"We’re Regressing Into The Unknown" - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

23:39Francis Foster:Well, here's another, like maybe a little bit of a counter argument. I, as I think I mentioned before we started, I, I love video games. I've been playing video games since I was a kid. Yeah. And I think if I added up the total number of hours I spent on video games, it'd be quite a lot. And if I put that time into other things, it'd be quite productive, but I'm okay. I've done all right with my life. But what I have found actually is if I'm playing like a historical video game about stuff. I've actually learned a lot from video games and it sparked my interest to go and then read about this particular medieval period that I'm playing the game about and whatever.

24:13Francis Foster:And I wonder whether the AI teaching is gamifying learning in a way that might actually be quite productive. Is that possible or are you skeptical about this? No, yay and nay. I completely respect that. You play Assassin's Creed and you're like, man, Rome was cool. Let me learn more about Rome. Totally understand that. the percentage of people doing that are going to be very slim. But for the ones that it works for, absolutely. Gamification was one of Ed Tech's biggest mistakes. So games work via addiction, basically. We want to keep your attention on a screen. And so the official metric would be called engagement.

24:52But engagement is not synonymous with learning. You can be wildly engaged. There have been movies, like superhero movies, you're wildly engaged with, couldn't tell me anything about it two days later. and then sometimes you're less engaged like a hard movie like affliction or schindler's list you're not as engaged it's not easy to watch but because of the thinking you're doing throughout it the discussions you're having you remember a ton about it two decades later so engagement is not the right metric but when we gamify something what happens is we end up focusing on the mechanics of the game how does the game work so i always say my example is always oregon trail so i grew up i'm part of the oregon trail generation to this day i can tell you everything about that game i know which buttons to press to shoot.

25:32I know where to go to find bear instead of rabbits, how to ford a river. I got it. Only recently did somebody tell me that was meant to be a history lesson. That wasn't a game. That was supposed to be a lesson for kids to learn the Oregon Trail. Mate, I couldn't tell you anything about the Oregon Trail today. I don't know who did it, when it happened, where it went. I probably ended in Oregon. That's my best guess. But the reason was because I was focused on the mechanics rather than the content of the game.

25:58Francis Foster:Now, as you explain that and I think about gaming, I go, sure, I will read about a historical figure afterwards. But if I think about a thousand hours I spent playing this game, they were spent on exactly what you're talking about. Which button do you press? How do you jump off this? That's the Duolingo issue, by the way. So somebody just did research comparing Duolingo, which is gamified, to Babel, which is a non-gamified learning app. And I do not get funding from anyone. This is just research. and they found people use Duolingo about two times more than Babbel, but they learn less. So for every hour on Babbel, you're spending two over here, yet somehow you're learning less than in that hour over here.

26:35And it's just because you're focused on how do I get my bird a little bow tie or whatever, how do I get the high score? It keeps you engaged, but it doesn't necessarily focus you on the content.

26:43Francis Foster:Use our code TRIG to get a discount on the Babbel subscription. That's horrible. I know. We'll have to cut that research out. No, no, no, that's it. Generic language app. No, no, no. I was just kidding. Go ahead, mate. But I'm really glad you used the word addiction because when it comes to phones, it really feels like addiction. One of my friends, he's got three young boys, and he goes to meet Francis. When I take the tablet away from them, it's like I'm taking heroin away from a junkie. They lose their minds. And these are well-brought-up, well-behaved boys, and they're doing a great job in parenting, and they have tablet hour once every Sunday.

27:27But he said when tablet hour is over and then they try and take the tablet away from the kid, he goes, it's like withdrawal symptoms. It was with TV when we were growing up. I remember my mom saying every time I turned off the TV, you would flip out. And it was like, all right, here comes a 30-minute meltdown. But it is addiction. It doesn't look like it. It literally is a physiological addiction. So what happens is, here's how addictions basically break down. Every addiction starts with a cue. Something has to grab your attention. So let's say my phone dings. That's an attention grabber. But cues can also be internal.

28:00I feel uncomfortable. I just woke up. I got to go to the bathroom. In response to a cue, you can now undertake an action to try and resolve it. So if my phone dings, I look at it, sweet. If you resolve a cue with an action, your brain will give you a hit of dopamine. You're going to feel good. There's your reward. So cue, action, reward. Cue, action, reward. That's kind of the cycle. Now, what happens, you do that enough times in a row, your brain's not stupid. Eventually, it's going to preempt you. You're going to go cue, ding, and your brain's going to say, I know what's coming. And it's going to spit the dopamine out before you've done any action.

28:33So here's the trick. When you get dopamine after you've done an action, it feels really good. You get that exact same chemical before you've done an action. It no longer feels good. It feels like a craving. Now it feels like an urge. Now you have to do the action just to calm your system down and get a sense of relief. So once you've moved from Q action reward to Q reward action, you've built a habit cycle. You've built an addiction. And now you are forced to behave in a way just to regain homeostasis. So that's all technology is trying to do. They don't even hide it anymore. There was a time when tech people were like, we're trying to be altruistic.

29:07We're here for the people. We love you. And now they don't even kid. They're like, we're going to pay the highest salaries to psychologists in history of the world just to build habit cycles on our machines. So when you take it away and the kid gets the cue, whether it's discomfort or my mom talked to me and they don't have that action that they can go to, the dopamine ramps, they get worse and worse and worse. They get more uncomfortable. You get yourself a meltdown. So it's very much a trackable addiction cycle. And it's not just that. I remember we did sex ed classes because I taught year six.

29:41That's 10 and 11 year olds. And it was very much about, you know, how to protect yourself, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the parents said to me, I don't want my child attending these classes because I'm religious. I don't agree with it. And I said, okay, fine. But your child has an iPhone. He goes, yeah, so what? I went, well, what do you think he's watching on that iPhone? He went, what do you mean? I went, you can access literally hours and hours and hours, thousands if not millions of hours of hardcore pornography on that. You think your son hasn't seen that? And he went, he just couldn't believe it.

30:16Isn't that trippy? Like, best argument, I was, someone from Seattle, Emily Shurkin, a parent asked her, when should I give my kid a cell phone? And her response was, when are you ready for them to watch porn? That will be the first thing they do when they pick up that machine.

30:30Francis Foster:That's a great answer. I mean, we're all the same. But now imagine, so bring that exact device now into a school. And so how do we learn? Learning requires deep focus and sustain. I've now put something in front of you that you have spent thousands of hours doing nothing but addictive cycles, porn, having fun. And now I say, OK, 40 minutes, let's learn. It's no wonder kids make it on average about six minutes before they start going off task. And it's just a pure training thing. I always say, man, if you assume it takes 10 ,000 hours to master anything, whether or not that's accurate, who knows?

31:04Within four years of being introduced to a screen, kids have mastered basically messing around on it, not sitting down and learning. And now when we bring Ed Tech into schools and we're like, tech, we'll teach them how to learn. That is giving them heroin and saying, can you use this heroin to learn about weights and measures? Well, technically you could, but I don't think anyone is actually going to do that. You could use beer to learn about buoyancy, but an alcoholic probably isn't going to learn fluid dynamics from it. It's the same problem with tech in schools. Absolutely. And then you get onto the issues of things like ADHD, where we have all of these kids being diagnosed with ADHD.

31:42and you go, all right, I guess I understand that some children will have this disorder, but the amount of kids that we have and how much of that is kids going on TikTok. I mean, if TikTok doesn't give you ADHD, then you're probably not a human being. That is, and it gets shorter and shorter. We used to have at least two minutes was kind of the average interaction with tech. That's now about 40 seconds is now the average interaction before you go to the next thing with tech. I get in a lot of trouble when I talk about ADHD. So I'm going to be very, very measured in what I say here. There is genuine ADHD and that ADHD we can track, we can treat it with medication, we know what's going on.

32:2250 % of kids do not have that, yet that's about the diagnostics in most districts around the US. 50 % of kids have a special plan that gives them extra bonus time to help them because they have a learning disorder, typically an attentional disorder.

32:36Francis Foster:50 %? So not all of them will have the diagnostic of ADHD. Some will get an ASD diagnostic. Some will get a tactile. But 50 % have some special treatment. Most of it is going to be attentional. And the trick with ADHD is this. Oh, gosh. You can have what's called induced ADHD, where basically you act as though you have it, but you genuinely do not. And we can tell by based on how medication is going to interact with you. If you have biological ADHD, nine times out of ten, well, eight and a half times out of ten, the medication will treat the symptomology. We know we're dealing with something real.

33:12In the real world, if I give the majority of people who are demonstrating ADHD medication, they will just ramp up. It doesn't help them. It makes it a little bit worse, which is a sign you didn't actually have it. You were acting as if you had it. And then you gave them speed. And then we gave them speed. Then we gave them coke, which makes it even more fun. And then, and so you go, why do we act like we have ADHD? It's that. Have you, so we have what's called our threshold. Basically, ADHD is measured by a threshold. Your brain, there's too much stuff hitting your brain at any one moment. You can't take it all in.

33:42So your brain has a hard limit that says, cool. Anything above this, you can pay attention to. Anything below this, we're not even going to process. ADHD is marked by having a very high threshold. Almost nothing gets into their brain. So that's why you get that real flitting behavior. When it's there, it's above my threshold, but then it's gone. And then it's a bird, and now it's gone. And now it's here, and now it's gone. Just nothing is breaking through. So you give them speed. And what happens is just same as us, their threshold lowers. It just started so dang high that when it lowers, it lowers into a more normal level.

34:11Now they can sustain focus. But we set our threshold to our context. If I'm in a very quiet spot where nothing is coming in, I can set my threshold real low. If I'm in a hyper noisy, crazy place without any problem, I will set my threshold high just to block all the extra noise out. That's what we're doing as a society. I pumped gas earlier today. There was an advertisement on the gas pump saying something to me. I'm like, I can't even have this minute to myself. All right. What do you want me to buy? There is so much going on that just naturally we've all set our threshold so high that we're acting as though we have ADHD, but we genuinely don't.

34:48So what can we do in schools? Reset the threshold. Just make the context of school much calmer. We can start to get rid of it. But instead, we're going to give them screens in schools, which is going to say, there's nothing louder or noisier than a screen. So you're going to set your threshold high when you play with it. You know how at the beginning of every year, people say, this is a year things change. Then by February, everything looks the same. If you've been sitting on a business idea for months or even years, 2026 is your line in the sand. The most common thing that separates people who talk about building something from the people who actually do it is taking the first step.

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36:31Francis Foster:As you grow, Shopify grows with you. Handle more orders, expand into new markets and manage everything from one simple dashboard. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your£1 a month trial and start selling today at shopify.co.uk slash trigger. Go to shopify.co.uk slash trigger. That's shopify.co.uk slash trigger. One of the things Francis and I have been discussing is, like, education is the least sexy subject for us to talk about on the show literally ever and a Catherine Burblesing who's a who's a headmistress of Michaela school in London she kind of drilled this point into me pretty pretty aggressively but I went to visit the Michaela school yeah and the day I turned up there were two police officers uh at the gate inside the door and her school is known for its strict discipline so I don't know what's going on here and it turned out on that day i know sorry the day before a school right next door which has the same sourcing pool they're not selective school they get kids from the same inner city area that catherine school there was a kid who was being bullied or we don't know went into that school stabbed two kids while shouting al-aqbar then ran to a mosque and was crying there and has been arrested and whatever and then you go into her school and the kids are learning they're incredibly well behaved they're very patriotic even though from the very very very mixed backgrounds lots of first generation immigrant families there etc they all love britain you know sing the anthem all of that stuff and it just points out to you how important education is but for some reason like we i think as a society we just don't get it and we were talking this morning about like trying to work out where that was and i think partly it's because we kind of a in a lot of people's minds i think education is just a case like where you shove your kids so you can go to work.

38:26Francis Foster:Yeah. Another thing is, I think we kind of all assume that education is broadly speaking, the same as it was when we were there, you know? Um, and for some reason, just this issue just doesn't, it doesn't resonate. Yeah. And why, and I, and we all have experience with it too. And I think a lot of us look back on our own schooling and go, Oh, that sucked or that wasn't fun. So who cares? And I think you're right. It's, it's the most important yet less least sexy thing you could possibly talk about and i when we think back to our own schooling believe it or not oddly enough we were in school during the golden page golden era if you were in school basically from around 98 to about 2008 96 to 2008 and that window there you didn't know it but you were hitting home runs everything about school that was when more kids were succeeding more kids with the gender gaps were closing racial gaps were closing more kids had access to it that was it but it still wasn't fun and that's where people think learning should be fun right working out isn't fun sometimes when you need to move your biology in a new direction which learning is you're forcing your biology to reinterpret the world around you it's a slog it ain't easy it needs structure now it doesn't mean it can't be fun it just means it's not going to be fun 24 7.

39:39but i think what by bringing in tech now so when we went to school i think just think of tech we had a typing class once a week and um uh word class once a week where they taught us how to use ms word and paint and all that stuff today kids are spending in the us right now over half of our kids are on a computer one to four hours every day for learning and over a quarter are four or more hours every single day on a screen so the whole structure is kind of shifted in there and with that then has kind of come a very big change of meaning so why would some schools we're talking about like school crises, right?

40:16When was the last time you heard a school crises in military schools? They don't exist. Last time you heard a crisis in an art school, they don't exist. Or a religious school don't exist. Why? Because they have a very clear reason for existing. They know the type of person they are trying to build. That's what education is. It's not there to serve a society. What do you need? We'll make sure the kids can do that. It's there to build a society. What do we desire? That's what we are going to create. But public schooling, by and large, has become a service industry we've forgotten who we are trying to create what kind of society we want to build so we just ask the world what do you want workers and what are we doing all we think about education is will it get my kid a job i got no problem getting kids jobs no yeah well and i'm i'm happy to to talk jobs but believe me i've been a teacher for a long time i don't know what any of my kids do for a job except for one he worked in my lab there you go i know what one of my kids do i don't care there's not a teacher in the world who cares about work we care about the person.

41:14What is the... So if a school has a very clear understanding, we're here to create a UK citizen. We're here to create an American citizen. What does that mean? Now we have a goal. Now we align according to that.

41:26Francis Foster:Well, and that's, I fear, has become quite difficult for political reasons nowadays because there's so much, partly perhaps due to the social media driving people apart, it just feels like even saying, you know, we're trying to make American citizens. Now, there's half the country that's going to think that's somehow evil or oppressive or whatever, Yeah, and that's scary. If you can't even talk about helping create a unified society, because I mean, what's the point? I always say, interesting thing about the brain, we do not all live in the same world. For a long time, we had this debate. Do we all live in the same world?

41:59We just describe it differently? Or do we all live in very different worlds? And we now are very much falling on this side, where what you see, what you taste, what you hear is very different than what somebody else will see, taste, hear in the exact same context. So we don't take the world in clean. We're constantly just creating it up here. So give me a million kids as kindergartners. They're all gonna come in with completely different stories. Isn't the job of a public education at some level to unify all of them under a single comprehensive narrative so that we can all live in the same basic world together?

42:33We don't gotta agree on everything, but at least there is one narrative so we're all tasting the same stuff. We're all smelling the same things, at least in this context. And that's where I think you're going to see in the US, especially school is going to become smaller and smaller and smaller. I think it went from local communities were controlling the school to then districts, to states, a little bit of federal touch in. And now I think you're going to see it swing way back where we're going to say, look, if we can't do this at a national level and we can't do it at a state level, we'll just do it at a local level.

43:02And we will drive our own curricula in this community here. Talking about schools, this has sparked a memory in me. I remember in 2010, interestingly enough, I went for a job as a drama teacher. And one of the questions in the interview was, why can't you have an exceptional lesson without technology? And I made the point, I'm like, well, you can. They were like, well, what do you mean? I went, well, that then presupposes that before technology, there were no exceptional lessons. Now, I didn't get the job. But you spoke with the truth. No. But I annoyed someone. You shoved the truth right in their face.

43:39face and that's how trigonometry starts. Yeah, exactly. The next day came here. But I think the point nevertheless is kind of an important one and that we do worship technology. It has become something I tell people, make a list. The aqueducts, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the pyramids of Giza, going to the moon, the atom bomb. These are all things we did before digital, modern digital technology. What human beings can achieve by ourselves when we think and work is ridiculous. Yet I think you're right. We've crossed some sort of threshold where we think without tech, we are nothing. Without this boost, I can't do anything.

44:23And to be fair, as adults, I'm fine with it. So think of something like AI, right? If you, AI, as far as I'm concerned, I call it the tool nobody asked for solving problems nobody has. I have no reason why large language models exist. No one else does. The guys who invented it don't. They're like, oh, it's just science to us. Enjoy. But if you can say it's for anything, it's for experts to offload or outsource their thinking. So like me, I'm really good at stats, but it's going to take me two hours to do stats. I'll just use the machine. It'll do it in two seconds. But it only works because I can immediately vet what happens.

44:58My expertise allows me to go, yep, that's correct. Or, oh, no, that's wrong. What did I do different? I'm going to change it up. The tools we use as experts to make our lives easier are not the tools a novice should be using to learn how to become an expert. When they use those tools, they do not learn a thing. They do not learn the process. They don't learn the material. All they know is the output, copy, paste, give it to you. So that's why you think about calculators. Kids who learn math on a calculator typically outperform kids who learn math with pen and paper. So long as they have their calculator.

45:30As soon as you take calculator away, they drop to basically nothing. because they weren't learning math, they were just learning how to type things so that you would go, right answer. And so a lot of this tech stuff, maybe as adults we can use it. And that's where I can see some people saying, if I'm trying to invent the next space shuttle, technology can help, cool. But if you're trying to learn about space or what it means to build something or how engineering works, all of that stuff should be done analog and offline. Don't use the tool you use to make your life easier before you understand what the process is first.

46:04I was, my undergrad, I was in film school. And the way my, so they wouldn't let us touch cameras till our second or third year, junior year of film school. Couldn't touch any equipment. We were pissed. All we did was yell at them. No, we want to make movies. But the argument they said was, an idiot with a camera is still an idiot. Like, mate, I could give you one today, but you're gonna have nothing to say. But if we spend years figuring out how do you think through the medium of film? What's the language? What are the patterns? What are the processes? now you have something to do with the tool.

46:33So you can only use tools down from where you're at and kids are nowhere. So I'd say most, the best lessons will never touch tech. Let me say this because I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. You train hard, you travel, you push yourself and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin, hair, nails, things don't look or feel quite right anymore. So many people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this isn't just getting older in some vague sense. A huge part of it is collagen.

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48:56Francis Foster:I think about that a lot with history because history and historians is a subject that we cover a lot on the show. We have lots of guests who are brilliant historians. And the thing that, the reason we do is I do think certainly in my school, into my generation, I went to a pretty good school. History was taught very badly because it was kind of taught like a calculator in the sense of like, here's some dates. You need to memorize these dates and here's one or two bits that you need to remember. But you weren't taught actual history, which is effectively a story about human nature, repeating in different ways over centuries and millennia, right?

49:32Francis Foster:That's all it is. And I think part of the reason so many people are now disconnected from the fact that there is a human nature. And they all think in this kind of blank slate utopian way is they don't really understand history because they were not taught it properly. And I don't see how an AI tool is going to teach you that understanding. It can teach you dates. It probably can teach you dates way better than a human. And you drill the daylights out of it. And you will remember, and you'll remember what the machine told you the cause of World War II was, but you're not going to understand human nature because you don't have that context.

50:04Francis Foster:And you know, one thing that I think I don't understand why this isn't a bigger talking point. You see it clearly with the big tech developers. They, none of them let their kids use the devices that they generate. I mean, Steve Jobs famously didn't have a tablet and all this stuff. And then you go, well, you want to give this to my kids when you're keeping it. It's like, if I went to a restaurant. Your kids don't care. Your kids are the guinea pigs. Right. But if I went to a restaurant and the guy who ran that restaurant was not prepared to give the food to his kids, I'd be like, whoa, maybe I'm going to go to a different restaurant.

50:41Francis Foster:But we just just carry on. That's such a good analogy. That's yes. If you won't even eat your own food, why should my kids eat your food? But we do it and we do it at scale. The amount of money we're shoving into it is insane. Go back to the AI. So we've got things here in the US. I don't know if it's hit the UK yet called alpha schools. Have you heard of those yet? good don't so basically it's it's it's a tech bro school they said we can 10x your learning any 10x man anytime someone uses business lingo in education run it's not going to make any sense but they said we can 10x your learning by just using an ai digital tutor two hours a day that's all your kids are going to need they're going to pass it yeah i have friends who do that yeah so fair enough so i guarantee you you can pass a test in two two hours a day that's fine what you forget is the rest of the day in school, we're not just doing numbers and facts and skills.

51:34Now we're hopefully, what we're doing for the rest of the class, we might do 10 minutes on facts in class. Now we're gonna do what's called deep learning. We're gonna have a discussion about it. How does that link with what we learned yesterday? How does that tie to over here? How can we apply this? The reason why school is slow is because it's developmentally appropriate and we're pushing deeper rather than just pure breadth. So as these schools say, we can just run kids right through this material. cool that's surface learning exactly as you said maybe these tools uh who's justin reich out of mit said are great he says maybe these like ai tools will be good for um learning to read but they're never going to be really good for reading to learn once you actually want to do something with the skill go deep it's basically stuck on just surface data here's the next pattern off you go and so i think that's a really interesting if you think about the history of ed tech where it came from, how it moved.

52:24It was basically sold to us as this is going to stop drilling kill. Tech is going to free up creativity. It's going to let your kids flourish and be huge human beings. They're not going to have to sit there and just rote memorize anymore. Yay. Well, cut to today. When's the only time digital technology appears to work for learning? When you use it to rote drilling kill, when you lock things down. Now, a lot of people think maybe that has something to say about tech and it does, but I also think that it has a lot to say about learning and actually what is required for learning. If they would have stopped 20 years ago and said, okay, what is learning before shoving these tools in front of kids, maybe we would have saved 20 years of down slope to get to this point where we're like, you know what?

53:02Humans matter. Teachers are important. Depth matters. One of the things I really noticed when I was teaching is how I started in 08 and there wasn't a lot of tech in the classroom. And as it progressed till the time I left in 2020, 12 years, it became more and more tech focused. There were iPads, you went to the computer lab, there was interactive whiteboards, there were other things that we were doing as well. There were other types of pads that we were using in maths lessons. And part of me, I remember when I was teaching going, how much of this is actually for the kids? And how much of this, there's a financial incentive being conspiratorial.

53:43I mean, does this actually work? Have we done enough testing into this? None of it was driven by data or learning. There wasn't a single decision made, I would say, across ed tech ever for learning. So we've got data out the wazoo that shows the more time kids spend on tech at school for learning purposes, the more learning goes down. And it's basically linear. It's not, some is okay, a lot is bad. It's just kids who don't use it at all, great. Kids who use it a little bit, a little bit worse, a little bit more, a little bit worse, to the point where kids who are using it six hours a day, basically all online, are two-thirds of a standard deviation worse on average than kids who don't touch tech ever at school.

54:25So it's the data across standardized tests, international tests, national tests, local test, all shows that same thing. To which a lot of people say, well, cool, that's just correlation. Correlation isn't causation. Very true. How do you make correlation causation? And first, I would like to say, well, here, step one, triangulation of correlation. The argument correlation isn't causation was really a salve against single data sets, to be very wary of one data set. But if you see the same correlation across hundreds of countries, across decades, across subjects, across age levels, that saying no longer means the same thing.

55:06So triangulation of correlation, that's exactly what was going on with tech. It didn't matter where we looked, we were seeing that same pattern. So the next step then is you do convergence of evidence. Now you do research. You get into the lab and you say, okay, what's actually going on here? And that's where we learned, yeah, human biology does not align well with digital tech. How we read, we don't read on a screen the same way we read on paper. How we think when we write, handwriting is very different than typing and all of the digital stuff was lesser than all of the analog stuff we were looking at so now we've got correlation data we've got hard data and then you get mechanisms that's where I come in as a neuroscientist and I say here's what's going on in the brain here's why this explains all the patterns you're seeing so the data is there so why then did we ever go down this path and that's why I say I always tell people look I can show you about 100 graphs showing tech harms learning.

55:57And people say, that's correlation. Show me any, show me 10 correlations that show benefit. They don't exist. There's no real pattern going the other direction. So why are these tools in schools? The only other option has to be some sort of economic incentive. They're not there for learning. There is no evidence to prove they worked. Imagine, maybe that's the whole thing. Like I always say, imagine I had a drug. I invented a new drug and you say, what does that drug do? And I go, why don't you give it to your kids and we'll find out. Now imagine every government in the world says, that's a great idea.

56:33Let's do it.

56:34Francis Foster:That's basically the EdTech model. We think it will be good for them. So let's give it a go. So let's give it, let's, let's do something. So Jared, that being the case, we're coming to the end of our conversation, which has been really informative and super brilliant. What does this mean for parents and what does this mean at the level of our societies what should we be doing should we i mean to me banning school phones from schools is like a complete no-brainer right but uh what else should should we do at the level of first the government and policy yeah and then as a parent you know that's the one thing that when you become a parent you kind of go i actually don't particularly give a shit what the governments do i just want to protect my kids against whatever because i can't control that but i can't control this right so the bit that we probably can't control but can influence is the government and then our own kids give us the ideas right i'm gonna level with you i'm not a gamer even though i look like one i'm not gonna pretend i've been grinding through rpgs between recordings although i have strong opinions about which final fantasy was the best one i think it's japanese and i think there's a sword that's genuinely everything i know but our social media guys showed me this app and i genuinely thought that's quite clever.

57:43It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money onto you. You play games you were probably going to play anyway, you own coins and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo actual money, not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game office, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign up bonus worth up to$10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode.

58:23That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, Snacksy. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TriggerPod. That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your$10 bonus and the app is mobile only so click the link from your phone not your laptop. Highest level you do a massive tech audit if you're a government you put a kibosh no more new ed tech for the next two years until we get a sense of what we've got how much money we've spent how it's working right now and what you'll find through that kind of in each school will have to do their own audit based on that but what you'll find is 90 to 95 percent of everything we're blowing money on and education just ain't working.

59:09It was a waste of time. It was a waste of money. And it's a zero-sum game. The$21 billion that went into building tech infrastructure for schools necessarily did not go to training new teachers, to increasing the pay rate of current teachers, to lessening workload. So if we can stop new tech, do an audit, figure out what's working, and then the government has to build a tech database. Basically, that says you cannot ever go to a school with your product until you have met these standards of safety, of efficacy, and privacy, basically. What's going on in the background of your tool? And that's got to be hardcore.

59:48So basically, you just regulate it like you would medicine or anything else. Put some limits on what do we expect from these tools. If they're doing worse than a pen and paper, then no, it doesn't belong in the school. If you can genuinely prove benefit, then we'll have a chat. But go back to the personal level. This is us as parents now.

1:00:08Step one, buy a printer. It's like the easiest, stupidest idea. But if you can make your house analog like you've done, that's the best way to get your kids ready to do analog work at school. So we print everything out. You got homework, print it. You got to read, print it. We have our tech-free, hopefully home. you have your tech-free days if you need to um when you support your kids with their learning everything is offline you're taking notes offline you're doing note cards offline you're having discussions offline you just make your home analog now as a group of parents how do we push back that's when if you go as one parent so the easiest way to do it is through an opt-out is you go to a school and you say i would like to opt my child out of all non-essential tech use um vermont is about to pass a bill that makes that legal.

1:00:57So once they do it, everyone, it's so soon it will be legal in the U.S. to say, I do not want my kid using tech, which is awesome. If you can't get your voice heard, one parent usually is seen as a nuisance. If you're the one parent speaking up, they're like, yeah, ignore that one. But if you can get a small coalition, even 10, 10 parents together saying the same thing, that's when they're going to have to listen. And your biggest allies in this entire tech battle. And basically, P.S., just be aware, all you're doing is asking for data. That's it. Just show me proof that this is working. Show me proof that in any way this has helped my kid.

1:01:30If you can, cool. We're not asking for miracles, just evidence. And no one's got it. Your school especially won't have it. So if they can't prove it, then we can start to step away. But your biggest allies are going to be teachers. So I've been working in education for a long time. My estimate now is about 70 % of teachers are done with tech. They hate it. And if you've been in a classroom longer than 15 years, you know how bad kids are today compared to what they were. but teachers can't speak up. Teachers don't have a voice until parents do. When parents start moving, teachers will swoop in behind you and they will say, yep, we can help you.

1:02:04We've got your supports. We've got the data you need. And they become your biggest champions. Unfortunately, they just can't talk because their jobs are on the line. I was working at a district in Kansas recently where the district gave everyone laptops. Here's your one-to-one programs. put a program on that timed how long the laptop was used, for what purposes, sent that data back to the district. And they put a marker that said, you have to use this 20 minutes in your class every day, otherwise you will lose your job. So if you're a teacher and you know tech doesn't work, and you've just been told, I have to use tech 20 minutes every single day, otherwise I'm fired, you don't have a voice.

1:02:42You put your head down and you do what you gotta do. So that's why parents become essential. You push, teachers will have your back, but we can't wait for teachers to make the move.

1:02:50Francis Foster:I mean, partly because of this, I think, and also, you know, I think a lot of people have concerns about the politicization of education as well. I meet more and more people now who are planning or are homeschooling already. And that seems to be like a route that a lot of people are now taking just because of the concerns they have about digital technology, the politics of the classroom and lots of other things that are going on. Yeah. And I think that's, once we get the learning settled, that's when we can start having more meaningful debates on what is this all for? And then what are the curriculum aspects of it?

1:03:24What is actually being taught here? So my focus is 100 % on, look, if we're going to take kids, 12 years of our kids' life, we better be doing best by them. And whatever it is we're going to teach them, maybe that's beyond my purview suite. There is a way learning works. It's a biological process. If you follow these steps, there's a way it works best if we can go back to that realign schools with that then i think we're in a much better place to have better debates about now what do we teach them what do we actually want them to take away from this we're just having it sucks man right we're having debates on form over function is we're we're so stuck on what works and what doesn't and we're so down a path of something that doesn't that we've got to spend so much time and money correcting that before we can get to the deeper more important question why are we here what are we actually trying to well

1:04:10Francis Foster:That's the amazing thing. And it's not just with this issue. It's with almost everything. It's how rarely anyone asks what works and what doesn't. So much of it has become about people's moralization of things. If you do this, you're a good person. If you do that. And we almost forget there's ideas that work and there's ideas that don't. It's kind of crazy. There's biology. There's things that work. There's things that don't. You have a memory or you don't. You have attention or you don't. And I think at certain levels, that's okay. My level as neuroscientists, people are fine with it. It's like, yeah, okay, you're talking about cells.

1:04:45But as soon as you get up to the social level, where now we're in psychology, and that's where people think it must be different. And maybe it is nuanced, but there still has to be structure to all of this. Otherwise, we're going to have a million kids living in a million different worlds, smelling a million different things as they get older. And I don't think that's going to be a very easy place to live in.

1:05:05Francis Foster:Well, Jared, thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with our audience. We're going to head to Substack, where we can ask you questions from our audience. Before we do, though, the last question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? What if digital technology and digital skills are irrelevant to the future of work? What if we don't need our kids all to use an iPad in primary years in order to become work-ready in the future? What if tech isn't the answer? Hold on. Let's explore that before we move on. though because I mean counter arguments are pretty obvious here which is like everything is becoming digital.

1:05:45Francis Foster:Like what are you talking about? So if you track digital literacy amongst students from 2013 to 2023 the percentage of kids who are digitally literate across the world, the countries we've tested, has dropped 21%. Despite in that time the percentage of kids using tech every day in explicit tech-based schools and classrooms has increased over 600%. So we're teaching tech more and more and more to our kids. They're using it all day, every day, yet they're worse at it at the end. Why? Because maybe tech literacy comes from deep knowledge of other things, of self. I always say, if you want to be tech literate, be life literate first, and then you move those skills onto tech.

1:06:27So I think if we reset schooling back to humanistic recognition, to we're here to teach you literacy, we're here to teach you numeracy, we're here to teach you how to think and how to to learn now whatever tool comes down the pipe you're going to be fine and you're going to be able to adapt to it and it could be that once we go back to training kids uh analog again tech is fine man no one taught me tech i use tech just fine no one taught my dad tech he can send emojis with the best of them and maybe when we all come out of there maybe a lot of us are thinking for work maybe i don't want to do anything tech maybe i want to think more about craft maybe i want to only use tech to do stats but that's not going to change the way how i actually run my experiments with actual human beings.

1:07:08So tech will always be there. But I think right now we believe that's the only future people have.

1:07:13Francis Foster:And I suppose the counter argument against my counter argument is what I alluded to in a joking way earlier, which is, I mean, if it can be done on a computer, why wouldn't it be done by a computer 10 years from now? It's in maybe, maybe it will. But all of that stuff is so you're thinking is your argument that I don't know that digital-based jobs are going to exist 10 years from now because AI will be doing the job. We'll take it, which leaves us with nothing more than what else is there but us, but human beings. I can see that. I hope we push back before that day. I hope it's not that AI gets so good that we just relinquish control of those jobs.

1:07:53And I hope we get to the stage where we're like, you know what? Screw that. No, I don't want to use that. Or I don't want that. And we're just going to go back to humanistic small scale. You got kids. I talk about this with my daughter. I want the smallest life for my daughter. Her choice, do what you want to do. But like, our generation was raised to be huge. If you're not the biggest in the world, you failed. If you're not the best movie star, you're not a real actor. No. How can we go back to small-scale community, where if my daughter just decides to pick up a craft, and we live in Italy, and she lives in the same village for the rest of her 80 years just making bracelets, That's sweet.

1:08:32You don't need tech for that. It's not flash hot. It's not going to change the world, but it's going to change your community. Maybe if we think smaller, tech becomes less important.

1:08:41Francis Foster:Jared, thank you for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Jared your questions. What advice would you give to a curriculum coordinator responding to the AI invasion of our learning space? How can schools develop robust, actionable policies that protect the outsourcing of our children's thinking to AI? We'll be right back.