Read the full transcript of Episode 91 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Jared Cooney Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion. He talks with New View EDU host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson about the neuroscience behind the book and how an education steeped in technology is changing how students learn and engage with the world.
Debra Wilson: Welcome back to Season 11 of New View EDU. I’m excited to be back for a new season of this podcast, where we’ll be digging into some larger themes that I think will resonate for our schools and school leaders right now.
This season, we’re going to be exploring conversations around the sorts of tech push-and-pulls that impact the work we do, including AI, innovation, and edtech, and how these forces will impact our schools and students into the future. And we’re going to focus some episodes around the future skills, mindsets, and dispositions our students will need for college and career readiness, and for the kinds of outcomes we want to foster so they can lead engaging and purpose-filled lives.
I think it’s going to be a great season, and I’m delighted to be able to kick things off today with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Jared is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist, best-selling author, and renowned keynote speaker with an expertise in human learning, memory, and brain stimulation. He’s published six books, over 60 research articles, and currently serves as director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities. The latest edition of his book The Digital Delusion was just released in mid-August.
Jared, welcome to New View EDU. I'm so excited you're here.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Thank you so much. It's awesome to be here.
Debra Wilson: I want to start because, like I think it's at the very beginning of the book. You just start with the statement of our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. And you note that for the entire 20th century, IQ scores rose steadily, each generation gaining approximately six points over their parents in a phenomenon known as the flown effect. Starting around the year 2000, this trend reversed across much of the Western world. And I can't wait to share this with my 20-something-year-old children who, of course, don't always find my advice particularly helpful.
Tell me a little bit about this. Like, like you kind of jump off into this book, The Digital Delusion, like from this point. Talk a little bit about what's behind this, like what some of your thinking is. I don't want to spoil the whole book for people, but I think this is like a really important place to start.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Yeah, and I love it. It's exactly as you said, we've been recording cognitive development, standardized ways since probably the late 1800s. And in that time, every generation outperforms their parents on basically every measure. So IQ is one of them, yes, but you also have literacy, you have numeracy, you have attention span, you have memory, you have creativity. On all these measures we’re always going up. And for a long time we had to address why, and the biggest answer, and of course, there's going to be a plethora of answers, diet, culture, everything changes. But the biggest answer keeps coming back to school. Every generation spends more time in school than their parents. School is where we devote time specifically to our cognitive development. Ergo, more school means better cognition.
And so now there's a causative paper, was recently published, that said for every additional year of schooling someone goes to, one to five points on IQ go up and it's a causative, it's no longer correlation. They're saying there you go, it's a straight shot. Then to Gen Z, like around 2000 into 2010, kids today are spending more time in school than we were, than our generation. Yet now all their scores on those things are going down. And I don't mean subtly, I mean pretty significantly. And again, this is across literacy, numeracy, science, IQ, you name it, even some things that we thought were not changeable.
So we have a measure called working memory limit. So everyone has a limit to the amount of information they can hold on their working memory. Now we always knew you couldn't really move it, or at least we thought. Like the argument for over a hundred years has been whatever you got is what you got. Lo and behold, Gen Z has a lower working memory limit than we do now. So somehow a biological construct that we thought was unchangeable, this thing is set in stone, no, even that is now going down.
So again, now what happened? If they're spending more time at school, but now their cognition is going down, what happened? What decoupled schooling from cognitive development? And one of the big answers, as you can probably guess, we landed on, was the influx of digital technology in school for learning purposes. It just hasn't been a very good experiment for us.
Debra Wilson: And it sounds… I mean, like I think a big premise in your book is, not only has it not been a good experience, and I should preface this by saying one thing I talk with school leaders about all the time is every child's got one shot at education. That's it. You only have one shot at childhood, you only have one shot at education. We can monkey around with all the adult things in the world, but every kid's got one fourth grade experience.
And as we all know, as we get older, I can remember, you know, some lunches from my sophomore year in high school better than I can probably remember six months ago. Like it's such a foundational time in your head, right? So, and we have been experimenting, particularly with technology in education. I mean, it, to me, education is a little bit of a rolling experiment on some level.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Yeah.
Debra Wilson: You know, we change pedagogy, we think about new ways the kids can learn or new ways that they can engage. But technology has clearly been a force through a lot of this window that you're referencing. In school or out of school, right? My kids were all Montessori kids. They didn't use a ton of technology through, you know, at least fifth or sixth grade. But even at home, they were using technology.
And so, talk about sort of your thinking behind that and in terms of that memory piece. You know, I always thought of my memory as it's almost like a party trick. I got it from my dad. He had a really good memory. But I find it interesting that we're seeing a shift there in that in that long term memory in particular.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Yeah. And I, I think you hit on a really cool point is…you're right. We only get one trip on this roller coaster here. And so when Gen Z, and now they're all growing up and they're starting to graduate, one of the messages I always tell them is like, look, that wasn't your fault. That was our fault. You never asked us to shove a screen in front of your face for six hours a day at school. That was something we did to you. And now you're suffering the consequences of our decisions.
And I'm 100% with you. I think school will always be evolving, but I genuinely believe 80 to 85% of everything we do is solid, is good. We are killing it. Go back to 2010, that was peak education. But does that mean it's perfect? No. So, but once you start to recognize that what we're really doing is playing around with 15%, we've got the core. We're now just playing with those edges, which will always evolve to make things better.
Tech was, it wasn't playing around with the 15%. It tried to replace a huge portion of what we know already works. So take something like memory. One of the biggest aspects of memory is spatial location. Where in space did things occur? That really matters. So this is why if you go back to your old school, your primary year, you're going to start getting memories left and right because the context itself will start to trigger all of these, oh, I was there once when we said this. I was standing right there when this happened.
Now, most of what we do learning-wise, analog, has three-dimensional locations. I'm in a classroom, I have a book, every word has a location, I have a worksheet, everything has a location. All of that boosts memory. A screen has no three-dimensional location. It is exactly the same thing. You use a laptop, my screen never changes, my keyboard never changes. Anything in the screen can move through it, left, right, up, down, and around. An entire aspect of human memory just starts to get dumped. So you get what's called Google dementia, is, the more you kind of use digital technology, the more—the lower your memory, you start forming memories less and less because your brain simply doesn't have enough information it needs to say, that must be meaningful. Let's form a deep memory for that.
And so that's why, like, COVID is a great example. When we were spending what, 10 hours a day on a screen, most of us remember very little from that. Now, of course, it has a lot to do with stress and environment and things are going on, but that also has a lot to do with the tool. That should have been our wake-up call that these tools are not learning tools. They are performance tools. You can get stuff done on them, but you're not going to be learning much from doing that stuff. And that's where we should have kind of drawn a line and said, adults, one thing. Kids K through 12, that should have been a completely different conversation we were having.
Debra Wilson: Did you call it Google dementia? Is that what you called it?
Jared Cooney Horvath: Yeah.
Debra Wilson: I've never heard that term before. That's awesome. And I mean I, I think what you're getting at, and I think you and I both spend a significant portion of our lives these days in airports, right? And so sometimes you're working on your laptop or you're doing emails on your phone or whatever, and you can lose time, right?
I don't think of it as flow, you know, sort of the traditional sort of happy space of flow. It's more like you've been sucked into the digital vortex for a period of time and your email I call a wiffle ball email, like you're just like, kind of hitting them back out of the cage, right? And everything kind of could be shifting around you, but you're so focused in that digital space that like, that's where your brain is.
Jared Cooney Horvath: And that's where you end up, you lose a lot of these what we're going to call pillars or landmarks that memories form themselves around, because the tool just simply doesn't give it to you. And I mean, anyone who's done— if you've ever spent an hour doing one of those rabbit holes on YouTube, you don't remember anything from any of those videos. It's not magic. You come out of it going, well, that was interesting, but I'm not going to change as a human being. It's just the, the medium itself isn't really conducive to that kind of deep memory formation and learning.
Debra Wilson: Go back for a minute, because you talk about this in the book too, which I think is an interesting distinction. And it's technology tools for performance versus, like, learning in school, right? You know, we all use these tools for performance, you know, whether it's, you know, the entirety of the Google Suite for email and calendaring and like everything else, or I used to have, actually, a fabulous sense of direction until I started using Google Maps for everything. And but, you know, I land in a you know, place I've never been, I get in a car, I turn on Google Maps, it'll get me to where I need to go nine times out of 10. It's important in Seattle, you've got to turn off the thing so that it doesn't accidentally send you to a ferry at off hours. Like, you know, there are things you have to learn to use it, but it helps with performance.
So talk a little bit about that distinction about, you know, about sort of how you've developed your thinking around that, because you're right, like technology showed up to change school, but technology wasn't developed for that purpose.
Jared Cooney Horvath: No, take it back to the very first. When, when did tech really enter school in earnest? Was the first Chromebook. And what happened there?
So this was a very small laptop that Microsoft built, assuming business people would like it because they could travel with it. It sold basically nothing. Everyone hated it. It didn't have enough power, it was just a janky machine. So what did they do to recoup costs? They sold it to schools. They said, All right, let's give it to kids.
Again, remember, now this is how tech entered schools, it was never built for them. It was never designed for them. It was simply a way to recoup money because business people didn't like the computer. So we're already off on the, on a bad foot.
But if you can think about it, that's the entire function of tool, of digital technologies writ large, is that they're performance tools. They are used for what we call expert offloading. So what offloading is, is it's basically when you know how to do something, but you don't feel like doing it.
You can use another tool to do it for you. But the only reason offloading works is because your expertise allows the machine to do things correctly.
So think about it like this: like I'm really good at statistics, right? But I hate doing it. Man, it takes me four hours to do a stats set, say. Well, I could do it online with a computer program in two seconds. But the only reason it works is because as soon as it spits out a number, my expertise allows me to go, yep, that's accurate, or nope, that's, what the, where did that come from? How did that work? By offloading, I'm still maintaining my expertise and I'm driving the tool to an outcome I need.
Now, the tools we use as experts to make our lives easier are never the tools a novice should use to learn how to become an expert. When a novice uses the exact same tool, they don't do what's called offloading, they do what's called Outsourcing. When they use the tool, they have no expertise to back it up, no way to vet the information coming out, no sense of what happened, what didn't happen, why things happen. So the best they can do is input the material, copy it, paste it, hand it to somebody else, and if they get a smile, it must have been good. At no point will they have learned the content, the structure, the skill. Nothing comes out of that. So what they end up doing is they'd build what's called a dependence.
Now, think about it. As an adult, if I use a tool to offload, and you make a great point. We learned how to read maps. We now use GPS so well that we're kind of screwed on the map situation. We've lost that ability.
Debra Wilson: I got everybody an almanac over the holidays. That was my, that was my big gift of the year, was just to try to bring back the map. I'm on a quest.
Jared Cooney Horvath: I love it.
Now think about it. So let's say one day your GPS doesn't work. Since we've already learned how to read maps, it would take us one to two days to get those skills back and we're going to be fine. But if you never learned the base skill, if your GPS is gone, you have nothing to fall back on because you never really learned anything. So I think this is where the more we can recognize that digital tools are built for expert offloading. They were never designed and they do not work for novice learning.
What it takes to become an expert is very different than what it means to be an expert and now perform that skill.
Debra Wilson: That brings us to like this meteor vector of AI coming at us, right? Like so we've had a lot of tech tools, you know, come into education through various ways and means. Chromebooks, power schools, Canvas, like, how you extricate yourself from the spider web that is ed tech is complex. And now you've got AI coming in.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Yeah.
Debra Wilson: We've had the good fortune to have the authors of The Disengaged Teen on New View EDU, and talk with them a little bit about AI. And to me, AI is like water damage, right? Like, so it finds your like, weakest points, so your least engaged kids. You know, and I love the term cognitive surrender. If I could have cognitively surrendered French when I was 14, I would have done it, right?
When I was in school, if you did, if you had something you didn't want to do, if you had a set of problems for pre-calculus, right, you would call your idiot friend who also doesn't like pre-calculus, they know just as little as you do. You would complain to each other, you might share some bad answers, and then like you would both kind of suffer through because you had to do the thing. Now you don't have to do that anymore, right?
And I hear your point, right? The expertise is not there. So if the students, you know, put the pre-calc problem or ask for the French translation, and they don't know if what they're getting back is right. They might say yeah, like, looks close enough, or maybe they do have one friend who could like, kind of at least eyeball it, and then they never do the deep squats of learning, right? It's, it hurts, it's hard, but if you do it every day like you build it up and you build that expertise.
Jared Cooney Horvath: And that becomes your baseline. Absolutely.
Debra Wilson: It's your baseline. I worry fundamentally about this. Like I mean, at this point as a parent, you know, I think a lot of parents are like, I hope I have a naturally curious kid who has a lot of perseverance because it is like the ultimate tool to avoid hard work.
Jared Cooney Horvath: And you've got to realize, too, I mean, it's, it's not just there to avoid it, it will kill curiosity. Like it's just like drugs and drinking, right? You could have the coolest kid in the world. If they turn to drinking, the drinking will sap that coolness right out of them. The drugs will strip it away and they become addicted to the drug. AI is no different. It's so, even if you have like the coolest kid in the world, this tool has all the potential in the world to damage them and take that coolness right out of them.
I'll tell you what it's good for. Nothing. It's good for just basically surrendering cognitive thought and development. This is why whenever anyone talks about AI, the data on AI, especially in learning and schools, is abysmal.
It is exactly what you'd think. It kills learning. It kills development. It increases confidence. But who can, I mean, confidence has never been the defining characteristic of learning. In fact, the more confident you are, probably, it's called the fluency illusion, probably the more work you're going to have to put into it. But somebody said something really interesting the other day. When it comes to AI and learning, the benefits are all hypothetical. The harms have all crystallized. We have data and research showing this ain't good.
How do people use it? And exactly as you said, they use it to cheat. And why? It's, you're not wrong there. It's called the law of least effort. And this isn't a human law, this is a—everything in the universe follows this exact same law. If there are two ways to achieve a goal and one is easier than the other, we will take the easiest route, the law of least effort. It's there to save energy. So when you give a kid a tool and people are like, well, you know what? Your kid could use AI to ask them questions and have a Socratic dialogue. Well, mate, I could pop my car into neutral and push it to work every morning to increase my fitness. But of course, no one is actually ever going to do that because that's not what the tool is designed to achieve.
Very rarely do I use the hard B ban in schools. I got no problem with bans. I actually think school is one giant ban. I'm fine with it. But when it comes to tech, the only times I use it, smartphones. Hard ban. No one's ever made an argument why those need to exist. And AI. Any student-facing AI, ban it. That, nothing good can come from that unless you as the teacher are literally driving it with the kid. In which case, why have the tool? You as the teacher can do the exact same thing better than that tool can in that moment. So I, yeah, I'm no, I'm no fan.
Debra Wilson: Okay, so let me push on this a little bit because I was talking to a head of school two weeks ago and we were talking a bit about AI, and they don't generally use AI in the classroom. I mean, we can talk about kids already on their laptops and what they're using, what they're not using, and how they're trying to multitask and all those things. But we were also talking about kids who are working on specific projects, right? So they've developed some level of expertise.
And you know, they're developing portfolios or maybe they're developing apps for a certain purpose or whatever. And I mean, what do you think about those use cases around AI? Like it does, you know, people are definitely using these tools to create new and different and interesting things. Like, I mean, vibe coding usually results in something unstable, but it's still like an end product.
Jared Cooney Horvath: But that's why we call it AI slop. And that's where you've got to be very clear on, what is the goal of this? Is the goal to produce a program? Then by all means use it. Is the goal to learn how to make a program? Why would you use a tool that takes away all the work of that?
So this is where you really get to come back to say, is school a learning institution or is it a performance institution? When you have these AI schools coming out saying, we guarantee your kid will make a million dollars before they graduate. That's a performance institution. Use AI. Do whatever you gotta do to make a million dollars. Fine. I don't know if any of my kids have ever made a million dollars. I've been teaching for 20 years. I don't know what any of them do. Why? Because I'm not in the business of performance. I'm in the business of helping you learn and understand how to develop your own thinking.
Perfect example, research was done looking at creativity, which is innovation using AI to do these kinds of things for you. One group of kids has AI to do creative tasks. One group of kids does not. When they're tested, the kids in the AI groups always come out with more ideas. They come out with a bigger set of ideas. Congratulations. But they are all the same. When you point to each group, they are all saying the same basic set of things. The group without AI comes up with fewer ideas, but they're all highly what we call original. They're unique to those kids, that group at that time.
So you get more work done, but that work is no good. It doesn't reflect you or your knowledge of where you want to take it. Now go to the next part of this experiment. You retest both of them on creativity, except this time you take the AI away. No one can use AI. Well, the group who never used it to begin with did fine. The group who used it the first time around comes out performing worse than their baseline, because they had believed the tool was so essential for them to do this work that when the tool was taken away, they regressed and swung the pendulum further back in the other way and actually did worse than they would have had they never touched the tool to begin with.
So this is where you get to say, man, by all means, if that teacher's like, the goal of our thing is to make an app so kids can make a million dollars, do what you got to do. But if the goal of your class is to learn how to make an app, learn it first, offload it second. The IO, people say, when should you bring in ed tech? It's when you no longer need it.
The moment you know how to write, then bring in a keyboard. There you go. Now you can type. The moment you know how to do math, then bring in a calculator. You're good with arithmetic? Sweet. Now we can bring it in to start offloading. If it's an offloading tool, you need the skill first. If you bring it in too early, you will just shunt the skill and become dependent on the tool.
Debra Wilson: So… and again, I'm going back and I was talking to the, when I was talking to this head of school, we're talking about later high school. And I think he's talking sort of about the same thing, right? Like it's, how are these students using AI as a tool? Like in a pretty deliberate way, less so much around the creative process, you know, around like what are we trying to do? A little more around like AI can actually be helpful in, in helping you get those things done.
Jared Cooney Horvath: But so what? Again, if you are in school at any level, you're not trying to get things done. There's a reason why no kid has ever won a Nobel Prize, why no kid K through 12 has ever won a Fields Medal. It's not because they're stupid, it's because they're learning. They're still in the mode where they are getting the knowledge and experiences and understanding so that they can make advances in the world. If a 17-year-old can use a tool to make a program, so can I. So it no longer becomes a, it's, who cares?
Think about it like this: a tool is only as important as what you bring to the tool. What is AI? It's a box you type words into. Surely that's not the important bit. It's, what are you typing into that box? Now, who's going to type more important things into that box? Someone who deeply understands the process of coding, of development, the step by step trajectory needed to get an app into market and what it means? Or a 17-year-old kid who was told, I know the basics of coding, now use this to make an app? Well, man, I could, again, I could do that.
So it's, one of the greatest things I've learned over my 20 years of studying the brain is, it might only take you three years to learn how to speak, but it takes decades before you have anything meaningful to say. Learning how to use a tool is easy. I could learn how to use a hammer in 10 minutes. But surely building something meaningful with that hammer is going to take years of experience. And none of that has to do with tool training. It has to do with cognitive training.
So again, I'd say, what's the purpose of your lesson? If your goal of your lesson is to make an app, do it. But if the goal of your lesson is you want to help your kids learn how to think, understand the process, troubleshoot, that, you can do that without the tool. In fact, you should be doing that without the tool, because they are still in learning mode, and that's going to make them so much better. When the tool becomes a part of their job as adults, it will make them so much better at using that tool than if we make the tool the focus of their lesson now.
Debra Wilson: I want to actually dive into that a little bit more deeply. You mentioned in one of the chapters in the book around AI, you get into the story of Narcissus. And as an English major, I appreciate anybody who jumps into some mythology.
But you're talking about, you know, students developing their identities. You know, for better or worse, like I'm not sure I was ever particularly proud of the identity I developed around my, you know, freshman French class. However, my capstone senior project was rewriting our physics lab manual. There was no AI to do that, like I just, that's what I did for my capstone project.
You talk in this chapter, though, about like students developing their identity and how tech plays into it, and particularly like, you know, you mentioned AI slop, which is another one of my favorite terms, right?
Talk a little bit about that because it's, you know, when we're talking about like learning and knowledge and developing expertise is one thing. And then there's this like other side of how students identify with the things that they create, the work that they do, that they engage with, because I haven't heard anybody talk about this the way that you talk about this in the book.
Jared Cooney Horvath: I think Narcissus is the best example of this, is when people hear about the myth of Narcissus, they assume, the, the go-to is, it's the dude who fell in love with himself. And then when you really stop and think, you realize, no, it was not the man who fell in love with himself. It's the man who fell in love with the reflection of himself.
So when you really dig down, you realize the myth was never about conceit and self-love, it was about the dangers of externalizing one's identity, of allowing the world to reflect back to you who you are, and then falling in love with that image rather than doing the hard work of figuring out who you actually are. What do you genuinely believe?
So when we talk about kids becoming more and more narcissistic these days, we're not saying they like themselves more. It's probably the opposite, in fact. What we're saying is they're farming their identity out more and more, and they're allowing the world to dictate to them who they are.
So if you think about it, one of the biggest periods of identity formation, arguably the biggest, is going to be adolescence. Now, historically, during adolescence, that is when you start externalizing your identity. You start to bounce your thinking and ideas off of people. Are they dressing like this? I'm going to start dressing like that because it made them smile. Is this guy saying this? And what you do during adolescence is you get really good at wearing different masks, because you're starting to figure out how to maneuver these different kinds of groups.
This process has historically taken place in a very confined context. There might be 15 other teenagers in your world while you're doing this. There might be 30. There might be, like, I think in my class at school, I think there were 80 of us total during that class. But the whole point was it was local and it was confined. You were bouncing off of other people, trying to figure out what it meant to be you in this world. Along comes the internet. And what does the internet do?
It explodes your group from 80 to 8 million. And now you're bouncing your idea and opinion off of just a vast amount of things. And it, and it makes the externalization of identity so much easier because now you have likes, thumbs up, pokes. It just may, it basically bakes the externalization into it. So now what are kids doing? Now they're writing songs, they're putting it online, and the song is neither good nor bad till they see how many likes it got.
That one got 100, must be a good song. That one got 10, must be a bad song. Basically, it's identity formation by committee. They're allowing the world to tell them what's good and bad. But at least during that period, kids were still writing their own music. They were still making their own art and putting that online. AI comes along, and they don't even do that. Now AI, they ask AI, can you write a poem? They'll post that online.
They'll see what likes it gets and it comes back and they'll say, Well, I guess I'm a good poet, or I guess I'm not a good poet, without realizing you had nothing to do with any of this. At no point did you stop and even say, Who am I? What do I think? What do I believe through this whole process?
So I think one of the scariest examples of that was I was talking with a school counselor at a university, and she said, I have a patient, a student, who freely admits, used ChatGPT to do the college essay to get into college, uses ChatGPT to pass all of his assignments at college, uses chat GPT to write emails to all of his peers, uses ChatGPT to write jokes, so in case he has to be with them in person. She said, this dude isn't here. There's no one in this room. And I can't work with this person because there's nothing there. He doesn't know what he likes. He doesn't know what he wants. He, he's farmed his identity out so much that now when he's in his early twenties and he's starting to get that stress or that bubble back, that what the heck is going on here? He has nothing to fall back on.
And so that's going to be her big challenge is, how do we form an identity now, when usually during that process, you were coming in and out till you established who you were. And this kid just established nothing, never once stopped and asked what he wanted. So that's, I think, going to be the greater danger of AI is, whether or not kids use it to cheat is irrelevant. Of course they do. Whether or not it's going to harm learning, honestly, is irrelevant. Of course it does. I don't think there's any debate about any of this.
How is it going to impact our children's development of who they are, what they believe, and how they interact with the world around them? That is the scarier question to me. And that, that's the one I don't hear a lot of people talking about.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I mean I think it, to me it's the core question, and you also talk about in the book, you know, sort of like the—and we, we talk about it a lot on the show and a lot at NAIS, you know, some of it is the purpose behind education. But you also talk about like the order that education brings, like you know, here's a laptop, you know, follow your interests like through this screen, like design your own education.
And when you talk about kids developing their identities that way, like it's chaos, right? Like they're, they're sort of handing it over to somebody else. They're handing the likes over to this sort of, you know, broad group. So as we're talking about things, in particular like, like student identity development and, I mean my takeaway from that is you're like, yeah, this has turned into a hot mess. Social media has helped make it a hot mess. You know, kids are sort of outsourcing a lot of this and then you have AI come in and then you're using AI to create, you know, more content to put on the internet to get more people to judge the content that the kids were never involved in growing. Like it's, it's sort of pandemonium, right?
And I get to be in a room full of adults, including all educators, and when I say, Hey, who wants to go through like their junior year in high school again? Nobody raises a hand. Like that is just not a thing. There's this other premise coming at us. I mean, social media I do think about it as sort of ghosts of bad decisions past, right? We just were not, I'm not sure how we could have been more aware, but we just were not aware of what we were just setting loose.
You can read Careless People. There's a lot of takeaways in there. But you know, but then I look at where people are going with AI in education, right? Hand, you know, hand a kid a laptop. Good luck. All of the knowledge in the world is now at your fingertips, right? Like you can learn anything. And you know, you also talk in the book about sort of that premise of education as something that actually creates structure. Like that's actually a, that's a thing that schools do, is they actually create scope and sequence and a structure for learning. I mean, how do you think, you know, school leaders listening to this, how should they be thinking of that, of that balance? And I know you're like, anti-AI and there's an element of like banning AI, but this is very much coming in to disrupt education. There's a lot of people who are like, no, AI is the answer.
Jared Cooney Horvath: It won't be the answer for long. It's a—model collapse will start to happen. I think there's two kind of ways to take this.
First is the free-for-all model. We've tried that before. It was called the MOOC. In 2006, we started releasing courses online with the understanding that anyone around the world can now access the best teachers and the best curricula. What happened? All the data from MOOCs came back, and the only people who could succeed in MOOCs were the people who already understood how to learn well.
85% of people who passed a MOOC already had a college degree, and 50% already had a master's or a PhD. It was the people who didn't know how to learn, the people who needed it the most, who couldn't succeed through it. Why? Because in order to succeed through freedom when it comes to learning, you have to have self-regulated learning skills. You have to understand the process enough to drive it. How do we get self-regulated learning skills? You go to school.
That is what we are doing in a K through 12 situation. So if you think anyone in, like maybe a couple percent of high schoolers might be able to handle it, but the vast majority of people, they need structure. It's what we do. So this is going to bring us back to AI, is when it comes to information, everyone knows the dangers of not having enough information. That could lead to wars, that could lead to famine, that could lead to drought. I don't know how to solve a problem.
But no one ever talks about the dangers of having too much information. Having too much information is just as bad, because what starts to happen is you lose coherence. All of a sudden, everything is equally important. Just open a newspaper today, on the front page of your newspaper, or I guess to make it more on your, the feed on your phone now. I don't know, that's like the new thing to do. Go for it.
Debra Wilson: I still get a newspaper.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Good, good. There, I'm with you. You will see on one page a story about a war going on in the Middle East, a story about a boat race going on in Pittsburgh, a story about a dog show coming to your town, a story about how the new Odyssey movie is faring. These are all jammed together in the same thing, given the exact same amount of weight.
What's happening is there's too much information, and now we are not sure how to parse any of it. What belongs where, what goes where, and what you do is you lose coherence. And when you lose coherence, you lose any sense of society, any sense of community around you, and really any sense of identity. You start to get what's called hyper-individualization, where everyone builds their own feed and now you lose any commonality.
So bring it back. The first big glut of information we got was the printing press. That just flooded the world with information. What happens 80 years after the invention of the printing press? We invented the very first curriculum for the exact reason that there is too much information out there. We need to structure. What do kids know? It happened in Paris. What do kids know to become Parisian citizens? What is important for them? What is not important for them? What is the best way to go through this? The structure is how they weeded through all the noise.
And what else did you get? You got a precedent-based legal system, you got the modern medical system, you've got modern politics, you got the nuclear family. All of these are in response to helping us weed through the noise of information to find what matters for us so we can grow.
Cut to AI and modern internet now. Now there's more information being popped out by AI than in human history. It's just everywhere. You see it, everything is cracking. Political parties are fraying. Why? Because it's just full of contradictions now. There's so much information, no one knows. There's no commonality to any of this. Hospital systems are fraying to Eastern esoteric medicines. The law system, now every case has to be tried individually, because there's so much data we can't, there is no precedence for this.
Everything is fraying because there's too much information. It is at that moment when school gets to make a decision. Do we double down and maintain our function as the organizers of information and knowledge? Or do we open up our doors to the free for all? If you do that, school will not exist in the way it exists now in any meaningful way, shape, or form in the next 20 years. But if you build the walled garden again, so if anyone wants to have a good read, go look up Andrew Cannarudi's Substack, The Walled Garden.
He says school needs to be so heavily constrained and so contextualized that we do one thing in these walls, and that is learn and develop. Anything that pushes against that does not exist inside of these walls. So that could mean in the real world, we got AI, we got tech, we got all this stuff. Cool. The second you step onto this campus, we have sitting down, we have discussions, we have reading hard copy books. Doesn't matter that it doesn't reflect the real world, if we want to maintain our position of helping kids cognitively grow, we need to take back that structure.
So, again, for a leader, that's, that's your choice. You can, you can choose the free-for-all model, but a lot of people have chosen that in the past, and almost none of them have succeeded. Or you can double down on the fact that we are here to do one thing. And if you do not like that thing, you don't have to go to this school. But this is what we are going to do inside of these walls, and all of our decisions are going to hinge back on that.
Debra Wilson: You know, in independent schools, relationships are at the heart of every single thing we do.
And one of my theories is that now is actually the time to lean more into humanness. You also talk in the book about how we talk about humans as machines, right? There’s a fascinating sort of chapter that you go into around technopology. And that does worry me, because it's our humanness that makes us creative, it's our humanness that makes us different, it's our humanness, you know, you also talk about empathy and how empathy is not a thing that a single individual has within them. It has to be between two people.
And when we've talked to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, she's actually done really interesting research on, you know, how the best teachers, feedback students get from teachers is part of an ongoing conversation. It's like a relationship conversation. You know, not so much, you know, here's another comma splice, which was, you know, one of my main takeaways from most of my English classes, but you know,, I really see you working hard here. This was definitely great improvement for next time. Maybe think about, you know, these five things, because students feel seen, they feel like they matter.
How do you think that will play out? You know, as we're looking at a teacher shortage, funding in education, public education, independent education is all shifting pretty dramatically. There's a lot of disruptive forces. Somebody is going to lean into, we need fewer teachers. Or we don't need as many teachers as we've had. Right? Like, let's go, let's go full dystopian here, right? Like, where does that lead when you think about relationships in education?
Jared Cooney Horvath: If we get rid of relationships in education, education just becomes a data dump. In which case, just give every kid a computer, let it rip, and they're all going to fail miserably. Because they just, you need a certain amount of data to make a data dump work. Pretty strange how that works. But if we start getting rid of teachers, people forget, man, teachers aren't important for what they know. They're important for literally who they are. Go back to concepts of resonance, go back to concepts of feedback.
This comes not from mimicking humanity. This comes from being a human. One of the biggest metaphor mistakes we make is people think the brain is a computer, the human is a machine. Those are metaphors, baby. Nobody genuinely thinks, no neuroscientist worth his or her salt genuinely thinks the brain is a computer. We know it is a lot more than a computer. A computer is a very weak version of what we have. But people take that stuff seriously. And the scary thing is, the more serious you take that, the more you elevate technology above humanity. You start to think technology is a better form of us. Therefore, it should take over.
We invented technology. Not only is it not a better form of us, we created it. It didn't create me. I invented it. Go back through history. And this is one of my favorite things. So when people are like, we can just, kids can do AI schools. Greatest way, okay. What is one of the biggest purposes of school, is to build a community. That comes through all of us working together, resonating with one another under a common narrative. You give a million kids a million different programs, you're going to get no community. You're going to get no culture, you're going to get fraying at all edges, which is something we simply do not want.
But take it even further. What drives the highest order skills we want? What do we want from the next generation? Creativity, community, communication, whatever the other C's are. We want all this stuff. Where do those higher order skills come from? A lot of people think they are separate from lower level knowledge. You have knowledge, you have skills, when the two come together, congratulations. No, higher order skills emerge from lower level knowledge. They are not separate entities. It starts with knowledge, and creativity in these higher skills emerges from it. If you do not have the knowledge, there will be none of those higher order skills to have.
And I could show you data on this for weeks. People who know more stuff are more creative. People who know more things are more critical. Not people who have access to more things, it's people who know them. So then we can go back to, if school is about embedding information, learning knowledge, what is the best way to do that? And data time and time and time again says, you do the exact same thing on a screen versus with a person, you will always learn more, comprehend better, retain more from the person.
So if our goal is learning, and we know learning works better with humans, why would we ever start investing money in something that would replace the human? And when people say we just don't have a lot of money, if you knew how much money was being funneled into tech in schools right now, whoo! The sheer number of teachers you could hire off the back of that if you just put the dang subscription down is phenomenal. But okay, you know, whatever.
But here's where I'll leave you with this: human beings. And this is, I'm just pulling stuff off the top of my head. Here we go. The Pantheon, the Aqueducts, the entire city of Venice. You can tell where I was just traveling recently. The entire rail network, refrigeration, the atom bomb, going to the moon. These are all things human beings did without the use of computers. The entire skyline of New York, with the exception of World Trade One, we, when we let humans be humans, we make a lot of mistakes, but the things we come up with are phenomenal. We answer problems better than anything else in the world. And now we're inventing a machine. We created it. That people are saying, how are we going to cure world hunger? The machine will solve that for us. No, it won't. The machine can never surpass us. It is us in a very weak form.
So as much as you can going forward, remember, take tech off the pedestal. It is not magic.
It is not even all that good half the time. Remember the power of humans, of what we are capable of when we give ourselves the time and the space to think, to create, to ideate. That is what school always was. It was giving ourselves the space and time to learn, to cut our teeth in a safe environment so that we could do incredible things as adults. We don't need tech for that. And as you'll start to see, the data is going to come back more and more. The less tech you use during that process, the more creativity and incredible things will come out of it. So do not—take tech off the pedestal, put us back on it. Humans matter.
Debra Wilson: That's awesome. Jared, thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. And I think this has been a fabulous episode.
Jared Cooney Horvath: Debra, thank you so much.