Are We Educating Children for a World That No Longer Exists?
- Carolina Gaviria Salazarjournalist and communication strategist.
While a ten‑year‑old child can use artificial intelligence to solve a task in seconds, many schools continue to assess them as if memorising information were the most important skill of the 21st century.
The uncomfortable but urgent question is: are we educating children for the world they will live in, or for one that has already disappeared?
For decades, the education system was designed to prepare people to function in an industrial economy: obedience, repetition, compliance, days fragmented by bells, little autonomy, and a vertical relationship with knowledge. But the world has changed faster than the school.
Our children inhabit a radically different ecosystem: hyperconnected, immediate, saturated with stimuli, mediated by algorithms, social media and an economy in which many of the professions of the future do not yet exist.
And yet we still ask whether they have learned to repeat an answer correctly.
The child's brain is not designed for this overload. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warns in The Anxious Generation, the hyperconnected childhood coincides with a worrying deterioration in adolescent mental health, and with a reduction in experiences that are fundamental for emotional development, such as free play, autonomy and productive boredom.
These behaviours and dynamics, intensified by intensive use of screens and digital platforms at early ages, are triggering a deficit in key skills for cognitive development. Researcher Gloria Mark, an expert in digital attention, has documented how the constant fragmentation of attention reduces the capacity for sustained concentration and affects the depth of cognitive processing.
The magnitude of the problem is already documented. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in seven adolescents aged 10–19 years (14%) lives with a mental disorder, and depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability at this stage. Furthermore, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people aged 15–29.
UNICEF, for its part, has warned that the digital environment is profoundly transforming the experience of childhood and adolescence, amplifying the risks associated with social isolation, cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content and deterioration of emotional wellbeing when adequate supervision is lacking.
We are not talking only about screens. We are talking about fragmented attention, constant comparison, external validation, cyberbullying, diminished free play and fewer opportunities to develop creativity and patience.
And here an enormous contradiction appears: while a child's brain needs deep attention, movement, emotional regulation and real human experiences, much of its digital environment offers exactly the opposite.
Some countries have already reacted
The debate is no longer anecdotal.
Australia approved a law in 2024 that forces platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat to prevent under‑16s from having accounts. This law was presented as one of the most ambitious regulations in the world on youth access to social media. France, for its part, has since 2018 restricted the use of mobile phones in schools, even outside the classroom, as part of its strategy to reduce hyperconnectivity and protect learning and school socialisation processes.
In the United States, concern escalated to the level of public health: in 2023, the US Surgeon General warned that there is still not enough evidence to consider social media safe for children and adolescents, while several states have pushed forward lawsuits and regulations against major technology platforms for their possible impact on youth mental health.
The global conversation has shifted: Ban or teach?
It is no longer about whether technology enters the classroom. It is about how it enters, according to what criteria and for what purpose. Because perhaps the most intelligent question is not how we keep children away from technology, but how we teach them to live critically with it.
Because artificial intelligence will not disappear. Algorithms will not disappear either. Social media will continue to shape public conversation, identity and consumption. So what should they learn? How do we ensure that the uses and impacts of technology reach a prepared brain?
Yes, a brain prepared to question, filter and discern. To distinguish information from manipulation. To tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing everything immediately. To build one's own criteria amidst the noise. To know when to stop.
In an environment where any adolescent can receive thousands of stimuli a day, consume unfiltered content and obtain instant answers generated by artificial intelligence, skills such as deep reading, sustained concentration, argumentation, critical thinking and reading comprehension cease to be traditional academic competences and become tools of cognitive survival.
Because whoever does not know how to think will simply repeat what the algorithm delivers.
And whoever cannot read deeply will hardly be able to construct their own position towards the world.
In this context, educating should not consist only of teaching how to use technological tools, but of strengthening what machines cannot easily replace: judgement, empathy, creativity, complex thinking, ethical judgement and the capacity for reflection.
Rather than banning technology, perhaps the real challenge is to develop minds capable of inhabiting it without becoming its hostages. The development of critical thinking does not occur in a vacuum; it requires, in an interconnected way, a solid foundation of factual knowledge, reading and comprehension processes (Willingham, 2023).
Colombian pedagogue Julián de Zubiría has insisted for years that education must develop thinking, not repetition. His proposal for "dialogic pedagogy" starts from an eminently current idea: knowledge is not mechanically transferred; it is constructed.
And perhaps today this idea is more urgent than ever.
Sources:
· Willingham, D. T. (2023). Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Graó.
· Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.
· https://www.gloriamark.com
· https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
· https://www.oecd.org/en/about/projects/future-of-education-and-skills-2030.html
The uncomfortable but urgent question is: are we educating children for the world they will live in, or for one that has already disappeared?
For decades, the education system was designed to prepare people to function in an industrial economy: obedience, repetition, compliance, days fragmented by bells, little autonomy, and a vertical relationship with knowledge. But the world has changed faster than the school.
Our children inhabit a radically different ecosystem: hyperconnected, immediate, saturated with stimuli, mediated by algorithms, social media and an economy in which many of the professions of the future do not yet exist.
And yet we still ask whether they have learned to repeat an answer correctly.
The child's brain is not designed for this overload. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warns in The Anxious Generation, the hyperconnected childhood coincides with a worrying deterioration in adolescent mental health, and with a reduction in experiences that are fundamental for emotional development, such as free play, autonomy and productive boredom.
These behaviours and dynamics, intensified by intensive use of screens and digital platforms at early ages, are triggering a deficit in key skills for cognitive development. Researcher Gloria Mark, an expert in digital attention, has documented how the constant fragmentation of attention reduces the capacity for sustained concentration and affects the depth of cognitive processing.
The magnitude of the problem is already documented. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in seven adolescents aged 10–19 years (14%) lives with a mental disorder, and depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability at this stage. Furthermore, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people aged 15–29.
UNICEF, for its part, has warned that the digital environment is profoundly transforming the experience of childhood and adolescence, amplifying the risks associated with social isolation, cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content and deterioration of emotional wellbeing when adequate supervision is lacking.
We are not talking only about screens. We are talking about fragmented attention, constant comparison, external validation, cyberbullying, diminished free play and fewer opportunities to develop creativity and patience.
And here an enormous contradiction appears: while a child's brain needs deep attention, movement, emotional regulation and real human experiences, much of its digital environment offers exactly the opposite.
Some countries have already reacted
The debate is no longer anecdotal.
Australia approved a law in 2024 that forces platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat to prevent under‑16s from having accounts. This law was presented as one of the most ambitious regulations in the world on youth access to social media. France, for its part, has since 2018 restricted the use of mobile phones in schools, even outside the classroom, as part of its strategy to reduce hyperconnectivity and protect learning and school socialisation processes.
In the United States, concern escalated to the level of public health: in 2023, the US Surgeon General warned that there is still not enough evidence to consider social media safe for children and adolescents, while several states have pushed forward lawsuits and regulations against major technology platforms for their possible impact on youth mental health.
The global conversation has shifted: Ban or teach?
It is no longer about whether technology enters the classroom. It is about how it enters, according to what criteria and for what purpose. Because perhaps the most intelligent question is not how we keep children away from technology, but how we teach them to live critically with it.
Because artificial intelligence will not disappear. Algorithms will not disappear either. Social media will continue to shape public conversation, identity and consumption. So what should they learn? How do we ensure that the uses and impacts of technology reach a prepared brain?
Yes, a brain prepared to question, filter and discern. To distinguish information from manipulation. To tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing everything immediately. To build one's own criteria amidst the noise. To know when to stop.
In an environment where any adolescent can receive thousands of stimuli a day, consume unfiltered content and obtain instant answers generated by artificial intelligence, skills such as deep reading, sustained concentration, argumentation, critical thinking and reading comprehension cease to be traditional academic competences and become tools of cognitive survival.
Because whoever does not know how to think will simply repeat what the algorithm delivers.
And whoever cannot read deeply will hardly be able to construct their own position towards the world.
In this context, educating should not consist only of teaching how to use technological tools, but of strengthening what machines cannot easily replace: judgement, empathy, creativity, complex thinking, ethical judgement and the capacity for reflection.
Rather than banning technology, perhaps the real challenge is to develop minds capable of inhabiting it without becoming its hostages. The development of critical thinking does not occur in a vacuum; it requires, in an interconnected way, a solid foundation of factual knowledge, reading and comprehension processes (Willingham, 2023).
Colombian pedagogue Julián de Zubiría has insisted for years that education must develop thinking, not repetition. His proposal for "dialogic pedagogy" starts from an eminently current idea: knowledge is not mechanically transferred; it is constructed.
And perhaps today this idea is more urgent than ever.
Sources:
· Willingham, D. T. (2023). Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Graó.
· Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.
· https://www.gloriamark.com
· https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
· https://www.oecd.org/en/about/projects/future-of-education-and-skills-2030.html
You May Also Interested