productive edge of difficulty where measurable, enduring change can occur.
The screen was never the intervention. It became a more precise way to deliver and monitor the cognitive task.
The significance of that design is not confined to performance on the exercises themselves. Brain-imaging research involving Arrowsmith participants has found positive changes in the connectivity of networks associated with attention, cognitive control, and reasoning, alongside improvements in cognitive performance.
These are among the capacities now causing concern in debates about digital distraction and reduced cognitive effort. The same surface—a screen—can therefore be associated with profoundly different demands on the brain.
Technology can distract, entertain, or perform cognitive work for the learner. It can also deliver carefully calibrated demands designed to strengthen the learner’s own cognitive capacity necessary for meaningful learning. We cannot determine which is happening simply by noticing that a screen is present.
This distinction has become increasingly important as screens occupy more of children’s lives and classrooms. Educators and families are reporting serious concerns about the negative impact on attention and learning. Technology is not the sole explanation, but we cannot assume that the design and volume of children’s digital experiences are inconsequential.
That places a serious responsibility on anyone asking a child to learn through a screen, including Arrowsmith.
The Arrowsmith Program remains guided by a “brain first” principle. With every development and refinement of our work, we ask: What is the student’s brain being required to do, and will that activity contribute to positive, enduring change?
Our interfaces are intentionally simple. There is no music, rapid-fire feedback, or stream of competing stimuli. There are no arbitrary rewards layered over the work. Mastery of a challenging level is the reward: it represents an increased capacity to learn more efficiently and operate with greater independence at school, at home, and in the wider world.
The screen presents the cognitive task; it does not compete with it.
Trained facilitators are equally essential. Students are not left alone with software for an entire lesson, let alone an entire day. Facilitators monitor participation in real time, interpret performance data, dialogue with the students, modify their support strategies and co-create action plans with the students. Technology gives them greater visibility into each student’s engagement, progress and development; it does not replace their professional judgment.
Using screens does not place Arrowsmith beyond scrutiny. It increases our responsibility to be precise about what the technology is doing, what the student’s brain is being asked to do, and whether the experience is producing meaningful change that extends beyond the activity itself, transferring into real-world outcomes.
A child can spend 30 minutes passively watching a video, asking generative AI to produce an essay or completing a cognitive exercise. From the doorway of a classroom - or even a child’s bedroom—each may register simply as “screen time.” Yet one activity may require almost nothing of the learner, while another may demand sustained attention, planning, interpretation, correction and cognitive effort. The device and the number of minutes cannot tell us which occurred.
Minutes still matter. Children need movement, conversation, outdoor activity, sleep and face-to-face learning, and paper offers important advantages for sustained reading and writing. But neither the number of minutes nor the surface alone tells us what the brain was required to do.
The brain responds to the demands of the activity, not the surface on which it appears.
Learning scientist Michelene Chi’s ICAP framework offers one useful way to make these distinctions. It separates passively receiving information from actively working with it, constructing understanding, and interacting with others. Each produces a different learning experience, whether or not a screen is involved.
My team has also created a guide for parents and educators to help evaluate digital learning tools through this lens.
Evaluating technology this way allows us to look beneath the interface: at the cognitive work being asked of the learner, the quality and precision of the challenge, and what change extends beyond the activity itself.
Ultimately, I support the scrutiny driving the techlash. I want educators, parents, policymakers - and especially students themselves - to examine how much technology is present, what it displaces and what effects it produces.
But “screen time” is only the beginning of that examination. We must also look beneath the screen - to what the learner is required to notice, hold, interpret, connect, solve and produce - and whether the experience builds capacity that remains when the device is put away.
The screen is only the surface. The deeper issue is what the experience is shaping in the brain.