The purpose of education isn’t to create young people who can behave well when the technology is removed. It is to develop young people who can behave wisely when the technology is everywhere.
That thought was prompted by a fascinating longitudinal study out of Finland I read about earlier in the week. Researchers followed 260 children for eight years, expecting to find evidence of the cognitive harm associated with rising screen use. What they found was rather different. Their research revealed children who reported greater cumulative screen time went on to show better cognitive processing as teenagers.
The researchers’ own explanation is the part that matters most, I think. Their best guess wasn’t that screens themselves are somehow beneficial – it was that the question “how many hours?” was the wrong one all along. What seems to count is what fills those hours. A child solving puzzles, building something in a game, or editing video is doing something very different with their attention and memory than one passively watching an autoplay feed – even though both would be logged, identically, as “screen time.”
However, that finding doesn’t prove screen time is good for children. The study is observational and relatively small, so it can’t establish that screen use caused the difference, and it doesn’t overturn the much larger – and genuinely mixed – body of research linking heavy or problematic screen use with poor sleep, low mood and reduced physical activity. The researchers themselves are careful about that.
But I think the study is valuable for another reason: it complicates a conversation that has become dangerously binary.
We have become accustomed to treating “screen time” as something inherently problematic – to be minimised, restricted, or eliminated. The Finnish research raises a deceptively simple question: what if screen time is a dangerously blunt measure?
Consider the difference between an hour spent:
- scrolling social media
- watching a stream of short-form video
- playing a collaborative strategy game
- researching a question
- creating a digital story
- analysing and representing data
- collaborating with others
- using AI to challenge and refine thinking
All of that sits in the same column labelled screen time. Educationally and developmentally, it’s worlds apart. The more useful question isn’t how much screen time, but what is happening during it. What’s the purpose? Who has agency? Is the technology enhancing the experience, or capturing attention? Is the young person creating, or consuming?
The urgency is real
None of this is an argument for complacency. This week the Government introduced its Online Safety Bill, proposing to ban under-16s from high-risk social media platforms – one expression of just how urgent this issue has become. Roughly one in three teenagers is reportedly spending five or more hours a day on social media. Concerns about sleep, wellbeing, bullying, body image and manipulative design aren’t moral panic; they’re well-founded, and they deserve a serious, urgent response – from government, from platforms, and from us as parents and educators. My recent podcast interview with Ray Finch confirms the reality of these risks in the lives of so many young people.
But there’s a difference between an age-verification law aimed at social media companies and a philosophy of digital education for schools. The first restricts access to a specific, high-risk category of platform, at a particular age. The second is about what we do, every day, with the eleven or twelve years young people already spend in our classrooms – before and after that threshold. We need both. But they answer different questions, and it would be a mistake to let the urgency of the first substitute for the harder, slower work of the second.
New Zealand’s restrictions on phones in schools are one sensible expression of that urgency. Increasingly, though, there are calls for schools to go further and eliminate digital devices from classrooms altogether. That’s where I think we need to slow down and ask a harder question:
What if, in our understandable desire to protect young people from the harms of technology, we inadvertently remove the opportunities they need to understand how this technology works, and learn how to use it well?
Prosper, prepare, protect
That tension – real urgency, but a different kind of work – is exactly what the Brookings Institution’s global task force on AI in education set out to resolve. Its Prosper, Prepare, Protect framework was built for AI specifically, but I think it holds for our whole approach to young people and technology.
Protect is the pillar most visible in the public conversation right now – age-verification laws, platform regulation, restrictions on phones in schools. It matters, and in many respects it’s overdue.
But Protect on its own isn’t enough. Prosper asks us to harness the genuine opportunities technology creates for learning – the Finnish study’s uncomfortable finding, that some kinds of screen time build rather than erode cognitive capacity, is a Prosper-shaped result. Prepare asks us to build capability – in students, teachers and families – so that protection doesn’t have to do all the work, forever.
A response built on Protect alone raises a generation that has been shielded from technology until the day the shielding stops. A response that holds all three together – protecting where protection is genuinely needed, preparing young people with the judgement to self-regulate, and harnessing technology where it can enrich learning – gives us something far more durable.
That’s the frame behind everything that follows.
A phone-free classroom isn’t a digitally-free classroom
There’s good reason for schools to want classrooms where students can concentrate, talk to one another, and learn without the constant pull of notifications. A phone-free classroom may be entirely sensible. But a digitally-free classroom is a very different proposition. Digital technologies aren’t simply another form of entertainment competing for attention – they are increasingly part of the cognitive, cultural and professional environment in which today’s young people will live and work.
If we respond to digital technology mainly by removing it, we may get calmer classrooms. That’s worthwhile. But we may also fail to develop young people who can regulate their own use, distinguish signal from noise, sustain attention in environments designed to capture it, use digital tools to create rather than merely consume, use AI critically, and know when to put the device down. These aren’t peripheral skills – they are increasingly fundamental capabilities for the world our young people are entering.
The goal shouldn’t be less technology. It should be better understanding and better technology use. That doesn’t mean a device in every lesson, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries. It means becoming far more intentional about when, why and how technology is used for learning – moving from treating it as something to be managed towards something that needs to be understood and learned.
The big issue here for me is responsibility. Personal responsibility of users, collective responsibility of the communities we are a part of and society as a whole to put in place the measures (educative and preventative) required to promote better use, and corporate responsibility of the creators and providers of these technologies (the platforms and environments) to ensure they are safe and have measures in place to reduce the harms associated with their use.
So what might that actually look like in a school?
1. Teach the difference between consuming and creating
Rather than asking whether students are using a device, ask what they’re doing with it. One useful test for teachers: if I removed the device, what learning would disappear? If the answer is “not much,” the device probably shouldn’t be there. If students couldn’t do the investigating, collaborating, creating or representing without it, its use is likely justified. The device isn’t the pedagogy – the learning intention is.
2. Teach attention – don’t simply protect students from distraction
If students never have to manage distraction because adults have removed every source of it, when do they learn to manage it? A teacher might build simple routines – device down for explanation, device up for research, two minutes device-free to think and discuss – and teach students why notifications, infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms are so effective at capturing attention. The goal isn’t pretending distraction doesn’t exist; it’s helping young people recognise it and develop strategies to manage it. That’s a more important form of digital literacy than simply knowing how to operate a tool.
3. Teach when technology enhances thinking – and when it replaces it
This matters especially in the age of AI. Give students the same task three ways – without technology, with technology, with AI – then ask not which was fastest or easiest, but which helped you think better? A useful principle: use technology when it amplifies human thinking, not when it substitutes for it. That’s a far more powerful lesson than simply telling students whether they’re allowed to use ChatGPT.
4. Build digital judgement into everyday learning
This doesn’t need to be a standalone “digital citizenship” programme. When students encounter information online, we can ask: Who created this, and why? What evidence supports it? What has the algorithm chosen to show me – and what hasn’t it shown me? Whose voice is missing? Is this an appropriate use of AI? What happens to the information I enter? When should I stop? These are fundamentally questions of critical thinking, ethical judgement and agency. Digital technology simply provides the context in which they matter more than ever.
5. Teach students how to put the technology down
Perhaps the most important lesson of all. The mature response to technology isn’t “I can use this whenever I want.” It is: “I can decide when using this is helpful – and when it isn’t.” Schools can build device-free moments alongside purposeful digital ones: read without a screen, think before searching, talk before typing, write before asking AI, go outside, make something with your hands. These aren’t anti-technology practices. They are technology self-management.
But teachers need to learn this too
We cannot expect teachers to teach what they have never had the opportunity to learn themselves. This isn’t about blaming teachers for their own technology habits, or reviving the tired idea of “digital natives” teaching “digital immigrants”. The real question is whether we have built the professional capability to understand how digital technologies affect learning, attention and behaviour – and to design learning that uses technology deliberately rather than habitually. There’s an important difference between digital competence and digital pedagogy: a teacher can be highly competent with a Chromebook, Google Classroom or an AI tool without understanding when it improves learning and when it gets in the way.
Schools need to create space for teachers to experiment, inquire and learn together – contrasting digital and non-digital approaches, gathering student feedback, sharing what they discover. That shifts the conversation from “should we allow devices?” to “under what conditions does technology improve learning?” – a much richer professional question.
And schools can’t do this alone
School is only one environment in which young people learn their relationship with technology. They’re learning it at home, with friends, through gaming, social media and increasingly through AI. Parents are navigating the same challenges as teachers, often without the professional knowledge, collective support or time that schools have.
Telling parents “don’t worry, we’ve banned phones at school” doesn’t solve the problem. What happens before school, after school, during the holidays – and what happens when young people leave school and nobody is standing beside them saying, “put your phone away”?
Schools have an opportunity to work alongside parents on a shared understanding of healthy, purposeful technology use – device-free times and spaces, sleep and notifications, passive consumption versus active creation, social media and online relationships, AI and learning, setting boundaries without making technology a constant source of conflict, and – perhaps most importantly – modelling the behaviours we want young people to develop. Rather than telling parents how to manage technology, schools can become partners with families in navigating something none of us has completely figured out yet.
This is where personal and collective responsibility meet – and where Prosper, Prepare and Protect need each other. Government’s role leans toward Protect: age-verification law, platform accountability, urgent action for those most at risk. Schools’ role leans toward Prepare: building judgement, not just compliance. Families sit across all three – protecting, preparing, and helping young people prosper by modelling thoughtful use themselves. None of these substitutes for the others. A social media ban that isn’t matched by a generation of young people who have learned to regulate their own attention will simply push the same problem two years down the road, to the day the ban lifts.
From managing devices to developing digital agency
None of this diminishes the legitimate concerns about technology. There are times when the right answer is to put the device away. There are environments where access needs to be restricted, technologies and forms of use that are genuinely harmful, and children who need particular protection and support.
But prohibition cannot be the endpoint of digital education. Eventually, students leave school – and turn 16, and leave home. There will be nobody standing beside them regulating their notifications, filtering their feeds, or deciding whether they should use AI. They will have to do it themselves.
That is why I keep coming back to the distinction between removing technology and learning to live with technology. We cannot build a digitally healthy generation simply by removing digital devices from young people’s lives. Nor can we assume that unrestricted access will somehow teach them to use technology wisely. The work of education lies somewhere between the two: creating the knowledge, habits, judgement and agency that enable young people to flourish in a world where technology will only become more present, not less.
The purpose of education isn’t to create young people who can behave well when the technology is removed.
It is to develop young people who can behave wisely when the technology is everywhere.
If we remove every opportunity for young people to practise self-regulation, discernment and purposeful technology use while they are at school, when – and where – do we expect them to learn it?
Further reading:
- Lead Like A Wayfinder – guidance for school leaders and BoTs on creating an AI Strategy for school. Draws from the Brookings 3P framework.
- Agency By Design – a playbook for educators, emphasises the importance of responsibility at the centre of what agency is all about.
