Be it resolved, distance learning is a disaster.

When COVID-19 shut down schools around the world last March, it launched an unprecedented experiment in education with a billion students as participants. At the heart of this experiment is the home computer, the new conduit to teachers, classmates and learning.

Supporters of digital education say that the pandemic offers a much-needed opportunity to rethink our approach to learning for the first time in over a century. They argue that digital learning is the wave of the future and that students in virtual classrooms connected through a computer and the internet will learn more quickly, retain more information, connect to an extraordinary library of resources, and arm themselves with the knowledge and skills needed to solve the problems of the 21st century.

By contrast, critics of distant learning believe we should be concerned not only about the inequitable access to the digital tools that support online learning – the real threat to education is the computer itself. Screen-based learning doesn’t place the same cognitive demands on students as the physical classroom and negatively impacts the reading and reasoning abilities that foster lifelong critical thinking skills. They argue that if the global experiment in distant learning continues, we are going to witness a steep decline in the educational attainment of hundreds of millions of children the world over.