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Transcript: Why AI In The Classroom Is A Catastrophe – Sophie Winkleman

Editor’s Note: In this compelling talk from ARC 2026, Sophie Winkleman argues that the increasing integration of screen-based technology and AI into classrooms is detrimental to children’s cognitive development and imaginative capacity. She contends that “edtech” often prioritizes engagement through addictive design features over meaningful learning, while physical methods—like handwriting and reading from books—are essential for deep, embodied understanding. Ultimately, Winkleman calls for a return to analog education, urging society to protect children from the “civilizational earthquake” of AI and prioritize human-centered mentorship in schools.

TRANSCRIPT:

When Children Forgot How to Play

SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: Good afternoon, everyone. Lovely to be here. A few months ago, I was introduced to a headteacher, Justine, who works at a primary school in Hertfordshire. One sunny afternoon, Justine cancelled the lessons, opened the back doors and told the children to go and play. They looked at her confused and shuffled out to the grassy area outside the school. She watched them stand there awkwardly for a few minutes until they asked to come back in. She came to realise that these children did not have the capacity to go and play. They couldn’t create their own fun, their own entertainment. So accustomed were they to receiving their entertainment via their devices.

When we talk about children, social media, smartphones, iPads, we tend to frame the discussion around harmful material. But Justine’s children weren’t traumatised by harmful material. They were dazed, glazed and passive, their young minds deactivated by constant low-level stimulation.

Justine removed screen-based story time from the school’s timetable and encouraged parents to let their children read or just get bored at home. Boredom costs nothing and is a crucial catalyst for the imagination. A few weeks later, Justine tells me the children can’t be stopped from tearing outside at break time, their imaginations and their sociability blossoming beautifully.

The EdTech Sales Pitch Nobody Asked For

Teachers like Justine, along with parents, doctors, academics and neuroscientists around the world, feel confounded that the very machines destroying children’s imaginations, concentration spans and capacity to think at home are now the principal conduits for their education at school. Internet-enabled devices are being handed out in schools across the world on the pretext of delivering a future-proof education. One million children in Britain spend nearly every lesson on a screen. Welcome to the world of EdTech.

Many parents who see what screen-based learning is doing to their child are not buying this sales pitch. They write to each other in burgeoning online communities, where are the books? Why has my child’s education been reduced to a series of links, games and videos? Why is my child accessing obscene content on his school-issued iPad? The school filters don’t work. Where is my child’s private data going? Why is my child online for his homework every night? He’s getting headaches. He’s getting cranky. He keeps going off-task. He’s going to sleep later. And now he’s short-sighted. I did not sign up to this.

The Global Pushback Against Screen-Based Learning

A number of these parents are moving their online rage to real-world action. The US-based alliance Schools Beyond Screens recently persuaded the Los Angeles School District to approve the most sweeping pullback on screen time of any public K-12 system in the US. Anya Meksin, the Deputy Director, says, “Cognitive skills are declining. Attention spans are declining. Executive functioning skills are declining. Human brains don’t work well by learning from screens. All the research says one thing. Why are the schools doing another?”

Equivalent pushbacks are happening in Utah, Delaware and New York. Similar mass action has happened in Madrid, where under-12s no longer learn on devices. John McGhee, Director of Education in Glasgow, recently binned a huge maths app in schools, saying, “You can do the work on paper as well as you can on the app, and you’re just moving the teacher away from the child. That’s no way to teach.” Denmark and Sweden are spending hundreds of millions on the reintroduction of textbooks. These countries and cities are the first fish swimming away from a misdirected shoal.

Slot Machine Tactics Built Into the Classroom

The data from the last 15 years shows that as soon as devices entered the classroom, scores started plummeting around the world. Of course, that’s when social media exploded into children’s lives too. But social media, smartphones and EdTech are all fins and teeth of the same shark. The social media design features deemed harmful enough to restrict for children, the streaks, the daily rewards, the endless notifications, are the very same features found in EdTech apps. These are slot machine tactics, the same unpredictable reward which keeps an adult scrolling, now built into maths, languages and even reading apps. A reading app, has there ever been a more oxymoronic concept?

Engagement Over Learning: The Business Model Behind Educational Technology

Will Ellis from Reclaim Childhood says, “These features do not appear in educational products because they improve learning. They appear because they improve engagement, and engagement is what the business model requires.”

The Physical Act of Reading: Why Books Beat Screens

The distracting features are by no means the only downside. Material read from a page in a book implants in the brain more profoundly than the exact same material read from a screen. We are physical beings, we must learn physically. Reading from a page in a book, the feel of the paper, the design of the cover, the typeface, the smell of the pages, the spatial position of a phrase on a page, all of these things contribute to the holistic embodiment of learning.

Reading on a screen is both immaterial and aspatial. What you’re reading right now is in the same place as what you were reading 10 minutes ago, half an hour ago, yesterday. It’s flat, it’s unimpactful, the information won’t stick.

The neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath explains how, after learning something, the brain needs a spell of downtime, rather like a digestion period.