There’s a photo taken by an AFP photographer that’s been circling the internet for a decade. It shows a woman standing on the bank of a 12sq km toxic reservoir in Inner Mongolia. It’s a vast, black, viscous lake of chemical and radioactive sludge generated by rare-earth-minerals processing.
The lake is the Weikuang Dam on the outskirts of Baotou, a city of about two million people in northern China, which has long called itself the world capital of rare-earths production. It’s been accumulating this waste from processing neodymium, a rare-earth element in laptops, along with sulphuric acid, heavy metals and radioactive thorium for 60 years. The Chinese Academy of Sciences warned in 2024 of serious ongoing air and tailings-pond pollution in the area, and researchers have found that children in Baotou carry measurable levels of rare-earths contamination in their urine.
Every September, thousands of Irish parents with kids entering secondary school are told that each student needs a personal laptop. Costs start at about €750, and in some schools parents are told to pay €1,000. In January, RTÉ reported that one of the largest providers of managed devices and tablets to schools in the State was inviting school principals to overnight stays at five-star hotels during term time to discuss what it called “Leading senior cycle reform with a student device model”. The invitations arrived, containing a hotel key card and accompanying video; the company said there was no sales obligation attached.
The episode illustrated how aggressively educational technology is now marketed to schools, which are treating personal, individual laptops as an unquestioned educational good. The research doesn’t fully support this. The Unesco Global Education Monitoring Report, which is the most authoritative independent review of technology in education, found only small to moderate positive effects from educational technology and said that even those gains are difficult to attribute to the device rather than to additional teaching time and resources. The most extensively studied laptop programme in history, One Laptop per Child, distributed hundreds of thousands of devices to more than 40 countries; a long-term analysis of the programme in Peru found effects on mathematics and reading that the researchers described as small and insignificant.
It’s not just that the educational benefits to children are weak; the physical consequences on their bodies are serious and poorly communicated to parents. A 2025 meta-analysis drawing on 45 studies and 335,000 individuals showed that screen time is associated with myopia, a risk that increases with between one and four hours of daily use. The impact of personal devices goes beyond children’s eyes into their necks and shoulders. Finnish research tracked teenagers and found that two or more hours of daily computer use was associated with a two- to fourfold increase in pain. Many schools are mandating the use of personal laptops in classrooms without the chairs, desks, or ergonomic supports that would be required in any workplace.
None of this applies to students who rely on devices for access to education. For children with disabilities, assistive technology is often transformative; the concern is with blanket mandates for all children, rather than targeted use.
Sweden, one of the world’s earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of classroom digitisation, has in recent years shifted back towards textbooks and handwriting amid concerns about reading comprehension, concentration and attention. The Swedish education minister described the digitisation of schools as an experiment lacking a scientific basis that had harmed children’s learning.
This September, first-year students in secondary schools throughout the State will be given their own expensive digital device which they’ll be told to use for hours each week. They’ll also be handed pouches to lock away their mobile phones during the school day – an initiative introduced by the Government, funded using €9 million of public money – because of the harm to their concentration and wellbeing. These two things are inconsistent.
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The burden should be on the Department of Education and schools to show strong evidence that individual devices improve kids’ learning before parents are asked to spend hundreds of euro on them. Otherwise, all we’re left with is a commercially lucrative mandate that, if it were any other product with this evidence base and resource cost, we would have called a scandal long before now.
A woman standing on the banks of a ‘toxic lake’ surrounded by rare earth refineries near the inner Mongolian city of Baotou. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
The cost of laptops begins in far-off countries, like the radioactive sludge lake in China. It ends, for more than three quarters of discarded devices, in unregulated waste, much of it exported, with components linked to rainforest destruction, river pollution and contributing to mining pressures that place species at an elevated risk of extinction. In between, it will be felt by parents shelling out money on something whose educational benefits remain surprisingly unclear, with physical and health trade-offs that receive little public discussion. Sweden looked at the evidence and pulled back. Here in Ireland, meanwhile, we’re only just getting started.