Digital Literacy & the Slow Death of Thinking

As devices infiltrate classrooms under the guise of educational enhancement, what we witness is the slow and silent erosion of an intellectual culture that once prized slow, deep engagement.

Navigating the wreckage of discarded traditions, mapping forgotten virtues, reviving enduring principles, and unearthing timeless pedagogical treasures…

A persistent myth, fueled by the restless anxieties of modern life and the ceaseless evangelism of technological progress, insists that a child’s success hinges on mastering the digital rituals of spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and Google Docs. This belief, omnipresent and deceptively alluring, reimagines education as a conveyor belt of technical proficiency, where classrooms become shrines to technology, and parents, entranced by the glow of screens, eagerly trade history, art, physical education, and language studies for promises of digital literacy.

Yet beneath this shimmering facade lies an uncomfortable truth: the tools lauded as educational saviors often erode the very foundations of learning. In their glare, students are seduced into skimming rather than analyzing, memorizing shortcuts instead of mastering complexities, and prioritizing expedience over deep intellectual engagement. The culture of technology in classrooms often undermines education’s purpose, fostering habits that discourage critical thinking and intellectual resilience.

This modern cult of the device is so brazen that it asks us to diminish what education has long been understood to be: a cultivation of mind and character, a means of forging intellect through deliberate and thoughtful engagement with ideas and experiences. The ironic twist? The very thing that you, in your infinite concern for the future of your child, seek to preserve—intellectual rigor, the ability to manage complexity, the command of reasoning—becomes precisely the thing that is compromised in the process of hyper-focus on technology.

Let's talk about history. Or art. Or physical education. Or languages. Can a spreadsheet replace these? Can a Google Doc substitute for an art class that teaches students not just to replicate but to create, not just to parse out information but to encounter it, engage with it, interrogate it? The question, it seems, is not just what technology is doing to education; it’s what education is doing to our relationship with technology. As digital devices infiltrate classrooms under the guise of educational enhancement, we increasingly witness the slow and silent erosion of an intellectual culture that once prized slow, deep engagement. No longer are we reading; at best, we’re skimming. No longer are we understanding; we’re just cutting and pasting from one pixelated platform to another.

Yes, in the well-lit classrooms of the digital age, the literary canon is being suffocated to death. Forget about sitting with Moby Dick or the ponderous Critique of Pure Reason. No, it’s much easier to click “find” and let Google dictate the answer. In truth, what happens when technology enters the learning space is rarely an expansion of intellectual territory. Rather, it’s an intellectual shortcut, a bypass where the inconvenient paths of thought, those that demand effort and sustained attention, are too often abandoned in favor of the instant gratification of digital quick-fix solutions.

Devices, often intended to open doors, close them instead. As students are invited to access the infinite, they are simultaneously prevented from accessing the depth that resides in texts and experiences not mediated by a screen. They are encouraged to skim, scroll, click, search, but not to read, not to wrestle with the difficult, opaque text of War and Peace. And in this intellectual shallowness, we do something far more harmful than merely dull their minds: We blunt their creativity. Without the struggle to decipher, to interpret, to wrest meaning from the opaque, the mind loses its capacity to create anew, to envision worlds beyond the sterile glow of the screen.

Is the solution truly more devices? Or perhaps, instead, is the better answer the quieting of the machine, the return to reading, to discussion, to slow, deliberate thinking, those same things that have made humans human for centuries? Instead of a world in which every question is answered with a few taps of a screen, wouldn’t it be better for our children to be able to think critically, engage deeply, and create meaningfully without the ever-present hum of the digital world dictating what they must focus on, how they must focus, and for how long? In stepping away from the instant answers and curated distractions of the digital age, we step toward something far greater: the arduous, liberating pursuit of true knowledge. This pursuit, though demanding, is what frees us from passivity and shapes individuals capable of thinking for themselves, an ability no machine can replicate, no algorithm can dictate.

True knowledge, the kind that emancipates, is not fed through screens but forged in the friction of thought. It is the freedom to ask, to doubt, to wrestle with the unfamiliar and emerge with an understanding uniquely one’s own. This freedom, messy and maddening in its demands, is the antithesis of the sterile, preordained narratives dispensed by the ever-churning digital ether. And yet, in relinquishing it, we do more than surrender our students to manipulation. We make them strangers to themselves, their potential reduced to echoes of a system that thrives on their passivity.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.