0:02 Thank you guys. Name is uh Dr. Jared
0:04 Cooney Horvath. I'm a former teacher
0:06 turned cognitive neuroscientist who
0:08 focuses on human learning. Um and I do
0:10 not receive funding nor have I ever from
0:13 big tech. Um
0:15 so a sad fact our generation has to face
0:19 this. Our kids are less cognitively
0:22 capable than we were at their age. Um
0:24 since we've been standardizing and
0:25 measuring cognitive development since
0:27 the late 1800s, every generation has
0:29 outperformed their parents. And that's
0:31 exactly what we want. We want sharper
0:33 kids. And the reason for this largely
0:34 has been school. Each generation spends
0:36 more time in school. We use school to
0:38 develop our cognition. Congratulations.
0:41 You see your correlation. Until Gen Z.
0:43 Gen Z is the first generation in modern
0:46 history to underperform us on basically
0:47 every cognitive measure we have from
0:50 basic attention to memory to literacy to
0:52 numeracy to executive functioning to
0:54 even general IQ even though they go to
0:56 more school than we did. So why? What
0:59 happened? What happened around 2010 that
1:00 decoupled schooling from cognitive
1:02 development? It can't be schools.
1:04 Schools basically look the same. It
1:06 can't be biology. This has had enough of
1:08 time to change. The answer appears to be
1:11 the tools we are using within schools to
1:13 drive that learning. across 80
1:14 countries. As Gan was just saying, if
1:16 you look at the data, once countries
1:18 adopt digital technology widely in
1:21 schools, performance goes down
1:22 significantly to the point where kids
1:25 who use computers about 5 hours per day
1:27 in school for learning purposes will
1:28 score over twothirds of a standard
1:31 deviation less than kids who rarely or
1:33 never touch tech at school. And that's
1:35 across 80 countries. Bring it home to
1:36 the US. Let's go to the US. We have our
1:40 NA. That's our big data. Take any state.
1:41 Here's here's a fun experiment you can
1:43 try. Take any state NAPE data, compare
1:46 that to when that state adopted onetoone
1:48 technology widely and watch what
1:50 happens. The NAPE data will plateau and
1:53 then start to drop. Now, as Jean said,
1:56 of course, this is all correlative. What
1:58 we really want is causitive. To get
2:00 causation, what you need is academic
2:01 research and you need mechanisms,
2:03 explanations for why we're seeing what
2:05 we're seeing. Luckily, we have academic
2:08 research stretching back to 1962 that
2:10 shows the exact same story for 60 years.
2:13 When tech enters education, learning
2:15 goes down. In fact, one of the biggest
2:17 um ed psychologists right now, Dylan
2:19 William out of the UK, recently said,
2:21 "Edte is a revolution that's been coming
2:22 for 60 years, and we're going to have to
2:24 wait another 60 because it ain't doing anything."
2:27 anything."
2:29 Now, that's research, but now we need
2:31 mechanisms. Luckily, over the last about
2:32 two decades, we've been doing a lot of
2:34 work in what we call the science of
2:36 learning. How do human beings learn? And
2:38 we now have the clear understanding of
2:40 why tech does not work for learning. And
2:42 it is all biological. It's not that the
2:44 tech isn't being used well enough. We
2:45 haven't been trained enough. We need
2:47 better programs. It's we have evolved
2:49 biologically to learn from other human
2:52 beings, not from screens. And screens
2:55 circumvent that process. I won't go too
2:56 deeply into the mechanisms. They can get
2:57 boring, but just know they're there if
2:59 you want to talk about them. So that
3:01 leaves us with two options. Option one,
3:03 when you know something is wrong, do
3:05 better. So we could just say, hey, may a
3:06 culpa, get some of this tech out of
3:08 schools, go back to what we know works,
3:10 some analog methods. Cool.
3:13 Or two, we could redefine our terms. We
3:15 could redefine what it means to be an
3:16 effective learner. I want to end with
3:19 one quick story here. Think back to your
3:20 childhood, to your schooling. I
3:22 guarantee all of us at one point took a
3:24 test on reading comprehension. And the
3:26 way it looked is this. Here's a passage
3:29 of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12
3:31 questions about that passage. Most of
3:33 them are inferential, not factual.
3:34 They're asking you to go beyond what you
3:36 just read to see what you understood.
3:39 Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading
3:41 comprehension section. Here's what it
3:43 looked like. Here is a single sentence
3:46 of 75 words. Here is one question
3:49 fact-based about that that sentence.
3:51 Next. Here is another sentence of 75
3:53 words. Here is one question about that
3:55 sentence. Next. Last year, they
3:58 redefined reading comprehension to mean
4:00 54 short sentences with one question
4:03 about each. That is skimming. That's not
4:05 reading. Why would we ever do that?
4:07 Because what do kids do on computers?
4:09 They skim. So rather than determining
4:11 what do we want our children to do and
4:14 gearing education towards that, we are
4:16 redefining education to better suit the
4:18 tool. That's not progress, that is
4:21 surrender. So as we go through our
4:22 discussion today, there's going to be a
4:24 lot of talk about smartphones and and
4:27 social media, rightly so. But I'm the
4:29 voice here to remind you that even in
4:31 schools, it doesn't matter what the size
4:34 of the screen is. if it's a if it's a a
4:35 phone, if it's a laptop, if it's a
4:37 desktop, and it doesn't matter who
4:39 bought it. Is it school sanctioned? Does
4:41 it have the word education stamped on
4:44 it? It doesn't matter. All of these
4:45 things are also going to hurt learning,
4:47 which in turn are going to hurt our
4:49 kids' cognitive development right at the
4:51 time when we need our kids to be sharper
4:52 than we are. So, thank you guys so much
4:54 for today. I look forward to talking
