In the early 19th century, textile weavers across England found themselves being rapidly replaced by machines. Seemingly overnight, a once highly skilled profession was reduced to low-grade piecework.

So the weavers fought back.

Under the banner of a mythical figure named Ned Ludd, they destroyed mechanised looms and burned high-tech knitting frames. For a brief moment, they reminded the world that technology is never “just a tool”. It always reshapes the people and communities forced to adopt it.

History remembers these rebels as “Luddites” - a modern slur for anyone seen to resist technological progress. But those supposedly backwards weavers saw the cost of uncritical adoption of new technology.

Two centuries on, education technology deserves a similar reckoning.

For years, the story around edtech has been overwhelmingly optimistic. Schools have embraced new devices and platforms in good faith, believing they would boost learning and maximise outcomes.

But that promise is increasingly difficult to square with the evidence.

How edtech tools are reshaping classrooms

A substantial and growing body of research shows that, far from boosting learning, pupil-facing technology often undermines learning. And while data is never the only factor in educational decision making, this should at least prompt some hard thinking about how these tools are reshaping our classrooms, learning habits and professional practice in ways few of us intended.

I raise these points not because I am anti-tech, but because I am pro-learning.

Luckily, when we understand the mechanisms through which digital tools impair learning, the path forward becomes more obvious.

Consider one of the most fundamental academic skills of all: reading.

For more than two decades, researchers have known that pupils comprehend and remember less when reading from screens, compared with reading from paper. Yet despite this, schools and exam boards continue shifting textbooks, novels and assignments online.

Many educators assume that pupils will eventually adapt; that with enough practice, or the right platform, digital reading skills will improve. But the “screen inferiority effect” is not a practice problem or a software problem. It is rooted in biology - and no new app, platform or update can erase it.

It begins with space.

Deep comprehension to shallow skimming

Have you ever tried to scroll back to something you’d just read on a screen, only to realise it has effectively vanished? You know it was there a few swipes ago, but now you can’t locate it. That’s not your imagination - it’s your memory system failing.

Much like a GPS, the hippocampus (our brain’s memory centre) builds a continuous spatial map of the world around us. And each time we learn something new, that memory becomes anchored in a specific three-dimensional location within that map.

When we read from paper, every word occupies a fixed physical location. If you’re reading a printout of this article, this sentence exists right here - and this spatial position becomes part of the memory you’re forming. This is why readers often remember where in a book an idea appeared (about 20 pages in, left-hand page, near the top), even if they can’t recall the exact phrasing.

Digital text has no such stability. If you’re scrolling through this article online, then this sentence, which first appeared at the bottom of your screen, is now sitting near the middle, and will soon vanish off the top. With no fixed location for ideas to attach to, the spatial scaffold that supports memory collapses.

As a result, reading from screens often triggers an unconscious shift from deep comprehension to shallow skimming - glancing, scrolling and extracting instead of truly learning.

Now let’s consider another core academic skill: writing.

As classrooms become increasingly digital, should young children still learn to write by hand? Or should schools shift early instruction towards typing?

There is a strong biological case for keeping handwriting at the centre of early learning.

First, handwriting builds fine motor skills in a way typing simply cannot. Whereas typing relies on broad, repetitive finger movements, handwriting requires precise, dynamic control. Each handwritten letter demands constant micro-adjustments in pressure, angle and motion: movements that strengthen fine motor coordination.

But this is about more than penmanship. Writing and reading both recruit overlapping neural systems, and strengthening one supports the other. Put simply, children who can write fluently by hand are more likely to read fluently by eye.

Brain-imaging studies make this clear: when pre-literate children write letters by hand, they activate the same reading circuit they will later use to decode printed text. Unfortunately, typing and tracing do not produce this activation.

Cognitive benefits of handwriting

Handwriting also benefits from variability. Each tool (pencil, crayon, marker) feels different in the hand. Each surface (paper, cardboard, blackboard) offers unique resistance. Each letter form (upper-case, lower-case, cursive) calls for a different motor pattern. This variability makes handwriting a deep, flexible motor skill; one that adapts well across settings and transfers easily to new contexts.

Typing, by contrast, is inherently uniform. Keyboards may differ slightly in size or layout, but the basic action of pressing a key never changes. Whether you tap the keys lightly or pound with force, the result is identical. This consistency limits the depth of motor skill being formed and hinders transferability.

For older students, handwriting also drives deeper thinking. Because handwriting is slower than typing, students must filter, prioritise and adapt ideas as they write. This “processing bottleneck” is one reason why handwritten notes consistently lead to better understanding and memory than typed notes - and that advantage nearly doubles when students revise their notes prior to an exam.

In the interest of space, I won’t explore the additional roles that handwriting plays in identity formation and conceptual development. Suffice it to say, these biological mechanisms illustrate why handwriting provides cognitive benefits that typing simply cannot replicate, particularly in the early years when the foundations of literacy are being laid.

Diagnosing a problem is one thing. Changing course is another. So, what practical steps can teachers take when digital tools are already baked into school life?

A good place to begin is by considering how technology interacts with memory.

Recall, don’t offload

Let’s try a quick experiment.

Question 1: What was your childhood best friend’s phone number?

Most readers can rattle it off instantly, even though they haven’t dialled it in decades.

Question 2: What is your current best friend’s phone number?

Most people have no idea - because their phone remembers it for them.

This reveals one of learning’s least appreciated truths: memory is constructive. The more we actively recall something, the stronger that memory becomes. That’s why we remember countless details from our favourite TV shows, even if we’ve only seen them once. Every time we talk about them, quote them or debate them, we reinforce those memories.

That’s also why we remember almost nothing from last week’s Zoom meeting. Without follow-up, there’s no recall - and without recall, there’s no memory.

Digital tools short-circuit this process. They store information so we don’t have to recall it. We still form memories when using them, but usually not of the information itself - only knowledge of how to access it.

And there’s a profound difference between knowing something and merely knowing where to find it.

To overcome this issue, teachers can:

1. Turn off multiple-choice quizzes on devices: use open-ended prompts that require pupils to retrieve information from memory instead.
2. Turn off search and summary functions: have pupils read full texts and process ideas through discussions.
3. Turn off auto-correct: ask pupils to apply grammar and spelling rules themselves.

If we want pupils to retain and apply what they learn, technology must be used to support effortful recall - not to bypass it.

Stretch the context

Human declarative memory comes in two distinct forms:

1. Episodic memories: facts or ideas tied to a specific time and place.
2. Semantic memories: general knowledge, independent of any particular context.

Why does this matter?

A recent study assessed the creative abilities of two groups of patients. One group had frontotemporal dementia, which impairs focused, sustained thought. The other had semantic dementia, which erodes general knowledge but leaves personal memories intact.

The results were striking. The frontotemporal group performed nearly 45 per cent below healthy controls. But the semantic group scored nearly 80 per cent lower.

This tells us something critical: semantic memories are our usable knowledge. They allow us to move beyond our own lived experiences and apply ideas flexibly. In other words, they are the backbone of higher-order thinking.

So, where do semantic memories come from?

They emerge from multiple, varied episodic memories. Each time we encounter the same idea in a new context, the brain extracts any consistencies and builds a semantic representation.

If a child practises maths in a classroom, a library and at home, the only constant is the maths itself - so the brain extracts the equation (making it more freely transferable). But if that child practises only in a single location, everything stays constant and the brain fuses context with content (making it more confined and harder to transfer).

This is where digital technology becomes a problem.

Screens impose a narrow, uniform, repetitive context. When every idea is learned through the same device, the device itself becomes part of the memory. Over time, knowledge becomes tied to the tool, and pupils struggle to use it anywhere else.

To overcome this, teachers can:

1. Alternate offline formats: if a concept begins digitally, revisit it through classroom discussion, physical practice or hands-on work.
2. Schedule deliberate screen breaks: during remote learning, have pupils complete readings or problem sets on paper before returning online.
3. Vary the digital context: if everything must stay online, mix formats (videos, PDFs, typed discussion, games, simulations) to disrupt over-contextualisation.

Our goal is to break the tight bond between content and device so pupils can carry what they’ve learned into the real world.

Restore the story behind the facts

Try this with pupils: at the start of class, display a list of 15 random words (motorcycle, glasses, lizard) and give everyone one minute to memorise as many as they can.

But here’s the twist - ask half the class to visualise each word in detail, and ask the other half to weave the words into a short story.

At the end of class, ask everyone to write down as many words as they can remember.

Most assume the visualisation group will perform best - after all, images are incredibly powerful. But nearly every time, the narrative group performs best.

Why? Because humans think in stories.

Facts only become meaningful once they are connected to one another in a coherent, cause-and-effect chain. Narrative is the brain’s default mode for understanding the world. Whenever information is embedded within a story, it becomes easier to make sense of, remember and apply later.

Unfortunately, digital technologies specialise in fragmentation. Short videos, quick content bursts and endless scrolling splinter information into context-less bits. This disrupts narrative formation, which, in turn, weakens memory and makes deep thinking nearly impossible.

If digital tools are going to remain in classrooms, we must rebuild the narrative ourselves.

Teachers can do this by trying the following:

1. Open with a frame: begin lessons with an offline story that provides context for the digital material to follow.
2. Connect to lived experience: invite pupils to share personal narratives that link their own lives to the digital content.
3. Turn fragments into flow: have pupils create physical concept maps or flow charts from online material, transforming scattered bits of content into a structured understanding.

If the brain thinks in stories, and digital tools strip stories away, then our job is to help pupils restore the narrative.

The Luddites weren’t afraid of machines. They were afraid of what blindly adopting machines would do to the people forced to use them. Ultimately, their warning wasn’t about technology; it was about values.

Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist, educator and author. This article is an edited extract of his new book The Digital Delusion, which is out now

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