An EdTech Tragedy:A groundbreaking UNESCO book on the damage wrought by ed-tech during COVID school closures around the globe Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch
In The Anxious Generation, we focused on the emergence of the adolescent mental health crisis that began in the early 2010s. However, since the book’s publication one year ago, we have learned even more about worrisome trends in education that closely mirror those in mental health: after decades of stability or gradual improvement, test scores in the U.S. and around the world began declining notably in the 2010s.
While widespread attention to declining test scores intensified during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—with many experts attributing the downturn primarily to COVID restrictions and the rapid movement to full remote learning—the declines actually began much earlier. Evidence from The National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP) clearly illustrates this earlier decline. As shown in Figure 1, after decades of slow and steady gains, American students started to give back those gains after 2012, particularly among students who were already performing at lower levels.
But as with the mental health crisis, it wasn’t just an American thing. In December 2023, Derek Thompson wrote an essay in The Atlantic titled, It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber.
Here’s a figure from that essay (re-graphed by us), showing that the decline is happening across the dozens of countries that participate in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). As with the mental health declines, these decline started after 2012, not 2020.
What could cause such an international decline in learning? One plausible explanation is the arrival of the phone-based childhood, which, as we showed, arrived between 2010 and 2015. However, there is a related hypothesis that is more proximal to the educational decline: the sudden appearance of a laptop or tablet on every student’s desk. To be clear, the intentions here were good. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools provide every student with “at least one Internet access device…Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes.” But the outcome seems to be bad for most students—especially students who were already struggling.
Last month we brought you a talk by Sophie Winkleman, who has been campaigning in the UK to get most ed-tech out of classrooms. Please watch her talk for an overview of the many ways that digital devices distract students and fragment their attention.
Following her talk, Sophie sent us a link to an extraordinary book from UNESCO that came out in late 2023, with little publicity. The book is by Mark West, an education specialist inside UNESCO’s Division for Learning and Innovation, a wing of the organization that .puts forward helpful ideas about how to achieve more just, sustainable and human-centered futures of education.
The book followed on the heels of a separate UNESCO report that consolidated global evidence on ed-tech. West’s work goes further and deeper, examining the consequences of the rapid shift to ed-tech that was driven by the lockdowns and school closures that defined the early years of the COVID pandemic.
The book details what happened to learners, teachers, families, communities—and understandings of education itself—when schools closed and formal learning shifted almost exclusively to digital screens. It is a critically important period to study. As the book explains, COVID-19 created a world-spanning record of the impacts of screen-dependent learning. And this record, recounted over 500 pages and with references to over 1,500 sources, leaves no doubt about its many harms. The word ‘tragedy’ appears in the title for a reason.
The book got relatively little publicity at the time. Indeed, we had not heard of it until Sophie brought it to our attention. But it is an extraordinary book for educators, administrators, and legislators who are now considering ways—and evidenced-based rationales—for making schools “distraction free.”
West borrows the organization of a tragic play to structure the book across three main ‘acts’. It’s a clever choice, and helps carry the book’s central argument which, much nuance aside, boils down to this: The recourse to screen-reliant education during the pandemic was largely a disaster and had numerous adverse effects on children, however unintended.
Tragedies generally begin with outsize ambition, and in ‘Act 1’ West recounts the breathless, if not hubristic, expectations people (the usual Silicon Valley set but also a wider array of pundits who should have known better) touted for technology-first education prior to the pandemic and in the early phases of school closures. Readers come to understand why so many school systems turned to ed-tech, with remarkable uniformity and remarkably little debate, as the pandemic took hold.
In ‘Act 2’ he juxtaposes these soaring expectations with what actually occurred on the ground – in homes, countries and entire regions of the globe – when ed-tech was deployed as a (typically) singular solution to the educational challenges imposed by the pandemic. This part of the book contains the central action — the drama, so to speak.
Tragedies end with new, if very costly, recognition and revelation. Things go astray, people get hurt, and overblown plans fall apart. But a tragedy is only a tragedy if the protagonists as well as the audience see this wreckage with moral clarity before the curtain comes down. People need to walk out of the theater wiser. This is certainly true with ‘An Ed-Tech Tragedy?’; readers come to understand what went wrong and why.
In the last ’act’ of the book, ‘Act 3’, West considers what lessons we should draw about education and technology from the messy experiences of the pandemic—experiences that played out with enormous variation locally but with striking global similarities as well. One takeaway he highlights is to shift formal learning away from personal screens, especially for younger students. (That means: phone-free schools and no more laptops and tablets on students’ desks.)
In addition to the three main ‘acts’ that structure the book, there is an ‘Inter-Act’ (a kind of intermission) between ‘Act 2’ and ‘Act 3’. Here, West untethers himself from the historical record to consider what might have happened if educational authorities had NOT made screens the centerpieces of their responses to school closures. West makes the commonsense observation that sending kids and families something as simple as art kits, building blocks and engaging picture books, instead of $1,000 laptops and internet equipment, might have been more educative and a whole lot more fun and imaginative. In this section, he invites us to consider whether public perceptions that technology-based solutions were ‘saving the day’ during school closures caused these closures to drag on far longer than they would have otherwise.
The book’s invocation of tragedy, beyond giving it a recognizable and thought-provoking organization, helps in another way: It keeps the enormity of what happened to home-bound and screen-bound learners between 2020 and 2022 in full view. West makes sure his readers see the full scope of the damage done to young people around the world, damage which will take a long time to undo.
Below we reprint the Table of Contents, followed by the summary of the book that can be found on pages 17-18. We urge you to read the summary, and to look closely at the Table of Contents, especially the sections in Act 2. In just a few words, the section titles survey the extent of the damage: diminished engagement, reduced achievement, digital addiction, increases in dropout, curtailed conversation, less inclusion, private sector capture of education, supercharged inequalities, new forms of invasive surveillance, and much more. The tolls are sobering. Then we urge you to read the book itself, which UNESCO has made available to the world for free.
Writing in 2023, West put a question mark at the end of his book title. Now, in 2025, we can see that the question mark is no longer needed.
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