Let children be bored. Gamified learning is not always a good thing.
Credit: Illustration: Jon Reyes for AJC
Public school students across the metro Atlanta area returned to school this month and, for many, it was a return without a key accessory: their cellphones.
This last year, the Georgia Legislature passed “The Distraction Free Education Act,” a bill that restricts all personal electronic devices from bell to bell for public school kindergarten through eighth graders.
Although the bill doesn’t formally go into effect until next school year, many metro districts have implemented this law for this school year, and several have expanded it to include high school students.
This legislation has been pretty disruptive, at least according to the small sample size of the morning carpool I drive. The largest point of contention: the school lunchroom. One student wondered how the faculty was going to manage students now that they didn’t have something with which to distract themselves.
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It got me thinking: Do we know how to be bored anymore? My mother, a public schoolteacher herself, often quoted the adage, “Boring people are bored.” I think she was acknowledging that blank spaces are often a breeding ground for creativity, an opportunity to sit in the boredom and find your way out.
But, like others, where there might be the slightest opportunity for boredom, I too often find myself reaching for my phone to check the news, my email or to scroll social media. Technology has become a reliable offer of entertainment.
Credit: Handout
Technology served a purpose during COVID but at a cost
This technology-fueled movement toward boredom intolerance didn’t start in 2020, but COVID was undoubtedly an accelerant in changing the way we interacted with technology.
I know in our household, we had a preschooler who had far more screen time than her older siblings did at that same age, as my husband and I were trying to balance our jobs and help our three older children navigate virtual school.
Although an abundance of screen time may not have been what we would have chosen, it kept our youngest daughter occupied in a time when we were just trying to keep our heads above water. We were not alone in this.
The pressures within homes changed how many relied on technology, but these same and other pressures also changed how schools relied on technology.
When over $6 billion in COVID-related educational funding flowed from the federal government to Georgia schools, investments in technology were one of the ways schools tried to address the educational challenges COVID created.
This influx of technological investment has the potential to be a really good thing, but we have to ask the twin questions: How is our education technology serving us? and What is our education technology costing us?
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To be clear, there are clear potential benefits to education technology. One of the prime examples is its ability to offer a differentiated curriculum like never before.
What used to be a single worksheet completed by everyone in the class, regardless of their learning level, can instead be unique, challenging assignments based on the starting point of each student.
Moreover, there are applications and uses of educational technology that engage students who would never have been engaged in a traditional learning environment. And all of this, and other applications, have the potential to prepare our students for a global economy.
Credit: NYT
But these potential benefits are just one part of the equation. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who penned “The Anxious Generation” and has been the most prominent voice calling for cellphones to be out of schools, has started talking more about the potential harms of educational technology in the classroom and the “gamification” of education.
If you have a K-12 student, you have likely seen this firsthand. There is probably some program your child has been assigned that rewards them for simple activities in the same way a video game might: competing through levels and earning prizes. From my experience, kids generally love this particular application of technology, but at what cost?
As a recent guest on the Armchair Expert podcast, Haidt admitted that children would be more engaged with gamified educational programs but said there was a downside. “If you gamify a quarter of a kid’s day, their brain — that is a lot of quick dopamine — is going to react by down-regulating dopamine neurons (so) that they’re less sensitive to dopamine. … When you take away the gamification, they are in a deficit state which means everything is boring and unpleasant.”
Haidt contrasted this with tasks that require executive functioning to make progress toward a long-term goal.
Refine policy to encourage critical thinking and creativity
We have become increasingly entertainment saturated and boredom intolerant in many environments, including our schools.
There has been a lot of state and national coverage of the learning losses that occurred during COVID — and rightly so — but I suggest we have yet to fully grasp the changes to both learning practices and classroom management that accelerated and were changed during that period.
How and how often we use educational technology are essential policy questions.
The Distraction Free Education Act is a good start, but there is an opportunity to refine education technology policy in our state so it serves the goal of creating deep-thinking, resilient, creative and, yes, occasionally bored children. Leaving space for the effortful wins is a worthy struggle.
Hannah Heck, a lawyer, founded a public policy, advocacy and consulting practice. She lives in Atlanta and spends most of her time in board service, supporting her four children and writing about life raising a son with Down syndrome.
About the Author
Hannah Heck, a lawyer, founded a public policy, advocacy and consulting practice. She lives in Atlanta and spends most of her time in board service, supporting her four children and writing about life raising a son with Down syndrome.
