I Never Want My Son to Touch an iPad Again (It's Worse Than You Think)

Something has felt instinctively "off" about society's relationship with technology for a long time. I tried (and failed) to delete Vocabbett's social media accounts after New Year's because of it. But businesses need clients, and today, they all live online.

More importantly, my refraining from the (already rare) Instagram post did nothing to make my 5-year-old son stop asking for "iPad," or talking ad nauseam about his "pets" in Bottle and Minecraft.

Before you gasp and say, "Erica! What were you thinking? Why would you introduce him to all this?"

I didn't. He brought these ideas home from school, where he plays pseudo-educational games on a tablet every day. The library is full of books about video games, so his guided reading is about Minecraft and Mario Kart (I kid you not).

My son is in kindergarten and goes to a great, highly-ranked public school, but the constant screens made us decide to put him in a collaborative, classical school next year. He'll go 2-3 times a week, and we'll homeschool the other days.

I was explaining my rationale to a brilliant friend of mine--I'd already told her about the constant screen time, but was adding my frustration with this obsession with video games.

"That isn't a coincidence, Erica," she murmured ominously, "this gamification of everything."

She then sent over some links which I dutifully read and verified, and now I never want my son to touch a screen again.

Step One: Tracking (Probing Your Mind at Age 5)

My son has "his" iPad at school, but many schools have interchangeable devices and student-specific logins. Either way, all activity is associated with a particular student. Just like the algorithms are mapping us, they're also mapping our kids, building profiles on them from the youngest age.

When everything is gamified, the depth of data increases exponentially because games tap into instinctive, visceral responses. How many milliseconds does it take you to go for that reward? What excites your eye movements? Are you risk-averse or a thrill-seeker? What motivates you to go for the bonus?

Think about how susceptible we are to Instagram ads in 2025, and the amount of data Big Tech has on us is 1/billionth of what they'll have on our kids! And the algorithm is getting more sophisticated every year.

If we feel like these companies "influence" us now...it's not a stretch to say they will control the next generation.

Best-Case Scenario: Corporate Capture

With billions of data points and the ability to influence human behavior, the best outcome we can hope for is an abundance of extremely persuasive advertisements.

The corporate capture of education is largely driven with this motive in mind. Google isn't donating Chromebooks out of the goodness of their hearts; they're doing it because they're data mining these children, and they'll be able to profit off this data for decades.

Worst-Case Scenario: Government Capture

The worst-case scenario is significantly more bleak. The Department of Defense routinely gives Google, Microsoft (which owns Minecraft), and other "Big Tech" companies billions of dollars in grants and contracts. Perhaps our government will never exploit these relationships; perhaps it will.

Either way, I consider it a huge security risk to have the majority of our population--both public and private school educated--under the thumb of an algorithm. I don't believe there is any precedent for a nuclear-armed nation allowing its children to be probed and studied from age five up, with techno-stalkers recording their most minute movements for the express purpose of influencing their behavior later in life.

In sci-fi terms, we're creating a nation of robots and unwilling sleeper agents, able to be activated at any moment.

Even if we always have good leaders, what happens if a foreign government gets its hands on this data--a possibility which is only ever one hack away?

The ramifications are truly dystopian.

Pulling Back: None of This Is Educational

Let's say you don't care about your kids being suckered into buying meaningless garbage, and you don't think a foreign government would ever use this power to its advantage.

Fine.

The most obvious problem with ever-expanding EdTech in schools is that none of this is actually educational. With every step we take toward this techno-hellscape, our children are markedly (and measurably) less intelligent.

Why is that? Tech companies have to convince schools to abandon what works in favor of the (literally) new and shiny, or the whole plan falls apart.

For instance, the best way for a student to recall information is by writing it down.

But Google can't strip-mine our children's brains if they're taking notes by hand, so they convince our teachers the world will explode if they don't go paperless. The fact that many of us have fallen for this is proof of how stupid we've become.

Think this through with me, please. By what possible metric are the horrors of cobalt mining, countless transcontinental flights and steamer ships, plastic, and batteries that leech poison into the water better for the environment than...(*checks notes*) trees? Nobody wants to cut down a tree, but trees are basically the cleanest, most renewable resource that exists. Anyone who tells me with a straight face that a computer is better for the environment than a tree is either an imbecile or selling me something. Turns out, many are selling computers.

The devastating changes in education don't end there. We've transitioned to teaching "skills" instead of knowledge because nobody can remember facts anymore (because they're not writing and they're on social media all night). So they tell you, "You don't need to know facts! Google knows everything. You just need to know how to use the facts."

But skills rest on a bed of knowledge. You cannot have the former without the latter.

You cannot have critical reading "skills" without a strong vocabulary (you'll never understand the reading if you don't know what the freaking words mean). You cannot have critical reasoning "skills" if you don't know history (if you don't know what has always happened after Thing X, you have the critical reasoning of a toddler; you're speaking in hypotheticals.)

And so by depriving students of knowledge, they are also depriving them of the skills that they'll need to wade through the increasingly-complex future they'll face. They're told, "Skills are more important anyway!" And they are. But you cannot acquire them without facts.

I could go on about the changes that have been forced on schools to shoehorn in EdTech, but this article is already way longer than most.

Suffice it to say, I never want my son to touch an iPad again.