Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.

I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.

I did tons of electronic learning as far back as the 80s and 90s, and still do.

It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.

Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.

I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding.

Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.

What are you talking about?

Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!

The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.

Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.

You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.