What India can learn from the West’s ed-tech reckoning

In early 2025, neuroscientist and education consultant Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate with findings that ought to give education policymakers pause everywhere, not least in India. His central claim: the rapid, large-scale adoption of digital technology in classrooms is actively harming children — reducing comprehension, eroding attention, and contributing to a generational decline in cognitive performance unlike anything seen in the history of standardised measurement.

His research finds that Gen Z is the first cohort in modern history to underperform its predecessor across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, and general IQ. They have spent more years in formal schooling than any generation before them but have emerged less capable.

Correlating classroom technology adoption across 80 countries with cognitive performance data, Horvath finds a consistent pattern: once digital devices become standard in schools, outcomes deteriorate. The inflexion point, in country after country, tracks roughly to 2010, when one-to-one device programmes began spreading through Western school systems. Students with heavy daily screen exposure in school score dramatically lower than those with little or none.

Horvath’s conclusions are not undisputed. Some independent researchers note that the evidence is correlational rather than causal, and that other factors — the pandemic, changes in home screen use, socio-economic shifts — complicate any direct line from classroom devices to cognitive decline. Yet the pattern he identifies is striking enough to have prompted serious legislative attention.

The problem, Horvath argues, is not one of implementation. Human cognition evolved for sustained, focused engagement — the kind that builds durable memory and develops higher-order thinking. It also evolved, crucially, for learning from other humans: direct interaction, social cues, and observed behaviour are the channels through which knowledge most naturally transfers.

Digital environments are engineered for precisely the opposite: perpetual novelty, instant switching, and the continuous capture of attention. By routing learning through screens, classrooms sever the very connection that human cognition depends on. Children who spend their school days on devices are conditioned into attentional habits fundamentally at odds with deep learning. The classroom device and the social media feed train the same neural pathways.

Historian and generational consultant Dr. Eliza Filby adds a dimension that should concern minds in India. Across the Western world, a quiet divergence appears to be under way. Wealthy families — including, conspicuously, those who build and sell the technologies in question — are pulling their children away from screen-heavy education. Elite private schools are increasingly rowing back on digital programmes, reinvesting in teacher-led instruction, and foregrounding skills that screens demonstrably weaken: concentration, creative thinking, and sustained reading.

Meanwhile, children in poorly resourced schools are growing more reliant on device-led learning, often because little else is available. The digital revolution in education is becoming a mechanism for entrenching the very inequalities it promised to dissolve. The new dividing line, as Filby puts it, runs not between those who can access technology and those who cannot but between those whose education is shaped by people and those whose education is governed by platforms.

India is accelerating into this landscape with marked enthusiasm. The National Education Policy 2020 positions digital technology as central to the country’s educational future: a National Educational Technology Forum, widespread investment in digital infrastructure, AI-integrated pedagogy, and online and blended learning across levels. Beyond formal schooling, India has seen explosive growth in ed-tech platforms selling the promise of quality learning to millions of aspirational families. Online courses, coaching apps, and AI tutors are rapidly filling the space that the state has long failed to adequately occupy.

The framing of technology as an equaliser allows governments to sidestep the far harder, far more expensive work of building and sustaining human educational capacity: trained and motivated teachers, functional schools, adequate salaries, and meaningful accountability. Ed-tech is considerably cheaper than that investment and considerably more profitable for the companies providing it.

The IT sector and ed-tech industry have an obvious commercial interest in embedding technology into national education policy, and that interest does not straightforwardly align with what the evidence says children need. When a government endorses mass digital adoption in classrooms as transformative policy, it risks substituting a corporate growth agenda for genuine educational reform.

The children most exposed to the consequences are those in underfunded government schools, precisely those for whom a tablet can seem like an upgrade. They will get apps, while children of the affluent get teachers, tutors, and the deep human instruction that produces durable learning. The equity argument for ed-tech, applied at scale and without rigorous scrutiny, may produce the opposite of what it promises.

China — which has invested in educational technology at a scale that dwarfs India’s — presents an instructive lesson. The country has restricted unsupervised generative AI use by primary school students and imposed limits on gaming and social media screen time, while simultaneously mandating AI literacy education for all grades from primary school upward. The thrust is on managed acceleration; an attempt to capture the benefits of technology while containing its documented costs.

PISA 2022, drawing on data from 81 countries, points in the same direction: modest device use in structured learning showed small gains, while heavy screen use correlated with dramatically lower scores; endorsing selectivity, not blanket acceleration. Specific bounded applications of technology have a legitimate place: tools adapted for children with particular learning needs or content delivery in genuinely isolated communities. Wholesale digital transformation of the classroom has no comparable supporting evidence.

The harder question — whether imperfect digital access is still preferable to no access at all in India’s most under-served communities — deserves a more honest answer than ed-tech’s proponents have generally provided. Research suggests the answer is more context-dependent than large-scale tech adoption allows for.

India has the advantage of being a late mover. The evidence from countries that moved first is abundant and concerning. The NEP’s digital commitments deserve serious, sceptical re-examination driven by what the data actually shows rather than by industry advocacy or the seductive simplicity of a technological fix. Putting a screen in front of a child is not the same as educating one.

The writer is an assistant professor with the Department of Professional Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru.