Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

It's like, yeah, okay, you're talking about cells.

But as soon as you get up to the social level, we're now in psychology, and that's where people think it must be different.

And maybe it is nuanced, but there still has to be structure to all of this.

Otherwise, we're going to have a million kids living in a million different worlds, smelling a million different things as they get older.

And I don't think that's going to be a very easy place to live in.

What if...

Digital technology and digital skills are irrelevant to the future of work.

What if we don't need our kids all to use an iPad in primary years in order to become work ready in the future?

What if tech isn't the answer?

So if you track digital literacy amongst students from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of kids who are digitally literate across the world, the countries we've tested, has dropped 21%.

Despite, in that time, the percentage of kids using tech every day in explicit tech-based schools and classrooms has increased over 600%.

So we're teaching tech more and more and more to our kids.

They're using it all day, every day, yet they're worse at it at the end.

Why?

Because maybe tech literacy comes from deep knowledge

of other things, of self.

I always say, if you want to be tech literate, be life literate first, and then you move those skills onto tech.

So I think if we reset schooling back to humanistic recognition, to we're here to teach you literacy, we're here to teach you numeracy, we're here to teach you how to think and how to learn, now whatever tool comes down the pipe, you're going to be fine, and you're going to be able to adapt to it.

And it could be that once we go back to training kids analog again,

Tech is fine, man.