By Shane Smith

On April 16, Welch Public Schools in Craig County released a statement informing parents and students that the district would be ending their “one laptop for each student” policy, beginning in the fall semester. Rather than taking their laptop with them wherever they go, students would no longer have an individual device assigned to them, and all laptops would remain in the classroom – only to be used when needed. It doesn’t take too much guesswork to understand that the district is finally acting on a fact of reality that we all know to be true: laptops are making it impossible for children to learn at school, and handing them out like candy has been an enormous mistake.

Across the country, albeit few and far between, school districts are taking the same necessary step of removing laptops from the classroom, in an effort to remove distractions and return the classroom to a place of learning. As greater numbers of parents and teachers wake up to the destructive presence of “ed tech,” we’ll see a domino effect of courage as communities demand removal of the devices that are preventing our children from learning.

News of the Craig County district taking the heroic and necessary step of removing distracting and corrupting technology from the classroom gives me hope that at least some education leaders are beginning to come to terms with one of the greatest crises of the modern, high-tech era: computers in the classroom. While phone bans have been a good first step, they don’t strike at the root of the problem.

Simply put, the presence of internet-connected devices in the hands of every student – used with little to no oversight – is having a devastating and irreversible effect on their minds and souls. We have ignored this blatantly anti-education experiment for far too long.

Reading comprehension and math scores have plummeted since we’ve flooded our classrooms with “ed tech” exposure, and addiction to internet porn among adolescents is skyrocketing. This epidemic of what can only be described as “brain rot,” is spreading as children spend almost every moment in the classroom staring at a screen.

What are they doing on their computers? Playing games, watching movies or YouTube, or worse – bypassing the feeble internet filters to find explicit content. They do almost anything other than classwork. A simple Google search results in horrific stories of elementary-aged children discovering explicit content online while using their school-issued devices. Stories also abound of cyberbullying, and of a budding addiction to online content that is consumed for almost the entire school day.

While we can blame parents, legislators, and society at large for what has happened, a big portion of blame should be laid upon the shoulders of our school administrators, who have recklessly distributed these devices. Rather than a safe space to learn, schools have become pushers of Big Tech’s digital opiate, ensuring that all children develop this addiction as soon as possible.

School should be the one place where students are safe from and free of constant access to a screen, but instead the classroom has been transformed into an 8-hour unsupervised internet free-for-all. “Laptops for all” has destroyed and distorted the minds of our children in a way that no enemy ever could. Internet-connected devices, given to all students, have become not only weapons of mass distraction, but weapons of mass corruption as well. Everyone who has grown up in the internet age knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I’m old enough to remember when internet-connected computers were first introduced in the classroom in the 1990’s. I was in middle school, enduring the gale-force winds of puberty, as were all my classmates. We should all understand by now that this point in a young boy’s life is the absolute worst time to give them internet access with little oversight. What did adolescent boys at my school do with the computers? Exactly what you’d imagine: we found the most explicit content we could think to search for.

This was, and still is, a universal experience for all of America’s youth, whether they want to admit it or not. This is the fruit of in-school internet access. Anyone with a brain understood that this would happen, and yet teens and preteens are still given internet access the moment they step on campus.

In hindsight, these teachers – blinded by the possibilities – remained willfully ignorant of the negative effects of the internet on our young minds. You’d think we would have learned an important lesson from all this. Clearly, we did not. As internet access expanded, we’ve granted unfettered access to every succeeding adolescent generation, and thrown the consequences into the wind. And the consequences are nothing less than the eradication of their innocence, as they view the most depraved content imaginable from the safety of their government-bestowed screens. Their mental faculties are destroyed as they acclimate to a rapid-fire assault of videos and images, while impotent teachers pretend not to notice. How could we have let this happen? Are there any adults in charge at all in our schools?

To comprehend just how fundamental the internet has changed the experience of children, think back to how explicit and inappropriate content was treated by pre-internet society. Porn was cordoned off strictly from children, as was explicit music. We all remember the “adult film” section of movie rental stores, and we all snickered any time we watched some adult wander in there. Explicit music had an age restriction – you couldn’t purchase it unless you were 17. On the whole, children were safe from these mind-warping and innocence-shattering threats.

Contrast that with how we’ve changed over the past 25 years. Every child who is given a phone or laptop has access to all the worst possible content at their finger tips. If they don’t have a phone, one of their friends does, who proceeds to show them anything they want to see. A 2022 survey of American teenagers conducted by Common Sense Media found that 1 in 4 teens viewed pornography during the school day, and almost half of those used school-issued devices to do so.

This is an absolute disaster that demands a severe legislative response. This collective removal of the guard rails around this garbage, should be seen as a crisis of the highest order. But it’s been met with a shoulder shrug and a blind eye.

The internet is a powerful tool – but dangerous – with the potential to inflict great emotional and psychological damage if used the wrong way. We have to stop viewing the internet as something that can be freely handed to children and not expect them to do exactly what we did with it when we were young. Our experiences should have shaped present-day policy, but it clearly has not. We’ve gone in the exact opposite direction, with predictable results. But we can change that.

What would it look like to course-correct the path that schools have been on for over a decade? First, the Oklahoma Legislature should step up and force a public audit of student-issued devices in major school districts, and find out how these laptops are being used. I’m guessing that the results will horrify us. We’ll find that elementary and middle schoolers have been given access, by the schools, to the worst content online. Images and video that they would otherwise never have seen, now reside within their impressionable minds all thanks to the mindless laptop-for-all policy of their school. We would also find that students are just passively surfing the web the entire day, watching YouTube, listening to music, anything other than learning. How do I know? Because this is the same result found from every audit already performed of student devices across the country. There is a reason that most school districts shy away from such scrutiny – the outrage from parents would be deafening.

The next step would be to remove every trace of “ed tech” from the classroom. No more laptops, no more tablets, no more digital distractions. We can cut ties with Big Tech and they’ll be fine on their own. Pen, pencil, paper, and a class of students again looking at the teacher, not a screen. Students would be given a priceless gift – learning how to navigate 8 hours of their day without a screen. As screens rapidly take over every other aspect of their lives outside of school, they probably need this more than anything.

The fallout from the results of an audit of school-issued laptops would create the political will to pass legislation to remove them. Who among our legislators will get this ball rolling? It’s past time to right this wrong, and whoever steps up to the plate will be seen as a hero for generations.