The Sorry State of Schooling
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Saturday, December 6, 2025
New article from the increasingly valuable The Free Press excerpts a book that makes the very strong case that the digitization of the classroom is harming student performance – immensely. The data presented in the excerpt is strong and this make intuitive sense to me. People learn tactilely and computers rob them of that experience. Sure it’s cheaper, less messy and less yucky to run a dissection simulation on a computer, but that same student, when confronted with an actual frog carcass might not have a clue how to proceed, despite having gotten a “A” with the simulation. – the simulation is just not that good. But I think the problems with computers in the classroom run much deeper.
Computers are tools, even if they run the much vaunted AI – they are still a tool. Even the most versatile tool has limits to what it can and cannot do. You must have mastered the task before you can decide how best to use, and when not to use, the tool. The problem is the computer, in all its forms – desktop, laptop, tablet, phone – is as much media purveyor as it is tool. Like drugs, they are useful in the hands of a professional, but addictive, or worse deadly, when misused.
Perhaps the biggest lesson learned, of the myriad lesson learned during our covid response, is that most teachers are not professional. Of course, there are still good, caring teachers out there, but many of them are not. They would rather collect a paycheck from home than actually get involved in the messy business of dealing with and teaching children. In places like California they milked the opportunity covid gave them until it was dry and well beyond. And once forced back to “work,” sitting kids in front of screens for hours a day was the next best thing.
Failing intellectual performance may be the primary fail of this approach to education, but there are ancillary issues. Consider a trio of articles that appeared this week:
- Catholic U. of America student government voted to ban people from quoting, recording them
- Nine in ten college students think ‘words can be violence’: survey
- EXCLUSIVE: Kent State a cappella group bans white students from solo auditions
Those are all headlines and they all caused me to double take. Each of them was so fundamentally opposed to my experiences as a student that I thought I was reading stories from an alternate universe. And then I ran into that Free Press piece and it began to click for me. A hallmark of the computer-based experience is the ability to have the computer filter out the unwanted. If in fact students are spending that much time nose in computer in school, then filtering out the unwanted is a way of life for them. Now those headlines make sense, even if they are abominable.
I find myself in a quandary; however. I am sure this will result in calls to improve how the computer works in the classroom but I cannot help but think the real answer is better teachers. Teachers that use the computer in context rather than let it be their substitute.
And now, the “leftover” stories of the week:
“Waste fraud and abuse,” on the federal and local level. In that federal story Matt Margolis says, “This fraud didn’t happen by accident. It’s a feature, not a bug, of the Democrats’….” Worthy of thought – that’s for sure.
The world’s covid response was an overreaction undertaken without cost/benefit analysis. And now we are learning that the vaccines were not 100% safe. Fair enough, but let’s not make the same mistake again. I have no idea the actual numbers involved here, but I will say a few deaths from the vaccine, while tragic, would be acceptable to me if the vaccine saved thousands, even millions of lives. That’s a cost/benefit analysis.
Yeah – most people who leave Christianity are grossly disillusioned – they are going to go as far away as possible. Which means Christianity needs to think hard about what it is doing to disillusion them so.
Well, of course – someone has to fund his campaign. Not actually news.
