Jared Cooney Horvath is highly critical of digital tools in the classroom. Horvath is a neuroscientist who studies learning, memory, and cognition. His most recent book is The Digital Delusion.
On January 15, 2026, he testified before a Senate Committee, where he linked the use of technology to declining academic performance, not just in the U.S. but in other countries.
Here is his written testimony with graphs, footnotes, and other evidence to support his thesis.
The BBC reports that that Sweden has joined Norway in ousting electronics from its classrooms and reviving the use of books. The Swedish government, like Norway’s, concluded that electronic tools were causing a decline in literacy rates.
Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.
Schools in Sweden are returning to more traditional learning methods – such as reading from physical books – after seeing their reading standards drop while ipads and laptops were used.
There is now a focus on using more printed textbooks, handwriting and less screen time in early education. Experts say reading levels are getting better because of this.
Some teachers have said students are asking for more books and paper based learning in schools, saying they learn more quickly and retain information better than using a laptop.
This isn’t a total ban on technology in the classroom and digital devices are still used, but the government is spending millions buying physical textbooks, and library books.
During the 2000s and 2010s, books were sidelined in Swedish classrooms and replaced with laptops and ipads.
The idea was to prepare students for life in a digital world.
But it seems to have backfired.
Sweden’s reading standards, which were among the best in Europe in 2000, began to fall.
In 2012, after years of getting worse, its Pisa scores — a worldwide test that measures reading, maths and science literacy among 15-year-olds — hit their lowest point.
Now, by popular demand, the books are back in the classroom and things are improving again.
The state has launched a national reading challenge for ten-year-olds and the classes that read the most books win prizes.
Sweden had intended to be a leader in the field of digital learning, but eventually concluded that the heavy use of Ed-tech was harming student learning. Increased screen time was leading to distraction, inability to concentrate, and lessened ability to do deep reading. “Studies have linked heavy digital use to reduced comprehension and memory retention as well as eye strain.”
The U.S. spends billions every year for Ed-tech. But the pushback is growing.
Jonathan Haidt of NYU, a critic of Ed-tech and social media for children, has kept a running tab on his Twitter account of cities and school districts in the U.S. that ban social media for children. where students spend less time on cell phones and social media, libraries report an increase in books checked out.
To those who are not on the payroll of Big Tech are likely to recognize that the frenzied spending of billions of dollars on Ed-tech had more to do with profits than with student learning.
A massive revolt against educational technology in the classroom is under way, especially in certain European nations. Education leaders in some countries have concluded that Ed-tech is the primary reason for declining interest in reading and ability to read.
In the U.S., experts blame declining reading scores on the pandemic, on teachers, or on schools that have not yet adopted the “science of reading.” But even here, some parents and educators have concluded that Ed-tech is the driver of declining interest in reading books. Meanwhile the Ed-tech industry continues to promote their products as the answer, not the problem.
Among the nations that are abandoning ed-tech, Norway is a leader of the pack. In 2016, the schools gave every child a laptop. Since then, Norwegians have seen growing aliteracy and illiteracy. Education leaders decided that Ed-tech was the reason that students lost interest in reading.
Norwegian libraries are the hub of a rebirth in literacy. According to a report in the Sunday Times of England, Norwegian libraries have reinvented their activities to bring back children and teens. They offer roller skating, rap workshops, and–most especially—-books.
Children find a nook in Lillehammer’s library as part of the Boklek scheme BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
There are 1,100 chairs in the main public library in Oslo — rocking chairs, armchairs, chairs on balls which let you spin yourself around. Every one is full.
When the Deichman Bjorvika library opened in 2020, staff quickly realised they needed teenagers’ ideas about how to attract young people. “When we used to arrange free pizza evenings on our own, nobody came,” said Mariann Youmans, head of Deichman Young.
Their ideas? Workshops to clean your trainers and write rap lyrics, chess tournaments and parties where you rollerskate around piles of books.
The theory is that the teenagers, who are paid about 187 Norwegian krone (£14.50) per hour to sit on the council for two hours a week, invite their friends; the library becomes a place that they know and like, and gradually they start borrowing books.
They held 1,000 events last year — and lent a record 2.2 million books across Deichman’s 23 libraries in the Norwegian capital. About 50 per cent were to children. It is books by the back door.
Welcome to the latest chapter in Norway’s attempts to reverse its catastrophic decline in reading. It might have one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds — about £1.5 trillion, and rising by the day — and the highest percentage of electric car sales — 96 per cent — but Norway, temporarily, forgot about the importance of books.
Around 500,000 Norwegians, in a population of only 5.6 million, cannot read a text message or simple instructions. Of the 65 countries measured for children’s enjoyment of reading by Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), it comes bottom.
“We are far, far too rich, so we do stupid things with our money,” said Trine Skei Grande, the former education minister, now director of the Norwegian Publishers’ Association.
In 2016, the “stupid thing” was to give an iPad to every child when they started school at the age of five. It had no parental controls on it, and the parents who complained were ignored, dismissed as “dinosaurs”. Books disappeared from classrooms. Children stopped reading.
Norway is below the international average, and far below Britain, in the Pisa reading scores, compiled by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Before the iPads were introduced, it was significantly above both of them.
Such children were left, Skei Grande said, with what she described as “kitchen language”, a vocabulary for only the ordinary things in life, perhaps 17,000 words, rather than a bookworm’s 55,000-70,000.
But the fightback has truly begun. The prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, vowed to make Norway into the best country in the world for reading. “Norwegian children used to be among the best readers in the world. But today, 15,000 pupils finish primary school without being able to read properly. That is serious,” he said, at the launch of a national reading initiative last August.
A reading commission was set up by the government in January. There are 13 experts on it, including two authors, who will report later this year. Skei Grande said there is political consensus across Norway’s parliament to resolve the problem. “We have no representative of Donald Trump saying: ‘I love the uneducated’. I’m happy with that,” she said.
Money is being poured into new strategies to get children reading again — and adults, constantly staring at their phones, are being targeted too.
An initiative, from Foundation Read, will encourage workplaces to set up book clubs for their staff, or at least to have a shelf of books that staff can exchange with each other. Nearly 30 companies have signed up.
Silje Brathen, from Foundation Read, said: “We need children to see their parents reading because why should they be forced to read if their parents are never doing that?” IPads have been removed for the first three years of school, and mobile phones banned for all ages.IPads have now been removed for younger schoolchildren.
There are summer reading competitions during the eight to nine-week holiday which begins in the middle of June, just as the sun barely sets in Norway.
Every child is encouraged to log their reading — cartoons and newspapers, as well as novels — and then to go to the library to pick up a prize to reward a milestone, such as getting to page 50. The shark tooth that children were given proved particularly popular one summer.
Helene Voldner, from the Norwegian Library Association, said: “Last summer, a library in Haugesund [a coastal town in the southwest of Norway] completely ran out of children’s books because so many wanted to take part.”
In Lillehammer, about two hours by train north of Oslo, an initiative, called Boklek, which translates as “book play”, was born, the brainchild of Marit Borkenhagen, festival director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature.
In the months before they start school in August at the age of five or six, every kindergarten class is invited to visit the local library.
Each year, one book is chosen, and the author, or a storyteller, comes to the library to read the story to the children, but also to play games linked to it. This year’s book is Det Runde Problemet by Vegard Markhus about a boy called Robert who loses his head.
At 10am in the library on Wednesday, there were 47 children listening to the story, with their 12 teachers, all sitting in socks, not shoes, in the children’s section. At midday, there were another 59 children from other kindergartens.
They do not listen silently. They were encouraged, by the storyteller, Kristine Haugland, to get involved — patting their head to check it is still there, and counting the number of socks on Robert’s messy bathroom floor. Kristine Haugland of Boklek keeps children enthralled at the library in Lillehammer BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
It is reading, but not the quiet, dull type that puts off so many children. The aim is to show the children, and their teachers, how reading can be fun.
The same book is read to all children that year, and a copy given both to their kindergarten and their new class at primary school. It is designed to make them feel comfortable when they make the move to big school.
Mia Granum, a Boklek co-ordinator, said: “When I was a child, we all watched the same TV. We had a lot more in common with each other. It’s important to have something comfortable that is familiar to everyone. The Boklek book gives them this.”
For Sarah Willand, director of one of Norway’s oldest and biggest publishers, Cappelen Damm, the decline in reading — but the newfound determination to reverse the problem — means she describes herself as a “concerned optimist”.
She said: “We are concerned that both people — children and adults — are reading less … It is not enough that books exist. They must be read or heard.
Next month, Norway will be the guest of honour at the annual Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, with dozens of events organised by Norla (Norwegian Literature Abroad).
Back in Oslo, Deichman Bjorvika — all 19,600 square metres of it — has five 3D printers, six sewing machines, and a scheme to hand out seeds to visitors. The architect designed the five-storey building — or ten if you include the five mezzanines — to look like a forest. If you look up, you see light coming in through the glass roof. Oslo’s central library, Deichman Bjorvika. The five-storey building opened in 2020.
To open the library, streets were closed, royalty invited, and little children — with rucksacks of books on their backs — walked from the old library to the new building. “We wanted the first inhabitants of the new library to be children. We wanted to show them the way,” said Youmans.
There are moments in history when legislation stops being merely controversial and becomes openly barbaric. Tennessee’s House Bill 570 is one of those moments. Proposed by two Republican lawmakers, this bill seeks to classify abortion as homicide punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, or even the death penalty. There are no exceptions for rape. There are no exceptions for incest. There are no exceptions for the health of the mother. This is not a policy debate. This is a war on women, and it is being waged in broad daylight. But Tennessee is not an outlier. It is a preview.
The good news is that the Republican-dominated legislature killed the proposal. They would not go along with the insane idea that a woman should spend her life in prison or get the death penalty as punishment for an abortion.
A Tennessee House committee rejected an anti-abortion bill Tuesday that would have criminalized women for seeking abortion procedures, potentially allowing them to be charged with murder.
The bill failed for lack of support and didn’t come to a vote in the Population Health Subcommittee, leading supporters to sing hymns and protest in the Cordell Hull Legislative Building…
Groups such as End Abortion Now and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion that supported Barrett’s bill blasted the Republican supermajority legislature for claiming to be “pro-life” but refusing to support the legislation. They expect to revive the bill in 2027..
In this post, Dr. Jeremy Faust interviews Dr. Joe Sachs, executive producer of the popular television series “The Pitt.” Both Dr. Faust and Dr. Sachs are emergency room physicians.
The show is an hour-by-hour depiction of life in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. Every hour brings new emergencies, new crises. The viewer sees doctors teaching resident doctors and making crucial decisions in an instant. If they make a mistake, the patient may die. Not every story has a happy ending.
As a viewer, you see patients who worry how they can afford the medical care; you see patients die; you see ICE agents bring in a woman who is injured, but whose very presence terrifies patients and staff. you see patients who are cooperative but also patients who are drunk and aggressive.
You see the staff acting and reacting in a situation that is always stressful. Some thrive on the stress. Others don’t.
This interview is really wonderful as an inside view about how the show was made. Many doctors and nurses are on set to make sure that their acting counterparts are doing what they would do. Every word in the script is reviewed by doctors.
Because I enjoy the program, I enjoyed the interview. I think you will too.
Finished paying your taxes? I bet you didn’t do as well as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Politico reported that the company founded made huge profits and paid no taxes. In fact, his company got a refund! It’s Trump tax policy at work for the 1%.
Politico wrote:
The company founded and formerly run by Energy Secretary Chris Wright paid no federal corporate income taxes last year, according to its regulatory filings, and actually got more than $10 million back from the IRS.
Liberty Energy, the oil field services company Wright founded in 2011 but left last year to join the Trump administration, was among several energy companies included in a report issued Tuesday by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy naming 88 companies that together made more than $105 billion before taxes last year but paid no federal corporate income taxes.
Liberty recorded net income before taxes of $193 million last year but received more than $10 million back in tax benefits, according to its latest annual financial disclosure. The company paid $33 million in federal taxes for the 2024 tax year after making a net income of $403 million before taxes.
The six conservative-right wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by striking down Section 2, which requires that minorities have districts in which their voting preferences may be heard. This section led to the creation of districts that elected Black representatives.
We can now expect redistricting of Congressional districts and state legislative districts to sharply reduce the number of Black elected officials.
Richard L. Hasen of Slatewrote that the decision “will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.
Future generations of legal scholars will review the Republicans’ retreat from civil rights protections enacted in the 1960s. Perhaps psychologists will figure out why Justice Clarence Thomas consistently opposes laws intended to protect people like him.
King Charles III came to Washington, D.C. to smooth over some rough patches in Britain’s relationship with the United States, all of it driven by Trump’s egotism and insults.
What was most interesting was not what he said, but what he implied. He referred to General George Washington. He mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” He said that an acre of land at Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed, was designated as American soil, as a tribute to President Kennedy. I don’t recall anything he said about Trump, unless it was a perfunctory thank you at the opening.
On the issues, he took a strong stance against Trump, clearly but obliquely. Charles saluted our Christian heritage but then spoke of respecting all people of every religion and no religion.
He made strong comments about protecting the environment, in contrast to Trump’s hostility to the very idea of climate change.
When he spoke about NATO, which Trump berates, the audience applauded loudly.
When Charles spoke of the importance of protecting Ukraine, the audience leap to their feet and gave sustained applause.
Gracious, literate, articulate–everything that Trump is not–Charles was applauded by both sides of the aisle.
William Becker is a prominent environmental activist. He is also a veteran and at one point during his service, he wrote for “Stars and Stripes.”
It’s hard to keep track of the latest Trump administration outraged, but one of the latest is that Secretary of DEFENSE Pete Hegseth is taking control of “Stars and Stripes” so it will be an outlet for Pentagon propaganda and Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism and straight white male supremacy.
Becker wrote about this travesty at The Hill, a widely read D.C. publication:
One of the classic sounds of the Vietnam War was the voice that famously boomed, “GOOOOD MORNING, VIET-NAM” over Armed Forces Radio each day.
The Army’s daily newspaper was an equally important fixture. Stars and Stripes was founded by Union soldiers during the Civil War. It was unique: a military publication independent from the brass, delivered to the troops along “the world’s most dangerous paper routes.”
During World War II, the paper shifted from a weekly to a daily publication, serving up national and international news along with stories from the theaters in Europe, Asia and, most recently, the Middle East. The paper had always been independent of military control. In the late 1980s, Congress required it.
Now, the Pentagon appears ready to make it a mouthpiece for Pete Hegseth,President Trump’s carefully coiffed secretary of Defense with battle-hungry biceps. We can expect the storied newspaper to acquire all the dignity of a British tabloid, becoming the manosphere’s daily drumbeat against “stupid rules of engagement” and “tepid legalities” like international law and the Geneva Conventions.
I have a dog in this fight. I was an Army sergeant who served as a combat correspondent for Stars and Stripes in Vietnam during 1966 and 1967. There were just a few of us. We didn’t wear rank or military uniforms. We traveled throughout South Vietnam, embedding ourselves in combat operations to give the soldiers’ perspectives on the war. At age 19, I competed hour by hour with veteran broadcast and newspaper reporters, the best in the business.
It wasn’t always about battle and bloodshed. We also wrote and photographed the military’s efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people. Based on Hegseth’s podium performances, “woke” coverage like that won’t appear in the paper. We can’t expect stories about the U.S. military as peacekeepers and rescuers during global disasters. We won’t read about the quiet ethos of professional soldiers. We’ll be bombarded with saturation coverage of how young men “intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill our enemies.”
Until last week, the newspaper’s independence was defended by an ombudsman, most recently Jacqueline Smith. She has been fired by the Pentagon. A spokesman explained that the department is taking over control of the paper to “modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that siphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”
In other words, Stars and Stripes is being swept up in the conservative tide taking over the news and entertainment media in the U.S. But as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes, “Acquisition of a media company should be treated differently than the acquisition of, say, a company developing self-driving cars or one developing small nuclear reactors, because of the media’s central role in our democracy.”
In 1966, Stars and Stripes featured my photos of the Philippine army, one of America’s allies in the war, handing out rice to villagers from the back of a truck. Now, we can anticipate that it won’t waste ink on such wokeness; it will report how God wants maximum lethality with minimum morality to “kill people and break things,” and deliver divine retribution with “overwhelming and punishing violence against the enemy.“
One of the problems with the Pentagon’s effort to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill our enemies” is that President Trump and Hegseth are working overtime to make enemies out of friends. Hegseth’s chief policy adviser suggests punishing NATO for not joining the U.S. in Trump’s war against Iran. Trump accuses NATO of being a “paper tiger” for not helping to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet neither man apparently consulted with or advised NATO before launching the Iran war. NATO nations are understandably reluctant to join Trump in the international crimes he threatens.
Trump has hardly been a good ally. He has soured relations with Europe with his threats to take Greenland by force and his punitive trade tariffs. In 2018, he called the hard-fought nuclear weapons agreement with Iran “decaying and rotten” and pulled out of it, leaving co-signers France, Germany and the United Kingdom in the lurch.
Hegseth and Trump have poisoned our relationship with allies. Will they now try to poison the views of the rank-and-file military? Stars and Stripes currently reaches 1.4 million people and gets 26 million page views on its digital edition. It may take a boycott by the rank-and-file or a crackdown by Congress to save it.
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and a contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of 2023’s five best science books. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe, lambasted the Washington press corps for inviting Trump to be their speaker. What did they expect he would say? Did they want to be insulted as “enemies of the people” and “fake news”?
Sure, it’s customary to invite the President. But did anyone expect Trump to forget about his hatred of the media? Cullen thinks they should be more careful in choosing a speaker, like picking someone who appreciates the First Amendment.
The biggest one being: Why was Trump there in the first place?
Like all fascists, Trump hates a free press and has done his level best to humiliate, intimidate, harm, cancel, and even prosecute journalists and news outlets. Like all authoritarians, he has tried to limit press scrutiny of himself and his administration.
So what on earth were the White House press corps thinking when it invited this guy to their annual dress-up party?
It’s like inviting your obnoxious neighbor to a family barbecue after he relieves himself in your pool.
It’s like inviting a jackal to a tea party for a bunch of cute little bunny rabbits.
In 2017, after a Republican congressional candidate in Montana assaulted and body slammed a reporter for The Guardian, Trump voiced support for the attacker, saying, “He’s my kind of guy.”
In 2020, after MSNBC’s Ali Velshi was hit by a rubber bullet during a protest after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump called it a “beautiful sight.” Trump misidentified Velshi as being with CNN, but, hey, all the fake news is all the same to Trump anyway.
At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in November 2024, Trump stood behind bulletproof glass and reassured his supporters he was safe, noting that anyone who tried to shoot him would have to shoot through a bunch of journalists standing in front of him, adding, “I wouldn’t mind that so much.”
Even more recently, after Saturday’s attack, Trump insulted CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and questioned her professionalism, calling her a “disgrace” for asking a question about the gunman’s manifesto.
If you’re noticing a pattern here, Trump really doesn’t like women journalists who question him.
I could go on — and I haven’t even mentioned the shakedowns of all the networks, and Trump using his influence so Edward R. Murrow’s storied CBS News becomes more like Fox News Lite — but you get the point.
So what did the Washington press corps think was going to happen when it gave Trump a platform at its shindig?
Did they think he would have some Jeffersonian conversion, pronouncing that if given the choice between a government without journalism or journalism without government, he would choose the latter?
Trump hates a free press for those very same reasons. He doesn’t want the public to know about his cons, about him using government to enrich his family and his cronies. He can’t stand the idea of the press, or anyone, questioning his judgment, or pointing out the folly of his ways, about him starting a needless war when he ran for president claiming he would never start a needless war.
Trump resembles not Thomas Jefferson, but George Jefferson, the TV character who hated everyone and everything. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest Trump is more familiar with George Jefferson than Thomas Jefferson.
Why give Trump a platform to spew his fascist hatred of a robust, free press?….
Diane Ravitch's blog 