When It Comes to Technology, Catholic Schools Can Lead by Example 

Over the past few years, an overwhelming amount of empirical research has shown the harmful effects of screens on learning, particularly for young children. You can throw a rock in a bookstore and hit a book packed with the evidence. Take Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, or Michel Desmurget’s Screen Damage. While theirs were once fringe views, there is a large and growing awareness among parents and educators that is quite difficult to ignore. Many now know: the iPad is not an ideal medium for reading, note-taking, or completing assessments. Reading on paper tends to yield better comprehension than reading on screens. Writing by hand requires forms of cognitive and motor engagement that typing does not. The presence and use of laptops can distract students and interfere with classroom learning. Completing an analogue essay generates formative friction and enables a more reliable assessment of student competence and command of language. Not to mention, policing iPads and Chromebooks has proven to be an endless and ever-changing classroom management issue with no end in sight. I’m writing this with the authority of experience teaching theology to a group of senior boys who, despite my best efforts, reliably figured out how to airplay memes of Ron Burgundy on the projector during first period circa 2019. 

This was all true before generative AI was embedded into word processors and search engines, now giving students unbounded access to tools that can construct entire essays if prompted, even if they are unable to access most sites on school-issued devices. Now, not only are 1:1 programs preventing tactile skill development (and perpetuating poor handwriting), cultivating dopamine dependency, and shortening attention spans, they are also potential sites of cognitive erosion through over-outsourcing to generative AI tools. Even if sixth graders are told how to use AI responsibly, they are still sixth graders. We should hardly expect young people, when no one is watching, to reliably choose the path of more resistance simply because it is better for their formation. Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman calls this the “law of least effort” in Thinking, Fast and Slow. 

Perhaps it never made sense to assess student learning using assignments completed at home with little oversight. It may have made sense in the 1960s when prospective cheaters needed to phone a friend in the kitchen with onlooking parents nearby or bully a smart kid into handing over his homework. It’s fair to say that passing off fraudulent work as one’s own was significantly more difficult under those conditions. It has not been that way for quite some time. Now it is rather easy to cheat and to defraud unsuspecting teachers. 

All of this is to say that all schools—particularly Catholic ones—should be contending with these realities: the empirical research on technology-mediated education and the obvious implications of impossible-to-ban-and-control access to generative AI. Does this mean schools should never use technology in education? Not exactly. It does mean that having students use it for everything is increasingly difficult to justify. Pope Leo XIV makes precisely this point in Magnifica Humanitas, reminding us that “every technology shapes those who use it.” Educating young people to use technology well therefore includes “teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used.” In fact, all the uniquely Catholic angles that school leaders should be considering in Catholic schools make it difficult to justify continuing 1:1 technology policies in which students have access to and use a Chromebook or iPad for all or most of their work. Let’s consider what those might be. 

Character Formation  

I would venture to guess that a decent majority of Catholic schools are explicitly invested in forming student character and have even named that care in their mission, motto, or values statement (or they ought to). Character is about who students become, not the grades they earn or the outputs they can produce. It means investment in graduating the sort of students who can be patient with difficulty, who can persevere through discomfort, who have cultivated care for what is good, true, and beautiful. Efficiency and ease run counter to the formation of virtue and good will—at least at the start. In its early stages, to be sure, the formation of virtue refuses the path of least resistance.  

It doesn’t seem to be the case that a 1:1 technology policy supplies any clear benefit to student efforts to tread the path of virtue. On the contrary, it often encourages quite the opposite—an expectation of ease, access to ever-growing sources of immediate gratification and distraction, an excuse to put down one’s head and indulge in one’s navel-gazing fascinations at the expense of the humans in our midst. If asking, “Does a 1:1 program offer any marked benefit to the formation of student virtue?” we would be hard pressed to answer in the affirmative. It is most clearly an obstacle in this respect. 

Spiritual Formation 

Of course, every Catholic school is clearly a ministry of the Church. No matter what population it serves, it does have the responsibility of cultivating disciples of Christ—not just teaching the tenets of the faith but creating an environment in which young people might become open and willing to encounter the living God (Psalm 42:2). Spiritual formation requires a certain ecology. It is more difficult for a spiritual novice to find beauty in the desert, to intentionally make space for the Holy Spirit in an onslaught of stimuli that whet the lower appetites. This is precisely what makes 1:1 programs problematic for Catholic schools, most especially for K–8 schools. 

Do such programs help encourage a school culture where discernment about technology use is encouraged? Or is it merely assumed? Does a 1:1 program provide space for students to sit and endure periods of silence that prepare their hearts to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the demands of conscience? In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo describes our task as cultivating the “inner freedom” necessary to live well amid digital technologies. Does the ubiquity of screens and devices encourage spiritual development and the discernment conducive to spiritual maturity? Again, we would be hard pressed to say yes. 

Care for the Poor 

Finally, though it is not part of every Catholic school’s mission, a great many specifically serve the economically disadvantaged and in doing so provide young people with the skills and talents that might eventually lead to a prosperous career and break the cycle of material suffering in their family. On this point, there does seem to be the strongest argument for encouraging technological fluency among young people—given that such a proficiency will be, no doubt, a part of their future professional lives. The argument, though, hinges on the notion that pervasive and extensive use of devices will develop such proficiency. That premise lacks evidence. The barriers to fluid use of technology are fewer as our tools have evolved toward an end of “human-centered design,” which prioritizes ease of use. iPads and iPhones, for instance, are built this way. This is why toddlers have no difficulty manipulating them to play games, find apps, and start and play videos. This is also why Boomers have developed their own dependences and addictions to social media despite not using an iPad or smartphone for the first fifty years of their lives. It’s not obvious that adept use of an iPad is among the top skills firms are searching for anyway. 

Further, to use generative AI tools well does not require an understanding of code or Boolean logic—they work in plain language. Because they work in plain language, a command of language is fundamentally the skill needed to use them best, that is, to get the output one seeks from a prompt. That utilitarian capacity first depends on other intellectual capacities. Those capacities include grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Making sound judgments about AI outputs also requires those intellectual capacities plus the discernment to know what is worth wanting, what limits ought to be in place, and where AI is not a sufficient tool or interlocutor. All of that depends on the formation of character and spiritual openness described above. 

It’s also worth noting that some of those who are keenly aware of market demands—and who have demonstrably benefited from them by amassing wealth—choose to send their children to astonishingly low-tech schools. The technologies sold as panaceas to the poor are kept at a careful distance from the progeny of some of the nation’s richest tech executives. 

This, of course, does not mean educational technology is intrinsically bad. It does not mean it has no place in education. Instead, it means that it should not be an assumed good or deemed an inevitable force that must be accepted at all times and in every subject. As Catholics, our choices about norms in education are not determined by Silicon Valley. They should be established given the realities of the natural law, and the inherited and very real theological anthropology of the human person developed throughout our intellectual tradition. Though the world turns and changes, we are called to respond with discernment, not simply succumbing to the logic of the secular. It just happens to be the case that much of the empirical science supports the realities we know to be true—that humans need each other, limits, rest, and an ecology that supports focus and sustained growth and development. 

So then, if 1:1 programs are not a particular benefit to learning generally, character development, spiritual development, or the Church’s care for the poor, the argument for their pervasiveness among most Catholic schools appears weak at best and imprudent and negligent at worst. Though rethinking a 1:1 program requires many conversations and thoughtful planning, it is something each school leader should feel called to consider and engage in good faith. It will, of course, demand the same strength of character we hope our students will possess—a refusal to submit to what is easiest, fastest, and convenient. Here, Catholic schools can lead by example. 

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