Parents hand out copies of the book at school board meetings. Administrators are relying on it for guidance on how to reduce the use of technology in their schools. Actor Hugh Grant promoted it and wrote a blurb for the cover.
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Practically overnight, Jared Cooney Horvath went from a relatively unknown educational consultant to the intellectual guide of a grassroots movement to limit screen time in schools, thanks to his self-published book “The Digital Delusion.”
The book, which he released last December, ties the yearslong downward trend in standardized test scores among American children to the rise of schools giving every child a laptop or tablet. With citations to academic research, Horvath argues students learn better on paper and through discussion, and schools are harming children by sticking them behind a screen.
Since releasing “The Digital Delusion,” Horvath has testified before the U.S. Senate and state legislatures as a growing number of states weigh screen time limits in schools. Local parent coalitions from California to Maryland have hosted him in webinars to seek his advice on pushing districts to return to printed textbooks. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union, cited him as a “leading researcher” in a speech last week calling for restrictions on technology in schools.
“There’s no way in hell my book has this big of an impact,” Horvath said. “So my thought is it was there, it was fomenting, it was always about to happen. It’s just people needed the arguments, and I think that’s probably where the book kind of slid in and just said, ‘Here’s the word you’ve been looking for.’”
Jared Cooney Horvath predicted ed tech would be the next big debate after schools banned cellphones.Courtesy Jared Cooney Horvath
For parents and educators pushing for guardrails on education technology, or ed tech, in schools, the book offers a persuasive package of statistics and sources they can deploy to convince other community members and school leaders.
“As parents, we feel a lot of imposter syndrome sometimes when we’re talking about this,” said Jodi Carreon, a mother in San Diego and the national director of the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. “So having a book written by someone with a background in education as well as neuroscience added a lot of credibility to what parents were experiencing.”
Administrators at Granville County Public Schools, in North Carolina, said they read the book when they launched a “tech-free” experiment in which students were not allowed to use laptops two days a week. Julie Frumin, a California mother who opted her children out of using devices in the Conejo Valley Unified School District, passed out copies of the book to school board members at a meeting in February.
But for longtime leaders of education organizations and tech proponents, the book has become a problem. School administrators are caught off guard by parents who have read the book and insist on policy changes. It has prompted lengthy debates from LinkedIn comment threads to school board meetings and webinars by education consultants to guide administrators on how to deal with Horvath’s claims.
“I can’t tell you how many times I get a call in a week from a school leader who is freaking out about this and is going, ‘What do we do? How do we respond to this?’” said Richard Culatta, the chief executive of ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit that advises schools on technology.
Culatta expected there would be a reckoning around ed tech after schools went on a massive spending spree on devices and software during the Covid pandemic. The technology schools purchased often wasn’t vetted well, he said. But the book has “caused far more wasted time arguing about the wrong thing,” he said, by linking falling test scores to ed tech.
“It’s just a huge case of correlation and causation,” Culatta said. “He’s making a causation that doesn’t exist, and the reason this is so dangerous is that when you look at what’s going on, it’s actually far more likely that there are other things that are causing that.” He suggested mental health has a bigger impact.
What the book argues
“The Digital Delusion” challenges recurring commentary from across the political spectrum that education is “broken.” If anything, Horvath writes, ed tech broke American schools by pitching distracting multimedia to boost learning. He believes that a decadeslong push by ed tech companies to deliver personalized instruction has been a waste of time and dollars. AI isn’t going to make it better, he argues, and schools that embrace it “signal institutional surrender.”
“EdTech isn’t failing because of outdated software or poor teacher training,” he writes in the book. “It’s failing because it’s fundamentally incompatible with how human beings actually learn.”
Horvath writes that students who use computers for at least six hours a day score 66 points lower than students who do not use them at all on the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, a prominent global performance test, and daily computer use in school also correlates with lower math and science scores on benchmark assessments from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. He argues schools would get more for their money if they invested in air conditioning instead of laptops.
“If I ran a school, I would drop it all tomorrow,” Horvath said. “And people would say, ‘What would you do?’ I’d say, ‘We already have it. It’s called textbooks. It’s called paper and pencil.’ It’s not about inventing something new — it’s about going back to what works better.”
Parents brought copies of “The Digital Delusion” to give to school board members in Thousand Oaks, Calif., on Feb. 4.Peyton Fulford for NBC News
Many of his book’s arguments echo policy briefs from think tanks, such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the National Education Policy Center, which describe research showing the superiority of reading paper books and writing by hand instead of on a screen, and other studies that associated even small amounts of computer use at school to worse academic performance.
Horvath earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he studied how the brain learns, and received a philosophy doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Melbourne in Australia. He has written columns about how the brain works in educational settings for over a decade, and has written and edited books about neuroscience.
He has split his time between Australia and Oregon, teaching and working as a consultant for schools through his company LME Global. Periodically, he has posted pop science videos about learning on YouTube — including one in January 2024 that declared “The EdTech Revolution has Failed.”
The idea for “The Digital Delusion” emerged after “The Anxious Generation,” a book by psychologist Jonathan Haidt that made the case against teen smartphone and social media use, helped advance dozens of laws restricting students from using phones in schools. Horvath saw smartphones as the “lowest hanging fruit” and predicted where the conversation would go next.
“The next apple up the tree was always going to be ed tech,” Horvath said, “because once parents realize, ‘Wait a second, we can push back against cellphone use in schools, then that means we can push back against Chromebook use in schools too.’”
A heated debate
When he published “The Digital Delusion” in December 2025, it received little media coverage beyond a Fox News segment and an excerpt that ran in The Free Press, a news website purchased by Paramount last year. But the book took off after Horvath testified about screen time in schools before the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on Jan. 15. He said he’s sold over 5,000 books each month; the book is the top seller on Amazon in the “Educational Psychology” category.
His timing was perfect, because groups of parents had recently begun organizing to pressure their schools to curb screen time.
One clip of his Senate testimony posted by C-SPAN on YouTube now has nearly 3 million views. The book will be republished by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in August.
Horvath taught and worked as an educational consultant for the past decade, while writing on the side.Courtesy Jared Cooney Horvath
Jody Scheer, a retired pediatrician and co-founder of Oregon Unplugged, a parent activist coalition that hosted Horvath for a town hall this spring, said she’s seen parents cite his book at school board meetings.
“He’s got a way of being able to share these complicated concepts in a way that people can understand it, and then use it to their benefit,” she said.
Almost just as quickly, people working in education policy began debating Horvath’s thesis.
“It’s very hard to interpret correlations,” said Peter Bergman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin who studies ed tech. “It’s rare to have one neat story that just explains some big macro trend across the country.”
Critics also say Horvath lumps together different types of ed tech and doesn’t grapple with research that supports moderate use of computers in school.
While the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international nongovernmental organization that administers the PISA, found that extended computer use correlated with worse test scores in 2022, students who used devices for learning for one to five hours a day at school did better than those who didn’t use them at all. Horvath said that data is an outlier because it reflects tests taken amid pandemic-related disruptions, and that overall math scores dropped significantly.
Jacob Pleasants, co-executive director of the Civics of Technology Project, a group of academics advocating for the ethical use of technology in schools, said he was unfamiliar with Horvath until he read the book last winter. In an April book club discussion the group held, Pleasants said, participants were torn between embracing it for catalyzing their concerns around ed tech and distancing themselves because they felt Horvath went too far with his sweeping conclusions.
“A lot of the arguments he puts forward are dubious, but many of the practical suggestions he puts forward are ones that a lot of us would endorse,” said Pleasants, an associate professor of science education at the University of Oklahoma, referring to Horvath’s suggestions for schools to audit their ed tech products and use caution adopting AI.
Horvath said he plans to address many of these criticisms in the expanded edition being released this summer. He acknowledges some ed tech, like tutoring software that adapts to students’ needs, does show a positive impact on learning.
But for many ed tech products, he said, there’s not enough research to show improvements compared to traditional methods.
Moving to Italy
Whereas Haidt made reducing teen social media use a yearslong campaign, Horvath doesn’t expect to do the same with technology in schools — there are other topics he wants to explore.
“What gets me out of bed in the morning is, how do human beings learn?” he said.
Horvath is in the process of moving to Italy with his family — he picked the country in part because he feels it has a better screen time balance and its schools emphasize handwriting — and has plans for at least two more books. One will be about whether genius is something people can teach, and another he’s calling “The Learning Blueprint,” in which he wants to convey “everything I’ve ever known about learning.”
The debate he has helped sparked will continue, he predicted, thanks to groups of dedicated parents.
“I’m not inventing a new school model,” he said. “I’m just nudging us back into something good.”
