The Shady Side Of Your Kid’s School Laptop

Maybe you remember the retro anti-drug PSA of an egg frying in a pan with the dramatic tagline, “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” Or its companion spot, in which an angry dad asks his kid, “Who taught you how to do this stuff?” and the teen shoots back, “I learned it by watching you!” 

Just replace “drugs” with “screens.” Any questions?

We’re at a cultural crossroads, and Big Tech is licking its chops. Almost half of Americans say they’re “addicted” to their phones and pick them up roughly 200 times every day, starting in the first 10 minutes after waking up. Most of us over age 16 spend more than 43 hours on screens per week. Let’s rise and shine that mind-numbing beacon into our brains. 

My screen time is best summed up as a meme: “Scrolling on my phone for 15 minutes before bed is the best 3 hours of my day.” The glow of techtopia interrupts my circadian rhythm, but that’s a “tomorrow me” problem because Pinterest is my nighttime wind-down.

Taking tech-free time 

But a few tech-wary thinkers want us to quit the 24/7 screen cycle. Leveraging his experience in the tech space, Terry Gromes founded the Canary Project as a “canary in the coal mine” tool to manage toxic levels of personal device usage. He sounds the alarm on limiting tech with, well, more tech. Along with a 30-day digital detox available via the Canary Challenge app, Gromes’ initiative offers strategies to reclaim attention and human connection in a digital world.

“Most tools block apps, set time limits, or push people to step away from technology altogether. Once the tech-fast is gone, the same patterns come back — because nothing underneath has changed,” he says. He tells The Daily Wire that the key is a shift in lifestyle. “That means teaching people how to say no when it’s not necessary — even when the device is right there.”

“It’s not just how long you’re on your phone — it’s how often you’re reaching for it without thinking.” Once you get intentional about your screen time, Gromes says, “That builds virtue: self-control, sacrifice, patience, and focus.”

It all seems relatively innocuous until you really think about how often you look at screens. It’s not like I’m writing this on papyrus — and not also answering texts on my phone while I type on my laptop. There’s also a TV above my head and an X feed to monitor.

Once I’m off the clock, I’m free to max out my average seven hours a day swiping my phone to death by tracking my food, my workouts, and the weather as well as talking to ChatGPT “as a tool,” adding to my Amazon cart, setting reminders, struggle-bussing Spanish on Rosetta Stone, saving recipes, hunting for a pic from that thing, pulling up a map, grabbing a QR code, and queuing all the podcasts. Open. Close. Open. Close. Repeat. 

It’s not weird that my phone used to have trouble recognizing my face, and now it knows me with and without glasses, makeup, and consciousness. But I don’t have a problem.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut described forgoing an online delivery to go out to buy a single envelope just for the chance to delight in the mundane. He noted, “The moral of the story is, we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.” That was in 2005, when Amazon Prime two-day delivery was the latest thing. What an innocent time to be alive. 

The reality is, “they” do realize the value of humanity — at least the advantage in trading behavioral data collected from our digital “farting around.” If you’re reading this right now, your habits are being surveilled and trafficked. It’s become such a part of our lives that most of us don’t have the bandwidth to care. 

When kids are digital guinea pigs

But while adults can consent to the relentless mining of their subconsciousness, kids cannot. Still, that doesn’t keep their data from being harvested within seconds by school-sanctioned technology. 

Emily Cherkin, the Screentime Consultant, is a mother, former middle school teacher, and author of “The Screentime Solution: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family.” 

She recalls the early days of student FOMO a decade ago. Kids without phones felt excluded from social events. Even with a school-wide phone ban, social media only heightened natural classroom distractions. Digital learning management systems for grading and lesson plans were introduced. An invasive species.

“I see it as two big elephants in the room,” Cherkin tells The Daily Wire. “There are the phones, social media, and devices that parents provide. And then there are the devices that schools are providing children in the name of education. I see them as equally problematic.”

“What we’re doing in schools is so unbelievably awful. And I think most people have no idea.” She notes the push to keep the youngest cohort off devices at home “only to have those kids show up in kindergarten and be given iPads. I think people just assume that because it’s educational, it’s okay.”

She points to a nonprofit watchdog group that “found that 96% of ed tech products collect and sell data about children without parental consent.” 

Cherkin’s not opposed to research on the impact of screens on childhood development, but it’s not hard to see with our own eyes. “If you walk into a 2nd grade classroom with 28 kids silently wearing headphones, on iPads for reading time, you know something’s wrong,” she says. “I don’t understand why this is something we have to debate.”

Headline-making phone bans at schools become moot when kids can just hop onto bigger iPad or laptop screens for the same fix. Cherkin describes how school laptops require the kind of deep cleaning that offloads crumbs and stickers, along with “all the porn sites that kids [access] and inappropriate content that kids have downloaded.” 

“Pinterest is available, and Pinterest is just a backdoor to TikTok,” she says. “That’s how kids find TikTok when they’re on school computers.” Someone’s asking for detention, and it might not be the students. 

Back-breaking work

Kids also don’t get the same onboarding that the suit-and-tie crowd receives. “When you work in a corporate environment, they give you an ergonomic desk, an ergonomic keyboard, they make sure that your monitor height is at the right level so that your back doesn’t get sore. They encourage brain breaks; they put filters on the screen. We aren’t doing any of that for children,” Cherkin notes. “They get a sh*tty laptop or an iPad that they hunch over, right?”

Instead of running around a playground before school, which “improves cognition and focus,” kids are slumped over their devices. Along with worsening vision and posture, these devices are much more vulnerable than those across corporate America. 

“The sad reality is that none of this has been vetted for safety,” Cherkin explains. “When COVID happened, it just green-lit everything to roll in. There was never a reconciliation of like, ‘Does this product work? Is this safe? Do we still need it?’ These companies locked districts into multi-year contracts.” 

“Most districts average somewhere in the hundreds, if not thousands of unique ed tech products per school,” she says. Digital literacy requirements come from state legislators, “educational” platforms provide the solution, everyone gets paid, taxpayers demand results, naysayers are silenced, and the fix is in. 

“Ed tech is big tech in a sweater vest,” Cherkin suggests. “It’s easy to look at Meta as evil. It’s a lot harder to look at educational products and be like, ‘Are they evil too?’” 

“This would be like a children’s hospital being like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this new drug. The drug company assures us it’s effective. They say it’s a good thing, so we’re just going to give it to all the kids in the hospital, just to test it. Parents, you will administrate correctly, and if you don’t, it’s your fault.’ That is literally what we are doing.”

It’s going to take a team effort to right this ship. Of course, change begins at home. Luckily, we’re overwhelmed with tech-based solutions for our screen problems, including Brick, Bloom, timed lock boxes, and offloaded cameras and MP3 players. Some of the more interesting options include the retro landline-style Tin Can phone for kids (Tin Cans talk to each other for free), the Yondr family-sized black box for phone-free quality time, and the Carrier Pidge app that sends text messages at the actual speed of an airborne pigeon. 

Over here in adulting land, privacy is becoming the new luxury as high-end gyms ban phones as a premium amenity. But if not appearing in the background of a small-time influencer’s workout post isn’t worth $500 a month to you, Vanderbilt professor Arthur Brooks offers a simple three-step plan for cutting the cord. It’s free, and it’s backed by neuroscience.

“You can solve this problem with basically three steps,” Brooks explains. “Tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech fasts.” As far as timing, think “first hour in the morning, meal times, and last hour at night.” 

Instead of looking into other people’s eyes while you eat, which Brooks says we evolved to do over the last 250,000 years, “if you see your phone on the table, it cuts off the neuropeptide that is occurring to bond you to others, called oxytocin.” 

“Just that — first hour, mealtimes, last hour — your life’s going to change,” Brooks says. Maybe it really is this simple — and worth it — to cut the cord.

***

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org