GlobeskoolWalking Away from EdTech Isn't the Answer. But Neither Is Tablets and Headphones.
The edtech backlash is pointing at the right scene: kids alone, headphones in, clicking through apps. The problem is passivity, not the screen. Here is where the real line sits.
There is an image that keeps showing up in education coverage, and it has become impossible to dismiss. Rows of kids. Tablets. Headphones. Silence. A dashboard somewhere is logging it as engagement. The children in those classrooms would not agree.
An op-ed in the Hechinger Report, written by someone who builds edtech for a living, opens with exactly this scene and then says something surprising: much of the backlash against education technology is completely justified.
He also says the backlash misses the broader point. He is right on both counts. And the space between those two things is where your kid’s education actually lives.
The Backlash Is Pointing at Something Real
The critics of classroom technology, and there are serious ones, are responding to a specific failure. They are not wrong about the scene. A child clicking next through a reading app, alone, with no discussion, no challenge, and no human in the loop, is not getting an education. They are getting occupied. The fact that it is happening on a device with the word “learning” in the product description does not change that.
Passive consumption is not learning. It never was. The problem is not that schools adopted technology. The problem is what they asked the technology to do: hold kids still and log the time.
When that is the use case, the backlash makes complete sense.
Where the Backlash Gets It Wrong
Removing the tablet does not fix the underlying problem. A child can be equally passive staring at a worksheet, sitting through a lecture, or watching an educational video. Passivity is not a hardware problem. It is a design problem.
The question that actually matters is not screen or no screen. It is: who is in charge of the tool.
There is a real and meaningful difference between these two things:
- A kid who clicks through a reading program until a timer ends, then closes the app
- A kid who uses technology to research a real question, frame an argument, work through a problem that does not have a multiple-choice answer, or learn to use AI as a thinking partner rather than an answer machine
The first one is a screen-time statistic. The second one is building something that transfers.
Same screen. Completely different experience. The difference is not the device. It is whether the child is running the tool or being run by it.
What Active Actually Looks Like
Active learning on a screen is not harder to recognize than passive learning. You can tell almost immediately.
Passive: the kid is waiting for something to happen to them. They click when prompted. They answer when asked. They move on when allowed. The screen is in charge.
Active: the kid is making decisions. They are arguing a position, building something, solving a problem that requires judgment, or working with a tool in a way that forces them to think. The kid is in charge.
The future skills that actually matter, critical thinking, creative problem solving, clear communication, and the ability to work with AI rather than just receive its outputs, cannot be delivered passively. They are not knowledge to be transferred. They are capacities to be developed through use. A child who never has to make a real decision in their learning environment is not building those capacities. They are just accumulating logged time.
What Parents Are Actually Choosing Between
The framing that has taken hold in a lot of parenting conversations right now is tech versus no tech. That framing is not useful. It lets schools and edtech products off the hook by making the question about the hardware instead of the experience.
The more useful question is: what is my kid actually doing for the hour they are on that screen.
If the honest answer is clicking next, watching, and waiting, that is the problem. The solution is not to remove the screen. The solution is to put your kid in an environment where the screen is a tool they are operating, not a conveyor belt they are riding.
That is not a technology question. It is a design and expectation question.
At Globeskool, we are an online school for kids aged 8 to 16 built on exactly this line. Not anti-tech. Anti-passive. The core subjects are there, but so are the skills that schools tend to skip: critical thinking, problem solving, communication, creativity, and working with technology in a way that keeps the kid in charge. Real projects over passive consumption. Judgment over recall.
If your kid is in the headphones-in, clicking-next scene right now, the starting point is a 5-minute assessment that shows you where they actually are and what a different approach could look like.