By Catherine L’Ecuyer, published in the Spanish outlet La Razón, on March 24, 2025
Following Sweden’s example, the Madrid region this week embarked on the path to removing tablets from classrooms. In Canada, the National Institute of Public Health of Québec conducted a literature review on the subject and concluded: “Recent scientific data suggest that digital devices in the classroom, whether used for personal or educational purposes, at best offer no benefit to learning, and at worst have a detrimental effect on young people’s cognition.”
The digitalisation of classrooms has been a colossal mistake from which we will be recovering for years to come. The million-dollar question is: why did we not even debate the convenience of introducing tablets in the first place? Much is said about the financial interests of the industry and those who sponsor its content, which has been the primary driver behind mass digitalisation. But today, I would like to describe three mental states that have paralysed the educator’s capacity for critical thought, even the most learned.
The first mindset is the belief that the new is always better than the old. Since technology was synonymous with progress and modernity, we never even paused to question whether it made sense to introduce it into classrooms. Nor were we prudent in demanding evidence before deployment, nor temperate in waiting to receive it.
The second mindset is the trance of technological novelty — an almost religious adulation of technology that threatens to cloud our perspective, leading us to perceive technological innovation with an apocalyptic fascination. It interprets change as radically decisive and revelatory of the future.
Yet if the ‘relevance’ and fever of novelty fade merely with the passage of time, it was foreseeable that tablets would eventually be relegated to the dusty chest of irrelevance. It was predictable that, suddenly and without moving an inch, those once dismissed as ‘old-fashioned’ would be embraced as the new ‘educational vanguard’.
The third mental state decisive in digitalisation has been that of the “lukewarm moderate”. For them, neither too much nor too little — “everything is a matter of balance.” If consumption statistics indicate a certain figure, virtue lies somewhere between that figure and total abstinence. The goal, then, is not excellence or meaning, but merely to “avoid abuse.” Yet, as Ethics Professor Margarita Mauri reminds us, “virtue cannot be spoken of as a diminished vice, nor vice as an exaggeration, by excess or deficiency, of that very virtue.”
The “lukewarm moderate” mistakes prudence for silence, timidity, or cowardice in the face of harmful behaviour; they reduce temperance to a minimalist law, a pact with mediocrity. They will scarcely succeed in educating their pupils or children in the virtuous life, for they do not understand it: a steady disposition enabling the choice of the most excellent path through prudence, courage, and temperance. Growing up with a device designed for addiction and distraction hardly seems the best means to achieve this.
In short, if we are to take any lesson from the error of digitalisation, it would be wise to adopt a timeless attitude — aspiring to what has been, is, and always will be, a good education.
