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The great educational debate for the 21st century asks whether children should be reading books or collecting coins for cartoon robots, Lara Brown argues in this week’s cover piece. A new divide has opened in Britain’s classrooms. Not between rich and poor, clever or dull, or private and state schools, but between children still taught by teachers and those being instructed by an avatar on a screen. Around 960,000 pupils in the UK now use an individual device in nearly every lesson, including 270,000 primary students. It starts young. On Mumsnet, a parent asks for advice after receiving a message from her reception-aged daughter’s school informing her that the practice of sending children home with physical reading books has
been phased out. Doctors are sounding the alarm, with 150 leading clinicians writing to Education Secretary Lucy Powell to warn there is a crisis unfolding as children present earlier and more severely with developmental and physical health issues due to screen time in class. Flora Watkins meets Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, the neuroscientist taking on classroom tech, who reveals how education technology has created a ‘screen inferiority complex’.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Douglas Murray argues that there’s no such thing as a clean execution, Tim Shipman wonders if Andy Burnham has a foreign policy and Madeline Grant calls out the patronising lies about English identity. Louis Sarkozy fears
that humanity is lost on our AI overlords, Owen Matthews explains how Donald Trump could force a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine and Rupert Hawksley discovers that Swindon is Britain’s defence hub. Mary Wakefield warns that fentanyl is coming soon to a park near you, Graham Keeley predicts that Spain’s snap election could give its far-right party a share of power and Dan Jones recalls his daughter being dandled as a toddler by the Iron Lady.
In Books & Arts, Ruth Scurr charts the history of the garden as a source of inspiration through the ages, Philip Hensher rages against attempts to turn the arts into mediocre, unappealing, deplorable shadows of themselves, Hermione Eyre explores our obsession with the 1990s and Deiniol Brown hails the return of 1970s yacht rock.
To finish, Nicholas Farrell asks whether his mother Joyce really did go mad, Olivia Potts declares autumn open with braised short ribs and Toby Young urges readers to look him up on Wikipedia to see how biased it really is. I hope you enjoy the issue.
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