Like many revolutions, the one in educational technology promised a panacea and delivered a dictatorship. This conclusion is being reached by a growing number of educators, parents and students who are enlisting in a nascent counter-Chromebook revolution.

Don’t take our word for it. The Boston Globe recently reported that, “Across Massachusetts and the country, communities are taking aim at school-issued laptops, iPads and more.”

And closer to home, VtDigger writes that a growing cohort of teachers, parents and others in education are “advocating against the use of education technology tools and software that have flooded Vermont’s classrooms over the last decade.” Lawmakers in Montpelier are considering a couple of bills that would govern the use of classroom technology.

It’s not hard to discern the reasons for this disillusionment. The surge of technology into classrooms has not only not boosted student achievement, research suggests that it may actually be harming their cognitive abilities. It has also facilitated anti-social behavior such as bullying, hazing and harassment. “Data is alarmingly clear that digital technology does not improve student learning,” Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and educator, told lawmakers. “In fact, in almost every instance we have, it harms student learning.”

Indeed, test scores began to fall in Vermont in 2014 after a couple of decades of steady improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. There could be other reasons for this, of course, but the decline has coincided with a surge in classroom technology that reached near ubiquity during the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2016, the 85,000 Chromebooks in Vermont schools outnumbered students, according to state Rep. Angela Arsenault.

In retrospect it’s also not so hard to understand why schools were seduced by the siren song of digital technology. The lure of enhanced student achievement was hard to resist, as was the promise that adoption of digital tools in the classroom would prepare students for a future in which technology would play a pivotal role in economic and social life. There was also the thought that widespread adoption of technology could level the playing field between schools with abundant financial resources and those with few. All this and more was incorporated into aggressive marketing campaigns by tech companies.

The problem seems to have been that there was not a sufficient attempt to verify these claims before the technology was widely adopted, and the brakes were not applied as it became clear that excess screen time was negatively affecting children’s attention spans.

A colleague of ours, parent of a high school senior, sees in the revolt against education technology a “tacit acknowledgment that we have a generation of students who were essentially one giant science experiment, conducted by Silicon Valley tech firms without much in the way of consent.”

This is especially troubling given ample evidence in recent lawsuits around the country that companies such as Google hardly have the best interests of children at heart.

The advent of artificial intelligence presents a related challenge for educators. The New York Times recently cited polling from the RAND research corporation to the effect that between May and December of last year, the share of middle school, high school and college students who regularly used A.I. for homework assignments rose from 48% to 62% — “even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills.”

This new reality has spawned a movement by educators to require students to write essays in class the old-fashioned way, with pen or pencil on paper. The drawback is that at this point, students have so little experience with pen and pencil that their handwriting can be difficult to decipher. But teachers interviewed by the Times said they were willing to put up with it in order to ensure that students’ work reflected authentically their own thoughts and writing skills.

Blake Fabrikant, dean of students at Sharon Academy, required students in a film and philosophy class he teaches to write essays in class with pen and paper this year, with heartening results. “It felt like the students, when you asked them to do something that was handwritten, were much more likely to turn it in, and much more engaged with the work,” he told VtDigger. This is perhaps further evidence that thinking — critically, analytically, reflectively, creatively — and writing are inextricably bound up together.

We also can’t help but wonder whether education may be the canary in the coal mine when it comes to A.I. As enterprises of all sorts throughout society rush to adopt and integrate artificial intelligence tools into their work, they ought to be considering carefully what’s lost when human intelligence takes a backseat to the artificial variety.