Áilín Quinlan: Textbooks, not laptops... Get back to basics in classrooms

She was deeply worried, she confided, about her school’s decision to shift students over from textbooks to laptops and digital devices.

Many other members of the staff in that large, second-level school had voiced similar concerns, but they weren’t being listened to, she said. Screen-based teaching and learning was coming in, and that was that.

We’ve had the shock over GROK. We’ve read about and listened to the very deep concerns being voiced about the potentially negative effects of social media and screen-dependence on children. There is an enormous amount of research underpinning that anxiety.

Yet here is the Irish government steadily, diligently, replacing textbooks, pencils, and copybooks with laptops.

Meanwhile, and ironically, traditional textbooks are seeing a resurgence in several traditionally progressive countries across Europe which are now steadily reducing emphasis on digital education.

Norway is restricting the use of screens in education for young students due to declining results in reading and numeracy.

Denmark too has stepped back from digital learning, and Sweden has abruptly and comprehensively changed its education policy, and spent millions bringing back traditional printed textbooks.

It’s an issue that Darren O’Rourke, Sinn Féin’s spokesman on education, has had some experience of – he commented recently that other countries around Europe have increasingly found that an over-reliance on screens not only harms concentration and results in poorer levels of literacy and handwriting, but, it is feared, may not deliver the anticipated better learning outcomes. Parents had been raising concerns with him, he reported.

Surprise, surprise.

In fact, no surprise if you read about the findings of a recent U.S study into the area. The research shows some younger generations are performing more poorly than their parents’ generation on standardised tests. The findings have led to warnings about dramatic declines in attention span, memory, and problem-solving skills in some children and teenagers.

Studies are indicating that members of Generation Z - those born from 1997 to 2012 - and (in this context, it seems somewhat ironically) Generation Alpha - people born between 1997 and around 2010 - are the first generation in the history of standardised testing to score lower than previous generations.

It’s believed this decline is linked to the heavy use of smartphones, laptops, and other devices in schools and homes.

Research also shows that reading material on a screen can make it harder for children to process information, and furthermore that heavy screen use can have a negative impact on young children’s brain development.

A neuroscientist and former teacher, Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, has had some tough things to say about the problems he believes humankind is bringing on itself as a result of this emphasis on throwing tech at kids.

Humans, he says, are biologically programmed to learn from other human beings and also from deep study – in other words, from books and writing and the use of memory and attention - and not from flipping desultorily through screens looking for bullet point summaries of the topic of the day.

O’Rourke asks the simple question, which someone in the Department of Education must surely be asking too: if go-ahead countries like Norway and Denmark are changing tack, and if Sweden, believed to be one of Europe’s most tech-savvy societies, is driving a strong renewed focus on traditional textbooks and pens in a bid to reverse what it has found to be falling literacy levels in its schools, why are we galloping off in the opposite direction? Especially when experienced teachers are voicing reservations about the whole thing.

Parents too. I read an interesting interview with an Irish mother who reported that her oldest child, whose school used traditional textbooks, copybooks and writing materials, studied better and consistently received higher grades than his younger siblings whose school had replaced textbooks with tablets.

Let’s look more closely at Sweden. Laptops became the norm in Swedish classrooms by the late 2000s. Within a few years, about 80% of second-level students at state schools had individual access to a digital device.

In 2019, the compulsory use of tablets in pre-schools was introduced with the idea that this would help to prepare even the youngest children for life and work in the tech-saturated society of today.

But, in 2022, suddenly everything changed. The government shifted direction in the belief that screen-free lessons created better conditions for children to concentrate and develop their reading and writing skills.

Why? The Swedish state changed tack first because students’ scores in basic academic subjects were falling drastically, and second because it listened… to teachers, researchers, public agencies, and communities.

Well, now.

The plan is to implement a ban on mobile phones in schools, even for educational use.

Schools have received more than €180 million in grants to buy new textbooks and other traditional resources. A new curriculum designed to enforce textbook-based learning is in the pipeline.

The aim? To improve Sweden’s once-astronomical scoring in the OECD benchmark for core academic subjects because the country’s ranking had so significantly disimproved.

The OECD, it should be said, has signalled caution around assuming a direct cause and effect in terms of over-reliance on screens and learning outcomes, but at the same time it has suggested that Sweden’s heavy adoption of technology all those years ago is likely to have impacted those results.

The back-to-textbooks move has, its reported, prompted concerns in the business sector, with fears that students might now be under-prepared for jobs in a tech-rich workplace.

Maybe, as in all areas of life, it’s a case of striking a balance between things rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Maybe Ireland should adopt a well-thought-out mix of traditional and high-tech teaching resources in schools.

But whatever the answer is, it certainly doesn’t lie in throwing out all the textbooks, the pens, and the copybooks.