American students are getting worse across the board, and the long-running excuse of pandemic homeschooling is starting to look more and more like the convenient scapegoat it always was. The decline didn’t begin in 2020; it started about 10 years earlier, when smartphones and laptops began to embed themselves in classrooms.

A March article from The New York Times investigated a growing shift in thinking, with schools across the country now reversing course, cracking down on smartphones and even pulling back on Chromebooks that were once handed out as supposedly essential learning tools. An act that has only proven to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick to brainwash kids, instilling them not with knowledge about our world but with brand loyalty.

All of these distraction tools were handed out to kids with reckless abandon, in the hope that they would help them learn as we entered a new and wondrous technological age.

The exact opposite has happened.

Kids Are Watching Thousands of YouTube Videos on School Laptops During Class

Now, a recent report from The Wall Street Journal shows us just how far in the other direction we’ve run. The article is broadly about how YouTube has taken over schools, as kids have found elaborate and, honestly, rather clever ways of working around YouTube bans on educational tech, from school-issued laptops to tablets.

Right off the bat, the article kicks you in the face with the biggest, boldest example the article’s writer, Shalini Ramachandran, found in her investigation: a mother in Wichita checked her seventh-grade son’s school Google account and found he had watched 13,000 YouTube videos over just a few months, and all during school hours. That is some pro-level procrastination, the kind you only see from veteran adult slackers who have mastered the fine art of doing just enough work to not get fired.

All of those wasted educational hours were made worse by what he was watching. His algorithm fed him nothing but videos glorifying gun culture and videos filled with explicit content inappropriate for a teen. His mother was disturbed by the whole thing, and it eventually fueled her run and eventual victory in an election to win a seat on her local school board, in the hope of addressing the problem of school tech distraction head-on.

Unfortunately, her story isn’t an outlier. It’s increasingly become the norm. The very same systems that keep you locked in and thoroughly distracted at home, on your couch, or on the subway, or wherever else, are doing the same thing for kids in school, in the classroom. At least when kids of the pre-Internet, pre-smart phone, pre-laptop world weren’t paying attention in class, they were still spiritually enriching themselves by drawing masterfully rendered penises. They were creating.

There’s an uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: technology has evolved far faster than our brains. For most of human history, we were a pen-and-paper species. Now we’ve mass-produced highly addictive digital ecosystems and handed them to children, assuming they’d enhance learning, didn’t think twice about it, immediately patting ourselves on the back, assuming we had done good.

All the evidence is suggesting, heck, it’s outright screaming at us that we got it dead wrong.

We dropped a technological distraction bomb in our schools and paired it with the relentless, algorithmically driven distraction machines of the social internet, and now we are reaping what we have sown. It took us far too long to notice, let alone do anything about it, because by this point, we’ve seemingly lost an entire generation to reckless distraction in the name of technological advancement.