Today, it is not uncommon for daily activities to be mediated through data-gathering screens: when you are putting gas in your car at the gas station, the screen prompts you to respond to a survey, as does the credit-card checkout device held by your server at a restaurant. How would you rate your gas-station experience today on a scale of 1 to 5? Please tap the emoji that best expresses your feelings about your dining experience!

Not only do such frequent solicitations of opinion provoke decision fatigue; they also reveal some cultural practices we have too thoughtlessly accepted, including that every momentary reaction we have to the most mundane experiences should be registered and tracked in real time. The assumption beneath it—that the more our habits and behaviors are tracked, the better we will truly understand ourselves—is also worthy of reconsideration.

These conceits have produced a culture that valorizes things that can be quantified and turned into valuable data, while undervaluing the qualitative experiences which cannot effectively be measured in the same way. This might be a tradeoff worth accepting when it comes to our shopping habits. The more Amazon knows about the brand of lightbulb I prefer, the more it can tailor its recommendations for other products I might need. The technologically enabled convenience the online shopper experiences might have real-world consequences (the decline of brick-and-mortar retail, the rise of more intrusive individual surveillance and consumer profiling), but we seem comfortable living with them.

As Mathis Bitton and Jack Sadler write in “Standing Athwart the Ed-Tech Revolution,” however, this philosophy of tracking, algorithmically personalized feedback, and screen-mediated experiences has not had a positive effect on education. Despite the loftiest promises of ed-tech evangelists, the overwhelming evidence points to failure and even harm for the students they claim to want to help.

Bitton and Sadler perform an important service by going back in time to tell their story. They are correct to point out the philosophical underpinnings of our current ed-tech enthusiasm among an earlier generation of technocrats, like John Dewey, who sought to solve perceived problems in the classroom by applying more bureaucratized and standardized solutions. These new educational technocrats embraced efficiency, quantifiability, and optimization in the classroom, in service to the idea that this would raise standards for all students.

Ironically, as they show, it was a rebellion against just such efforts at standardization that opened the door to allowing more technology into classrooms. Early ed-tech entrepreneurs promised that placing a screen in front of every child would offer a level of individual instruction that a teacher in the classroom could not. They note the rapid ascendance in popularity of Khan Academy videos, which supposedly heralded a new era of “personalized learning.” As they correctly note, “The traditional classroom format was never designed to be highly tailored to the individual; the classroom experience was social, allowing students to observe different styles of learning and gain patience or insight or kindness or boldness. To Khan, this constituted an inherent shortcoming.”

By the end of 2010s, “almost every school in America had provided devices for students,” and the clear message of ed-tech vendors and school administrators was that this was the way to prepare children for the future.

It is worth pausing to note just how quickly and uncritically this occurred—the rapid adoption in classrooms of technologies and software which even adults struggled to use wisely demanded that children manage their attention and avoid distraction in challenging new ways. It was placing digital dynamite in the hands of babies.

The authors correctly note that teachers were both wittingly and unwittingly complicit in undermining their own role by uncritically embracing ed tech. I would have liked to read more about why and how this happened. Did most teachers believe the message being sold by ed-tech purveyors? Did those who had concerns avoid raising them because they did not want to antagonize school administrators or the elected officials who voted on their annual budgets? What role, if any, did teachers’ unions or other special-interest groups play in the rapid adoption of technology in the classroom?

Bitton and Sadler also highlight how ed tech forces teachers to conform to the demands of the platforms and machines rather than adapting the machines to the needs of the classroom. In many schools, these supposed advances have turned teachers into technology supervisors—a demotion if one is measuring influence on students. Teachers are forced into the role of servants to the technology’s standards and its architecture rather than the primary guides for their students. As well, thanks to the “gamification” principles built into so much ed tech, students have less use, and less patience, for teachers, habituated as they now are to an expectation for constant, video-game-like entertainment in their daily instruction. As the authors note, “The reduction of education to a combination of entertainment and metrics mirrors similar transformations across society.”

Bitton and Sadler offer multiple examples of ed tech’s failure improve on traditional teaching methods. Those of us who care deeply about both the aesthetic charms and cognitive benefits of learning handwriting will be heartened to see the authors’ defense of this practice, and their description of how a thoughtless embrace of technology often marginalizes or eliminates traditional skills that have value for students. The embodied cognition represented by handwriting is one such skill, but we should also include less quantifiable experiences such as developing patience while learning to write by hand; the sense of pride children enjoy once they learn to write their own names in script; and their understanding of how this skill connects them to people from the past.

Although they don’t include an analysis of it in their essay, much of their critique holds true for an earlier experiment in online learning that failed to deliver on its promises: massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which were all the rage in the early 2010s, with MIT, Harvard, and other institutions launching online learning platforms that promised to bring elite education to the masses. As one analysis noted, students who enrolled in MOOCs rarely completed their courses, were unlikely to register for another course after taking a MOOC, and rarely came from the ranks of disadvantaged potential students whom MOOC promoters often spoke of as being their target audience. “The six-year saga of MOOCs provides a cautionary tale for education policymakers facing whatever will be the next promoted innovation in education technology, be it artificial intelligence or virtual reality or some unexpected new entrant,” the authors of the study concluded.

As Bitton and Sadler clearly demonstrate, it was a lesson education policymakers decided to ignore.

Ed tech also claims to be able to give every student a highly personalized experience of education, free from the human foibles of inconsistent teachers or the inefficiencies of the group classroom. Instead, it has made education both more automated and less creative for everyone, rendering the classroom experience more like a degraded version of Netflix than the Lyceum.

As well, it has led to a deterioration of important human skills and opportunities for socialization in the classroom. At home, it makes the job of parents more challenging when it comes to limiting screen time. How can you set reasonable rules around screen use outside of school when schools require students to submit their homework online, or make every assignment a screen-mediated experience?

It’s worth highlighting three specific contributions Bitton and Sadler make to the debate over ed tech. First, they situate the debate amid a longer, ongoing intellectual battle. What is education for? To shape and mold thoughtful citizens? To help create well-rounded human beings? To churn out enthusiastic consumers? Good workers? Skilled technicians? One’s approach to technology in the classroom depends on how one answers that question.

Second, as the authors note, the companies producing these devices and software have no incentive to limit students’ use of them; on the contrary, they have a financial interest in seeing as much technology in schools as possible. “Ed-tech platforms benefit from the harm that they inflict on younger generations,” they write. “The more students learn in front of a screen, the more students must learn in front of a screen, for they have lost the ability to do otherwise.” It is a vicious circle, and educators, parents, and school administrators need to be honest about the ulterior motives of the technology companies encouraging students’ use of these devices and platforms.

As well, many of the ed-tech companies’ claims are now easily disprovable. The authors note the failure of their products to yield improvements in any standardized test scores. And if efficiency and optimization are the goal, then schools should embrace things that are proven to be successful, not simply the latest technology or platform marketed as an improvement over the old way of doing things.

Finally, as the authors note throughout, these are not merely tools in the classroom, but transformative of the principles and values of the classroom experience. “Once confined to computer class—and used in limited ways, as a resource for acquiring digital skills like coding—tablets and laptops began to invade every classroom, absorb every subject, mediate every activity, and interject themselves between students and teachers, teachers and parents, and parents and administrators.”

This is the core of their critique, and something every educator and parent should understand: the creators of ed tech do not have as their goal encouraging children to think with their technology, as an extension of learning. They want to cultivate educational environments where children can no longer separate learning from technology—where the screen becomes the formative institution, both at school and at home.

The values embedded in the philosophy and design of ed tech pose a direct challenge to many of the virtues we should seek to nurture in children: curiosity, empathy, debate, emotional resilience, reasoning, and patience. Bitton and Sadler’s essay reminds us just how high are the stakes for schools that want to restore some balance between the mediated and the unmediated, and between the human and the machine.