What if digital learning is a catastrophe?

There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break… all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our own youth. More than that, smartphones are extraordinarily distracting. How are the children to learn if they’re surreptitiously WhatsApping one another under the desk? 

But this focus on smartphones in schools seems to me to ignore another issue: what happens outside school. The comprehensive my two older children attend is, as I understand it, typical in not allowing but requiring almost all its out-of-school learning to be done online. Physical textbooks are seldom seen. Exercise books are barely used. Homework is set, completed and marked in cyberspace. This has certain admirable effects – among other things, email alerts can let parents know when homework hasn’t been handed in, and you can see in one place which assignments are required for all the different classes.