The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.

If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.

Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.

That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.

The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.

And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.

Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.

Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.

To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.

Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad.

For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.

What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.

The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.

>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.

Allegations without evidence.