Screen time at school is tech-ing a toll on tots.
Rather than reading, writing and arithmetic, students as young as preschoolers are learning the fundamentals of Chromebooks, iPads and apps in 2026.
It’s a vexing, virtual reality much to the chagrin of peeved parents, nationwide, who are now admonishing the academic powers that be for plying their children with “electronic fentanyl” while at their desks.
“Every pre-K that I’ve been to has shown me that they have some sort of device in the classroom,” Nadia, a mom of a toddler prepping to start school this fall, groaned in a viral vid. “Why is this a thing? I don’t like that.”
“Even [at] the super prestigious schools,” she continued. “I don’t want my kid to be learning on this. I don’t want to be paying thousands of dollars for him to just be staring at a device, because he doesn’t do that at home — he doesn’t have a device.”
“What the heck? I don’t like this.”
Nadia’s sentiments are echoed by hundreds of outraged mothers and fathers, from New York City to Los Angeles, concerned that their kids are being exposed to excessive screen time on school-issued technologies.
Amid the rise of artificial intelligence — an advent that encourages humans, of all ages, to rely on bots over their brains — parents, teachers and students have ferociously decried the overuse of devices in classrooms, arguing the gadgets hinder learning and normalize cheating.
Criticisms cast in and around the Big Apple, unfortunately, have had little effect on the Department of Education, which has invested over $1 billion in tech firms. In fact, NYC’s Chromebook initiative, offering a device to almost every student across the boroughs, is one of the DOE’s largest technology investments.
But some fear the gift has fast become a curse.
Throughout the US, children from kindergarten to grade 12 average just 48 minutes of in-school screen-time per day, according to a 2026 EdTech App report by Lightspeed Systems, an educational technology company.
And while the researchers concede that less than an hour on school-supplied screens is “likely far lower than most assume,” they warn, “what’s changing isn’t how much time students spend on screens, but what happens within it.”
Incensed moms and dads of the Lower Merion School District, located just outside of Philadelphia, recently flew into an uproar after the school board voted 7-2 to repeal a policy that contained language saying parents could opt their children out of one-to-one use of school-issued devices.
“Shame on you!” shouted the angry mob, per WSJ, infuriated by the decision despite arguments that their kids were becoming addicted to games, apps and internet surfing.
Security guards were even instructed to remove one livid mother from the auditorium.
Jim Hausman, 59, a real-estate entrepreneur, deemed the devices, including his sixth-grade son’s Chromebook, “electronic fentanyl,” claiming the tween has become glued to a game similar to poker.
More alarmingly, other parents maintained that their youngsters had become hooked on a game called “Five Nights at Epstein’s,” in which players try to escape convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
Alexandra Parfitt, a 46-year-old biostatistician, discovered that her 9-year-old daughter has grown accustomed to copying and pasting answers from the internet into her homework assignments.
It’s the way children of the digital age are making the grade.
“What has my daughter learned?” said Parfitt. “How to change her profile pic?.”
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