After a decade of one-to-one devices, some schools are rethinking the screen.
In Emily Cherkin’s seventh-grade English classroom, the end of class used to bring a rustle—chairs scraping, planners snapping, a small line forming at her desk. Students gripped their papers, asking why a grade was low and what they could do differently.
Then the line disappeared.
Homework, due dates, grades—all of it moved online. “At first I thought, sure, why not just look it up online?” Cherkin told The Epoch Times.
She soon realized that the technology was taking her place at the center of the classroom.
“It took my students away from me,” she said. “I was told to tell my students to look up the grades in the portal, instead of coming to talk about what they could do differently.”
Cherkin’s classroom was an early warning sign.
She began teaching in the early 2000s, the decade when students had laptop carts rather than one-to-one devices. Today, six-year-olds toggle between apps, responding to rapid-fire prompts. At the same time, national exam scores continue to fall in reading, math, and problem-solving.
“Our kids are less cognitively capable, for the first time, this generation is doing worse than the one before it on the very skills school is supposed to build,” neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher turned researcher in human learning, told The Epoch Times.
He believes the rapid shift to screen‑saturated classrooms is a major reason.
Few Are Getting Smarter
For much of the 20th century, intelligence scores climbed about three points per decade or six points every generation. Researchers called the ascension the Flynn Effect. Over the past 20 years, however, the pattern has broken down.
Assessments in the United States suggest that Gen Z is the first cohort to score lower than its parents on IQ.
Holding information in mind, reasoning through problems, and juggling multiple ideas are the kinds of abstract thinking skills students practice in school—and the ones IQ tests mostly measure, according to Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia.
“IQ tests were designed to predict success in school,” Willingham, whose research focuses on how children learn, told The Epoch Times.
Falling IQ scores indicate a decline in cognitive abilities. Researchers broadly agree that the decline in scores reflects changes in children’s environments.
The timing of this fall is difficult to ignore. The downturn overlaps with a massive expansion of classroom technology. What began in the late 1990s as experimental “one-to-one” computing programs—giving each student a device for personalized instruction and to narrow the achievement gaps—has become commonplace in districts across the country.
