> Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.

Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.

This is the problem. People extrapolate from their own experience, especially with regard to childhood and children, and related experiences such as education.

I do not think "screens" per se are harmful, but what people do on screens. Read an ebook? Play chess? Watch a film? Doomscroll?

At least one controlled study supports this: (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50354-3)

They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.

"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "

What about 45 minutes of computer programming? Doesn't that reduce cognitive performance as well?

Yet we still tell students to buy textbooks. The individual must always pay. The corporation can do whatever the hell it wants.

The hypocrisy of this new world is already catching up to us.