The Walled Garden Education surged past 1,000 subscribers this month! To those who have been here for some time, thank you for your ongoing support. To those who are new here, a very warm welcome. And to all of you, this newsletter exists because of your curiosity and your willingness to take these questions seriously; I hope it continues to earn your attention.
The Roundup is a monthly collection of my writing as well as the writing of others who have helped shape my thinking about education, attention, and technology. Below, you’ll find works that explore AI literacy, youth screen time, and the gamification of our classrooms.
Please enjoy:
This is the third and final piece in the series on evidence and technology in schools. Where the first two pieces examined the plausibility trap and the structural conflict of interest that prevents AI companies from teaching genuine AI literacy, this one proposes what a real alternative looks like. The framework has three elements — What It Is, Who It Serves, and What It Costs — and is grounded in an important distinction: the difference between proficiency and literacy. A student who can write an effective prompt is not AI literate in any meaningful sense. A student who understands why the prompt produces what it produces, who built the system and why, and what it costs them cognitively and the planet environmentally has developed some critical literacy. The piece also proposes a developmental sequence, grounded in cognitive science, for when each element of that framework can realistically be taught. Any approach that inverts the sequence isn’t preparing students for an AI-saturated world; it’s preparing them for dependency.
Two new technologies have arrived in classrooms, and they share a common mission: to attempt to make the illegible legible by measuring it. The first of these is emotional surveillance: platforms that monitor students’ attention and affect via camera during screen-based work. The second is integrity surveillance: platforms that log keystrokes, track browser activity, and generate originality scores to detect AI use. Drawing on Onora O’Neill’s distinction between trust and control and C. Thi Nguyen’s concept of “Value Capture”, I argue that both technologies produce convincing imitations of the qualities we hope young people develop: honesty, engagement, and self-awareness. The alternative is more humane and trusting; it requires us to redesign the conditions of learning: assessment that reveals process rather than surveillance that monitors compliance.
I joined a panel hosted by The Dais, a public policy think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, to discuss best practices in school phone restrictions, the case for going further than most schools currently have, and what the research says about outcomes. I was joined by two administrators — Matthew Shapiro of Westmount High School in Montréal, Québec and Tim Mushumanksi of Trafalgar Middle School in Nelson, British Columbia — who have both implemented bell-to-bell restrictions in their schools and can speak to what the resistance looks like and what their schools feel like now. The conversation is grounded in the Canadian policy landscape but the practical questions it covers travel well.
“Schools Don’t Need an AI Plan. They Need a Teacher Support Plan.” by Tim Requarth
Requarth explores New York City’s recently released AI guidelines for its one million students, but he thinks they ask the wrong question. The document asks how to manage AI inside schools when the question it should be asking is how to redesign the classroom now that AI outside schools has made many traditional methods of assessment obsolete. His modest proposal: for every dollar spent on AI procurement, spend a dollar helping teachers redesign their teaching for a world that has changed underneath their feet through no fault of their own.
“Too Fast, Too Confident, Too Digital?” by Paul Kirschner
Kirschner returns with a close reading of a new study on how seventh and eighth-graders read the same texts in print and on screen. The finding is that when students read digitally, they read faster, became more overconfident, and understood less. Drawing on Gavriel Salomon’s classic work on the effort learners invest in different media, Kirschner explains that screens signal ease, and learners respond accordingly. Students glide through digital text, don’t pause, don’t reread, and mistake fluency for understanding. The authors propose better-designed digital environments as the solution. Kirschner has a simpler one: print it.
“New Surgeon General’s Advisory Raises Alarm About Screen Time Risks for Kids and Teens” by Jacqueline Howard in CNN
Released this week, the advisory declares excessive screen time among children and teenagers a public health concern. By adolescence, children average four or more hours of screen time daily, and nearly half admit they lose track of how long they’ve been on their phones. The advisory recommends no screens for children under 18 months and a maximum of two hours daily for ages 6 to 18. That it was issued at all by a leaderless public health institution suggests the evidence has become impossible to ignore.
“Canada Is Considering an AI Chatbot Ban for Kids” by Laura Osman and Martin Patriquin in The Logic
Three sources with knowledge of the government’s plans confirmed to The Logic that Ottawa will proceed with a social media ban for youth and is now actively debating whether to extend that restriction to AI chatbots. At their recent policy convention, Liberal Party members voted to set the minimum age at 16. Unlike social media, however, some believe that AI tools have educational uses, making a blanket ban thornier. But the political direction is clear, and the Tumbler Ridge shooting — in which a B.C. teen who killed eight people was found to have had troubling conversations with ChatGPT beforehand — has increased the urgency considerably.
“My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon” by Will Oremus in The Atlantic
Will Oremus opens with a scene that will be familiar to many parents: his 11-year-old, supposedly doing math homework, was instead battling cartoon monsters on Prodigy, a platform his teacher had assigned. In ten minutes of gameplay, his son spent less than thirty seconds answering math questions. Oremus documents how gamified EdTech platforms like Prodigy, Blooket, and Gimkit have become fixtures in many classrooms, promising engagement by delivering something similar to Candy Crush. The deeper problem his piece identifies is that screen time in schools has become a default rather than an intentional choice, and that phone bans and content filters, however necessary, haven’t proven effective enough. Software has colonized K-12 schools and unwinding that will require more than a Yondr pouch.
This month’s reading identifies a gap between awareness and action. The surgeon general’s advisory, Canada’s proposed chatbot restrictions, and the flaws of gamified homework all illuminate the vast distance between our concerns and our institutional practices. It’s time that we address that disparity.
If you agree, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. These conversations matter.
Until June,
Andrew
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