‘Rehumaning’ Education: Banning Screens Is Only Part of the Solution
‘We don't have to remove all tech,’ author Stephanie Malia Krauss says. ‘We need to remove toxic tech’ and bring back play and adequate sleep.
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Educators are having right now, with schools across the U.S. banning cellphones and parents fighting what many view as excessive classroom screen time.
But educator and author Stephanie Malia Krauss says ditching devices isn’t enough. If we want to improve young people’s academic results and well-being, we must focus on how schools can actually meet their needs. Removing devices without addressing stress and safety, among other issues, will be an empty gesture.
An expert on , Krauss began her career as a Teach For America teacher in Arizona and founded a competency-based high school in St. Louis. She has since led national youth readiness initiatives and consults widely. In her new book, “,” Krauss argues that schools have let addictive technology, stress and chronic busyness strip kids of basic human needs like sleep, play, wonder and connection.
She has coined the term to describe what schools can do to protect these needs. The 74’s Greg Toppo talked to Krauss about how the current tech backlash offers the opening educators need to focus on a version of school with students at its core.
Their conversation is edited for length and clarity.
You begin the book by observing that wherever you go, you ask people how they’re doing. The answer is always the same: “Everyone’s overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted.” Is this just a COVID hangover, or is something else happening?
I started asking the questions, “How are your kids?” “How are your families?” and “How are you?” as a way to understand the impacts of COVID. I was doing a book tour in my basement, and I couldn’t fly to be with the schools and youth programs I was speaking to. And at that point, the overwhelm, overload, stress and exhaustion that people were reporting made sense. I felt it. We were all experiencing the existential dread of a global pandemic.
But I decided to keep asking the questions, and six years later it’s hard to still consider COVID as the consequence for what’s driving the overwhelm in our lives. Having surveyed tens of thousands of adults caring for kids personally and professionally across an incredible variation of communities and contexts, the results have shown that people are more overwhelmed and overloaded and stressed and tired than they were six years ago. There’s only been one exception, in one community. And that was when I asked a group of hundreds of early childcare educators how the kids were. And the answers were: “Full of joy, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, unending energy.”
Something is changing between the early childhood years and the start of school.
Well, maybe we should be talking to them! Are they doing something right, or is something happening with four-year-olds that we need to focus on?
What is interesting to me is that at the bookends of our life, the early years and the elder years, the responses are often the same. Young kids start out as curious, joyful, full of energy, contributors. They want to help. They’re playful, creative. And when researchers study centenarians, people who live to be 100 or older, you often hear the same thing: These are people who have found ways to contribute, stay playful, keep moving, be curious. And in my mind, that’s a reflection that the overwhelm we are feeling today is not a personal failure, it’s an environmental one.
Let’s talk about classroom technology. You’ve said that digital apps and algorithms “exploit students’ developmental vulnerabilities, and that schools need concrete strategies to prioritize human essentials.” It seems like schools are starting to get this message — see recent phone bans and the nascent anti-screen movement. But you think this isn’t going far enough?
Toxic tech — tech that hooks and harms our kids — is what I call one of the “dangerous weather conditions” of modern life. Addictive, manipulative tech is often designed in ways that restrict some of the best parts of being human. So young people go on addictive platforms, for example, and they’re looking to have their normal developmental needs met. They’re curious, they want to connect with somebody, they’re bored and looking for entertainment. A teacher or adult told them to, and then they end up on a platform that’s designed to keep them coming back.
I think about this as “ultra-processed content,” designed to be hyper-palatable. But it’s fake, and kids are less likely then to want to socialize, play or experience recreation outside of something designed to be available 24/7 and feel much more fun and connecting. In the classroom, computers can sometimes be brought in to address capacity issues, cost issues and burnout issues — and they are, like ultra-processed food, a convenience and a cost saver. It’s still a level of ultra-processed content.
Any time that we have technology that is keeping kids from the very things they need to be healthy and happy, and also to learn and develop, I consider that toxic tech. And any time we have technology that actually assists or amplifies the ability to tap into the essentials that keep us healthy and happy, that’s humane tech. It’s technology that should stay. Right now, many schools are moving in the direction of seeing the antidote to addictive tech being the absence of technology. I would say the antidote to addictive tech is the abundance of healthy developmental opportunities that promote human essentials like play and creativity. We don’t have to remove all tech, we need to remove toxic tech.
So, what would be an example of tech that is not just non-toxic, but humane?
I interviewed boys at a private middle school in Richmond not too long ago, and they told me how technology is used for research, for projects, for really exploring things that young people are interested in or curious about. Kids can explore their capacities for wonder and creativity and or focus. They can learn something new, they can think about their personal interests, explore their identity — and then the technology goes away, and they’re reading books and talking about books and doing things outside. Technology is an enabler and encourager of essentials, rather than prohibiting the essentials in the first place.
How do you read the current anti-tech moment we’re in?
My worry is that the removal of devices will address symptoms that we’re seeing that sometimes relate to the consequences of harmful toxic tech, but also have roots in other places. When I was writing the book, the first question I had was, “Why are we all overwhelmed at such an intense level, and why is it getting worse? Hard lives are harder, and times of stability are still stressful.” And what I found was that there were four universal forces at play, toxic tech being only one of them. If we go into schools and remove computers and other digital devices without attending to the other “dangerous weather conditions” that I talk about — being overtapped, overworked, and overwrought, really afraid for our lives, safety issues that students feel — we’re going to see the persistence of the problems that right now are sometimes being exclusively attributed to technology use.
The idea that people are overwhelmed more broadly is not something that I hear discussed in this context. The only thing people are saying is, “My kids are overwhelmed by screens, so we need to remove the screens.”
Yes.
You’ve been on this listening tour, and I gather that kids are really interested in talking to adults about cellphone bans. What do they want us to know?
I’m wrapping up a statewide listening tour of Virginia middle schoolers on behalf of the , which is a statewide partnership of youth development organizations, school districts and education groups. And in every conversation with middle schoolers in Virginia — a state that did statewide phone bans — they have wanted to talk about it. And the answer is almost always the same, which is nuanced, and we have to give kids credit for the nuance they bring into conversations about devices, computers and AI.
What I’ve heard over and over is, “I like not having my phone when I’m learning. It’s easier to focus, it’s easier to pay attention. I’m not as distracted.” And then, from Appalachia to Alexandria, I have heard, “I don’t feel safe.” And what I have come to understand is that for kids, phones aren’t only communication devices, they’re comfort objects. If I have my phone and something terrible happens — a school shooting, a disaster, something scary — that is my way to get in contact with my family and to be safe. And when phones were removed from classrooms, schools either did too little or did not attend at all to the safety needs that crept in.
Aside from students saying, “OK, you took my comfort object,” what is the upshot? Are there behavioral consequences? Are there bigger mental health consequences?
I think so. In conversations with kids, it is clear that every day they come to school worried that something bad and dangerous can happen to them. Without addressing that safety concern, kids will be more dysregulated in the classroom. And we often confuse dysregulation with discipline. The signs of dysregulation look nearly identical to how we would characterize a misbehaving student or a lazy, disengaged student. Teachers receive little to no training on the science of dysregulation, but it’s possible that some of the problem behaviors that they are seeing are really dysregulation and not discipline.
You write about the behaviors that get kids into trouble at school — to your point about dysregulation — and you say, “These kids don’t need detention, they need a nap.” Are we missing a key success factor here? Do high school kids need a nap?
The is absolute that tweens and teens should not do school or anything before 8:30 in the morning, because their body clocks shift the moment they hit puberty. They are wired to want to go to sleep later. It has ancestral origins of young people staying awake later at night to protect their families, which means we wake them up hours before they’re ready and deprive them of the types of sleep they need for learning, memory, emotional regulation, and a whole bunch of other really vital things for learning behavior and future success. As the mom of a high schooler who starts school too early and who is also learning to drive, I will say personally this feels very consequential and even dangerous. We would be amazed at the improvements in adolescent mental health, adolescent learning and motivation if kids simply felt more rested, in the same ways that we feel profound impact as adults when we feel well-rested.
You write about the importance of play and movement, even suggesting that older kids need recess too. I’m guessing without their devices?
Yes. Whether we’re talking about sleep and regulation, or we’re talking about play and movement, this is all a part of a broader move to say it’s really time to “rehuman” schools, to have a version of human-centered schools and education that really protect and prioritize our natural human capacities to learn and develop, but also to endure and enjoy life, to thrive. Across millennia, humans have relied on play, for example, to prepare, to heal and to learn. So, when we look at studies of hunter-gatherer communities, we see that young people up until the time they transitioned into adulthood spent about a third of their time playing. So when humans are kind of left to their own devices, play becomes a really primal need that we share with every other social species. And groups like the National Institute for Play have shown that we need play at every age and stage of life, from the early years through elderhood. So adults in schools also should be asking, “How can my work be more playful? How can my engagement with students be more playful?” And when play is prioritized, there are physical and psychological benefits, in addition to quality-of-learning and work benefits. Movement? Same thing: In the studies that I looked at, for “How We Thrive,” they call sitting the new smoking, saying that if you sit for six hours or longer in a day, the health harms are equivalent to a pack of cigarettes a day. And yet we tell students that a good student sits in their seat, doesn’t get up, stays seated, and then moves quickly through the hallways in a pretty controlled way. But by injecting small moments of movement or small moments of play, we improve not only the culture of our classrooms, but also, ironically, the performance and quality of work that students can do.
Speaking of play, it strikes me that what happens after school, after the bell rings, is worth paying attention to.
In doing the statewide listening tour of middle schoolers, I heard from young people every time about the vital importance of their afterschool and summer programs. And there were instances of schools that bring that kind of youth development programming into the regular school day, and in those cases that was what I heard the most about. These are activities and experiences that lead with young people’s abilities to engage socially, to engage in play, to engage creatively, to celebrate each other. In this moment where we’re talking about screens and devices and what to take away, I want us to talk about what to give back. Too many kids can’t afford or access these afterschool and summer programs, and they matter more than ever.
To bring us to the beginning of the conversation, the antidote to addictive, toxic tech is not the absence of devices, it’s the abundance of healthy, positive developmental experiences, which are often found in afterschool and summer programs and experiential project-based learning in the classroom.
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