Edtech Racket Exposed as Schools Dump Screens

When school starts next year at Marian Catholic College in Sydney's north-west, the laptops that Years 7 to 10 students used in lessons won't be there. "There's a strong sentiment that devices are a problem," principal Matthew Smith says. The Kenthurst school will be among a handful across the state to effectively ban one-to-one technology after a survey of teachers, students and parents backed the move.

It's a sharp turn. The Digital Education Revolution Kevin Rudd launched in 2008 — 18 years ago — put screens in front of a generation of kids. Now the same apparatus that sold the revolution is announcing its end.

Who Has the Power

The federal government is pushing a "digital detox" in schools, according to a new report. Education Minister Jason Clare told ABC Radio National on Thursday: "I'm not making the argument here to burn the iPads ... but I am saying that there's a pretty good argument here for more pen and paper and less tech." State and federal ministers have agreed to consider national limits on screen use. NSW Education Minister Prue Car has introduced screen time caps of as little as 15 minutes per day for some students. A new taskforce will report to ministers three times next year.

Notice who decided what, and when. Until now there was no comprehensive national data on how much time Australian children spend on devices at school. Phone bans were set at state level. Almost everything else — whether kids bring a laptop, which AI tools they can use — was decided school by school. A decades-long trend ran without anyone at the top measuring it, and the same ministers who presided over it now say they'll fix it.

Who Gets Crushed

Families paid. Public schools previously recommended parents buy laptops and advertised buy-now-pay-later schemes for families who couldn't afford the upfront cost. On Sunday, the NSW government said parents will not be required to buy expensive laptops or tablets. Quiet words, after the debt was already on the books.

The edtech boom, the report notes, started in the 2000s. A 2015 OECD analysis — 11 years ago — found countries that invested heavily in computers for schools saw no appreciable improvement in reading, maths or science scores. And the source is blunt about the sales side: there hasn't been enough onus on those selling technologies to schools to demonstrate positive impact. Decisions were often made on the basis of pilots and word of mouth.

Teachers got squeezed too. La Trobe University lecturer Sarah Warby said that amid teacher shortages, the edtech industry became a useful gap filler with learning platforms, lesson-plan banks and educational games. "If teachers are teaching out of their area of specialty, edtech comes in fills that gap," she said. Staff shortages created the opening; the vendors walked through it.

Smith's teachers found laptops hard to supervise, with teenagers adept at flicking between applications to disguise what they're really up to. Laptops, he says, reduced students' working memory and created a barrier between pupils and the teacher.

What People Actually Did

The pressure came from below. Parents and teachers pushed. The Heads Up Alliance, founded by NSW father Dany Elachi, wants primary school device-free, handwriting restored, physical books as the default and generative AI out of schools. "It turns out that Australia's Digital Education Revolution of 2008 was, in effect, a vast experiment on our children," Elachi said. "The mood has shifted among parents and teachers – what was once a whisper has turned into a shout. We're not at the stage of picketing outside of schools. But we have started a petition and hope to present it to [Education Minister] Jason Clare."

In New York, parents have held public rallies outside classrooms against AI in schools. In the US, groups such as Schools Beyond Screens are lobbying government against digital devices.

Note the structure of that last step: a petition, presented to a minister. The ask goes up the chain. The Catholic Diocese of Parramatta, meanwhile, is simply doing it — buying physical copies of novels and mini-whiteboards, with head of primary learning Lisa Crampton saying handwriting is "part of the knowledge-building itself, rather than just a tool to record what we know."

The Alternative

Not everyone agrees on where this lands. Professor Matt Bower of Macquarie University warned against total rejection of technology, and Jason M Lodge of the University of Queensland called the report "a step in the right direction" but said "we need more planning and more information." Charles Sturt University's Noella Mackenzie put it plainly: "Education is not entertainment."

Smith, for his part, is clear about what he wants the classroom to be. "The classroom has to be interactive, relational and not passive." That's a description of people in a room, talking, without a vendor's platform in between. The taskforce reports to ministers. The kids, once again, sit downstream of the decision.