by Enrico Nardelli
(versione italiana qua)
VERSION WITHOUT LINKS TO AVOID FLAGGING BY GOOGLE WRONG ALGORITHMS
I had recounted, in a previous article, how the 2023 UNESCO report had sounded a first, dramatic alarm bell by defining Ed-Tech (that is, the use of digital tools in the education system) a "tragedy" with immense costs and virtually no benefits.
On January 15, 2026, before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist specializing in learning and technology, recounted another silent tragedy: that of an entire generation sacrificed on the altar of digital technology.
Horvath, director of LME Global and author of the volume The Digital Delusion, is neither a nor a nostalgic. He is a scholar who has spent years analyzing tens of thousands of studies on the use of digital technology in education.
For over a century we have taken for granted that each generation was more intelligent than the previous one. This is the so-called "Flynn Effect." But Horvath presented chilling data: starting from the mid-2000s, the cognitive development of young people in the developed world stopped growing. In many cases, it has gone backward.
Horvath didn't limit himself to words. He brought before the committee, which conducted a public hearing (here the full video) on the theme "Plugged Out: Examining the Impact of Technology on America's Youth," data from major international studies involving millions of students in dozens of countries. These include PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), the triennial survey on the level of preparation of 15-year-old students, TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), a study that analyzes international trends in mathematics and science learning, and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), an international survey that evaluates the reading skills of primary school students.
The conclusion is uniform: greater daily exposure to digital tools consistently corresponds to lower scores in reading, mathematics, and science. The more time spent in front of a screen, the worse the performance. The data is available within his written testimony.
I know very well that correlation is not causation, but it seems objectively difficult to identify causes other than the massive spread of digital technology in schools. And, in any case, the precautionary principle suggests the advisability of carefully reconsidering the situation.
On the other hand, what Horvath reported is in agreement with many independent studies related to reading and writing with digital devices.
For reading: text comprehension and retention are more solid on paper than on screen, particularly for complex or long texts. Spatial stability, reduced scrolling, and physical interaction with the paper page support memory formation and comprehension. The scientific literature on this point is substantial and convergent. A meta-analysis of 49 studies published in 2024 reaffirmed that students who read on paper consistently achieve higher scores on comprehension tests compared to those who read the same material on screen. Here is an informal description of what is called the "screen inferiority effect."
For writing: taking notes by hand is superior, for long-term learning, to taking notes on a computer. From the pioneering study by Mueller & Oppenheimer of 2014 (with the significant title "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard") to the recent article by Italian neuroscientists from 2025, the evidence is consistent. While typing on a keyboard encourages literal transcription and superficial processing, writing by hand requires synthesis, comprehension, and reorganization of concepts, and is therefore superior in an educational context.
Horvath examined nearly 400 meta-analyses, covering over 21,000 research studies related to the use of digital technologies for teaching. Most of these achieve results below the effectiveness of normal classroom instruction. In other words: a good teacher who lectures in a traditional way produces better results than almost all digital tools analyzed in the scientific literature.
Only in very limited contexts — adaptive exercises for basic skills and targeted remedial interventions — do digital tools manage to approach significant results. In these cases they work because they support the repetition of exercises in well-defined areas, not because they improve deep learning.
The reasons for this lie in neuroscience. When attention is repeatedly interrupted, three costs emerge: loss of time due to task switching, increase in errors due to cognitive interference, and weakening of memory formation, since learning shifts from deep encoding toward habitual processing.
The problem is that digital platforms are optimized for rapid switching between content, novelty, and continuous attention capture. Even when used for academic purposes, they activate the same behavioral patterns that students practice in recreational screen use: frequent checking, rapid scrolling, multitasking. These digital devices train young people's brains to respond to brief, intermittent, gamified stimuli. Technology doesn't make them smarter. It makes them dependent on the immediate reward circuit.
Deep learning, the kind that forms lasting memory and critical thinking, is built through interaction between people and in the continuous and thorough exercise of one's mental capacities, not in the relationship between a person and a screen. The human brain learns through relationships, socially mediated error, the physical presence of others — that didàskalos that Plato knew to be inseparable from the mathetés. Technology, if well used — and this is a very critical "if" — can enhance this encounter between teacher and student. But it can never replace it.
The fatal error of the last twenty years has been believing that a tablet could be a bridge to knowledge, when in reality it has been a wall that has prevented access to deep cognitive functions. Technology is a tool for experts who want to lighten their work, Horvath reminded us, it is not the way novices learn to become experts. A calculator is an extraordinary tool for someone who already knows statistics; it allows them to externalize the effort to concentrate on strategy. But if you give the same calculator to a student who has not yet internalized the meaning of various methods, you are not helping them: you are preventing them from building the synapses necessary to understand statistics.
The central point of all of Horvath's work, with which I completely agree, is not the rejection of technology, but bringing it back to its true nature: a useful tool, not a substitute. The absolute priority must be learning, which must be carried out in person with human teachers, as we have always done, that is, in an analog way. In this regard he stated, during his testimony: "The secret to learning to use digital technology is not to use digital technology. It's learning analogically, the way we've always learned, and then using technology to facilitate the exercise of cognitive abilities we've already developed."
Yet, many opinion newspapers (especially those that have praised distance learning) ignore this wealth of evidence. They prefer to tell stories of "innovative schools" with interactive whiteboards and classrooms without books. Of course, it's easier to celebrate technological novelty than to face the effort of building true educational relationships and investing resources to have well-prepared and well-paid teachers, the only ones who can make a difference.
Who is thinking about the long-term well-being, cognitive and otherwise, of future generations?
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The original version (in italian) has been published by "StartMAG" on 26 April 2026.
by Enrico Nardelli (versione italiana qua ) VERSION WITHOUT LINKS TO AVOID FLAGGING BY GOOGLE WRONG ALGORITHMS I had recounted, in a p...
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