Every September, thousands of Irish<\/a> parents with kids entering secondary school<\/a> are told that each student needs a personal laptop. Costs start at about \u20ac750, and in some schools parents are told to pay \u20ac1,000. In January, RT\u00c9 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 \u201cLeading senior cycle reform with a student device model\u201d. The invitations arrived, containing a hotel key card and accompanying video; the company said there was no sales obligation attached.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sweden, one of the world\u2019s 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\u2019s learning. <\/p>\n This September, first-year students in secondary schools throughout the State will be given their own expensive digital device which they\u2019ll be told to use for hours each week. They\u2019ll also be handed pouches to lock away their mobile phones during the school day \u2013 an initiative introduced by the Government, funded using \u20ac9 million of public money \u2013 because of the harm to their concentration and wellbeing. These two things are inconsistent. <\/p>\n
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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 <\/p>\n