This spring, students at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, learned the school had pushed back their final exam dates. The reason: Hackers had taken hostage the online learning management system Canvas.
But in professor Ted Cockle’s classroom, the test went on as planned.
Students participated in an oral exam, defending their written thesis. The simple format didn’t rely on Canvas to host class materials, gradebooks, student assignment submissions, or teacher-student communication, allowing Cockle to continue with the plan and letting students leave for summer break as scheduled.
Cockle, lecturer and director of leadership studies at Baylor, says he doesn’t shy away from technology. But he does still use his whiteboard. “It helps me stay at a manageable pace for students when I take the time to write down the material, rather than quickly flipping through slides,” he said.
Cockle offers a 95% or better participation grade if students keep a voluntary tech-free agreement in the classroom, a policy he says students have appreciated. “They are some of the most engaged students I’ve had, taking notes with pen and paper, eyes up, considering the material,” Cockle said.
After pandemic-era policies sent university and K-12 students home for remote learning in 2020, schools largely turned to educational technology. But despite massive growth in ed tech use, many parents, educators, researchers, and even students have grown concerned about the technology’s effectiveness and potential developmental harms. Now, some are opting out of device use at school altogether, and some K-12 districts have taken steps to reduce tech dependency.
“[A] Christian vision of education is primarily focused on what type of person we are becoming. While technology makes things easier, or more convenient, character is molded through challenges and lessons learned from failure.”
Jason Thacker, ERLC senior fellow and director of the Research Institute
In 2021, during COVID-19 remote learning, Congress approved funding for K-12 schools that enabled districts to purchase laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots. According to a 2021 EdWeek Research Center survey, 84%-90% of teachers said their districts provided devices for every student, known as a 1-1 approach. In 2023, the Associated Press reported that districts spent millions of dollars on new learning software applications.
That shift to devices “wasn’t some research-based process,” said David Griffith, the national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “It was like an emergency measure.”
When students returned to school, the devices came with them—and stayed with them. Schools kept using the technology to deliver subject material and communications. But a 2025 New York Times survey reported that schools were deeply invested in technology-based learning, with roughly half of teachers saying the school materials required students to complete their work online.
“Once you’ve spent millions of dollars on something, it seems like you should use it,” Griffith said.
But some parents and educators quickly raised concerns. In 2023, the National Library of Medicine found that how much time a student spent using digital devices each day was negatively correlated with reading comprehension. Psychology Today referenced a 2023 study showing that students reading physical pages demonstrated reading comprehension six to eight times better than if they read screen-based text.
Jason Thacker, a senior fellow and director of the Research Institute at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the purpose of a true education is the holistic transformation of the person growing in wisdom and virtue, not simply downloading information.
“[A] Christian vision of education is primarily focused on what type of person we are becoming,” Thacker said. While technology makes things easier, or more convenient, character is molded through challenges and lessons learned from failure. With less technology, Thacker suggested, children can be formed in the “virtue of slowing down to think deeply about the perennial questions of human life.”
