Protect This Man At All Costs.

[0:00]My name is uh Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. I'm a former teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on human learning. Um and I do not receive funding nor have I ever from Big Tech. Um so a sad fact our generation has to face is this. Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Every generation has outperformed their parents and that's exactly what we want. We want sharper kids. And the reason for this largely has been school. Each generation spends more time in school. We use school to develop our cognition. until Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have from basic attention, to memory, to literacy, to numeracy, to executive functioning, to even general IQ, even though they go to more school than we did. So why? What happened? What happened around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development? It can't be schools, schools basically look the same. It can't be biology, this hasn't enough time to change. The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning. Across 80 countries as Jean was just saying, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly. To the point where kids who use computers about 5 hours per day in school for learning purposes, will score over 2/3 of a standard deviation less than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school. And that's across 80 countries. Bring it home to the US. Let's go to the US. We have our NAEP, that's our big data. Take any state and here's a fun experiment you can try. Take any state NAEP data, compare that to when that state adopted 1-to-1 technology widely, and watch what happens, the NAEP data will plateau and then start to drop. And of course, this is all correlative, what we really want is causative. To get causation, what you need is academic research and you need mechanisms, explanations for why we're seeing what we're seeing. Luckily, we have academic research stretching back to 1962 that shows the exact same story for 60 years. When tech enters education, learning goes down because what do kids do on computers? They skim. So rather than determining what do we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That's not progress, that is surrender. So as we go through our discussion today, there's going to be a lot of talk about smartphones and and social media, rightly so. But I'm the voice here to remind you that even in schools, it doesn't matter what the size of the screen is, if it's a, if it's a phone, if it's a laptop, if it's a desktop, and it doesn't matter who bought it. Is it school sanctioned? Does it have the word education stamped on it? It doesn't matter, all of these things are also going to hurt learning, which in turn are going to hurt our kids cognitive development right at the time when we need our kids to be sharper than we are.