A screen-free school sounds wholesome, but for some children it is a locked door - IOL

Alison Scott, Executive Head of Bellavista School and Bellavista S.H.A.R.E

There is a child in almost every school in this country who cannot get through a printed page, but who reads perfectly well on a screen. Change the font, adjust the contrast, let the device read the words aloud, and text stops being a wall. For a child with a dyslexic or dyspraxic profile, or a child who is hard of hearing or visually impaired, that device is not a distraction, it’s the door into reading. Audiobooks do the same work, and so, for some children, do subtitles.

Now hold that child in mind, because the argument gaining ground at the moment is not really about phones. It’s that the school day should be screen-free entirely. No devices, no tablets, no digital learning materials. Back to paper, and the way we did it before.

I understand the impulse. I share a good deal of what sits behind it. But I think a blanket removal would do real harm to the children who have the least room to absorb it, and I think we should say so plainly before the pendulum completes its swing.

Because that is what our education debate does. It swings hard in one direction and then hard back again. The global pendulum swings between war or peace, hate or love, filthy rich or desperately poor, AI or human. Current opinion on best practice in schools oscillates between vehemently pro-tech and doggedly anti-tech, as though those were the only two places a thinking person could stand.

The ed-tech craze, and all the marvellous edutainment that arrived with it, has to be held in tension with something more sober: the power of these tools to open access, and to ready a child for a world leaning more rapidly towards machines than humanity. The schools managing this well are, in my experience, not the ones that leapt onto the earliest bandwagon. They are the ones that updated steadily and integrated the mechanisation of learning materials thoughtfully. And credit to technology and to schools where it is due: if educators had not moved onto devices during the pandemic, where would we be?

The digital divide across economic groups remains a real barrier to eradicating poverty. The inclusion that technology brings to children with barriers to learning is immeasurable. Both of those things are true at the same time, and any honest argument has to carry both.

So let me be equally honest about the other side of the ledger.

Has reading crashed? Yes. Eighty-one percent of South African Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any official language, a figure successive PIRLS studies have returned with depressing consistency. Is technology a factor? Yes. Should we be reading books and building libraries furiously, perhaps more than ever? Yes. Must publishers and paper manufacturers think harder about affordability for the ordinary household? Yes.

And then the questions get uncomfortable, because they stop being about schools.

Are our homes rich with print? No. Are children having conversations that stretch their language and vocabulary all day, seven days a week? No. Are the adults in the house scrolling while they answer? Yes. Are parents torn apart by frenetic, always-on workplace demands? Frighteningly so. Should employers respect family time? Yes.

Can we improve reading at home simply by valuing books and stories? Research says yes. Can we improve literacy by sharing a book at bedtime? Every single time. Can we switch off the television and the console? Yes. Yes, and yes again.

Parents have to fight for these, and not because schools have failed them. It’s because no school, however good, can manufacture a reading home. Twenty minutes of calm, unhurried reading with an adult who is genuinely present does more for a struggling reader than most of what we can offer inside a school day, and it is the one intervention that costs nothing.

Nor is any of this an argument against restraint. Handwriting is dissipating. Spelling is crumbling. A quality early childhood grounding, with plenty of play, would do more to grow readers than any application we could install. Smart devices, and gaming and social media in particular, are a scourge wreaking havoc through the lives and wellbeing of young people. Schools should be free of personal smart phones. Schools should also be honest enough to cut back on homework and the relentless extramural timetable so that families have the time and the energy to sit at a table and talk to one another. These are not soft requests, they are the things the educational system must tackle ardently.

But a phone in a pocket at break time and an audiobook in a literacy lesson are not the same object doing the same work, and a screen-free policy cannot tell them apart. That is precisely the problem with it. It is a blunt instrument aimed at a problem that requires a scalpel, and the children it cuts first are the ones who were only just let in.

We have become oddly bad at making distinctions of this kind - distinctions require thought, and positions require none.

Society throws the baby out with the bathwater with remarkable enthusiasm. Perhaps we can let this particular pendulum swing a little less widely and settle somewhere in the middle ground. Ask of every screen in a school what it is actually for, and remove the ones that cannot answer. There is genuine merit in the marvel of technology meeting the soul of what it is to be human.

If we are going to foster any single aspect of a child's development, let it be their cognitive functions, where wisdom and discernment, analysis and thoughtful deployment become an innate way of standing in a world gone crazy. We owe our children that balance. And balance, unlike a ban or a rollout, cannot be announced. It has to be practised.