How a self-published book became the bible of the anti-screen school movement

It started with a handful of parents passing out copies at school board meetings. Then administrators began using it as a guide to cut back on classroom technology. Even actor Hugh Grant gave it a shout-out on the cover. In less than a year, Jared Cooney Horvath — a relatively unknown educational consultant from Australia — has become the unlikely intellectual figurehead of a grassroots movement to limit screens in America’s schools.

His book, “The Digital Delusion,” released last December, draws a straight line between the long-term decline in standardized test scores among U.S. students and the rapid expansion of one-to-one device programs — where every child gets a laptop or tablet. Citing peer-reviewed research, Horvath argues that students learn better on paper and through face-to-face discussion, and that schools are doing real harm by keeping children glued to screens.

Since the book’s publication, Horvath has testified before the U.S. Senate and several state legislatures as a growing number of states consider screen-time restrictions in classrooms. Parent coalitions from California to Maryland have hosted him in webinars, seeking advice on how to push districts back to printed textbooks. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, cited him as a “leading researcher” in a recent speech calling for technology limits in schools.

“There’s no way in hell my book has this big of an impact,” Horvath said. “So my thought is it was there, it was fomenting, it was always about to happen. It’s just people needed the arguments, and I think that’s probably where the book kind of slid in and just said, ‘Here’s the word you’ve been looking for.’”

For parents and educators pushing for guardrails on education technology — or ed tech — the book offers a persuasive package of statistics and sources they can use to convince others. “As parents, we feel a lot of imposter syndrome sometimes when we’re talking about this,” said Jodi Carreon, a San Diego mother and national director of the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. “So having a book written by someone with a background in education as well as neuroscience added a lot of credibility.”

Administrators at Granville County Public Schools in North Carolina said they read the book when they launched a “tech-free” experiment, banning laptops two days a week. Julie Frumin, a California mother who opted her children out of using devices in the Conejo Valley Unified School District, handed out copies to school board members at a meeting in February.

But for longtime leaders of education organizations and tech proponents, the book has become a headache. School administrators are caught off guard by parents who arrive at meetings armed with Horvath’s arguments. “I can’t tell you how many times I get a call in a week from a school leader who is freaking out about this and going, ‘What do we do? How do we respond to this?’” said Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit that advises schools on technology.

Culatta said he expected a reckoning around ed tech after schools went on a massive spending spree during the pandemic. But he argues Horvath’s book conflates correlation with causation. “He’s making a causation that doesn’t exist, and the reason this is so dangerous is that when you look at what’s going on, it’s actually far more likely that there are other things that are causing that” — including student mental health.

Horvath, however, is unapologetic. He writes that ed tech broke American schools by pitching distracting multimedia as a learning tool, and that AI won’t fix it — calling its adoption “institutional surrender.” He cites data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showing that students using computers for at least six hours a day score 66 points lower than those who don’t use them at all. He argues schools would get more for their money investing in air conditioning than laptops.

“If I ran a school, I would drop it all tomorrow,” Horvath said. “And people would say, ‘What would you do?’ I’d say, ‘We already have it. It’s called textbooks. It’s called paper and pencil.’”

The book’s arguments echo policy briefs from think tanks like the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the National Education Policy Center. Horvath holds a master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Melbourne. He has written about the brain and learning for over a decade.

The idea for “The Digital Delusion” came after Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” spurred laws restricting smartphone use in schools. Horvath saw ed tech as the next target. “The next apple up the tree was always going to be ed tech,” he said.

When he self-published in December 2025, coverage was sparse — a Fox News segment and an excerpt in The Free Press. But after he testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on Jan. 15, the book exploded. A C-SPAN clip from his testimony has nearly 3 million views on YouTube. He sells over 5,000 copies a month and is now the top seller on Amazon in the “Educational Psychology” category. Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, will republish it in August.

Critics, including ed-tech researchers, say Horvath oversimplifies. Peter Bergman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “It’s rare to have one neat story that just explains some big macro trend across the country.” Others point out that the OECD found moderate computer use (one to five hours a day) correlated with better test scores during the pandemic. Horvath counters that those data were skewed by disruptions.

Jacob Pleasants, co-executive director of the Civics of Technology Project, said participants in an April book club discussion were torn — embracing the book for raising concerns but uneasy with its sweeping conclusions. “A lot of the arguments he puts forward are dubious, but many of the practical suggestions are ones a lot of us would endorse,” Pleasants said.

Horvath said he plans to address criticisms in an expanded edition. He acknowledges that some ed tech — like adaptive tutoring software — can have a positive impact. But for most products, he says, the research doesn’t support claims of superiority over traditional methods.

Unlike Haidt, who turned reducing teen social media use into a multi-year campaign, Horvath doesn’t plan to do the same with classroom tech. He’s moving to Italy with his family, drawn partly by the country’s better screen-time balance and emphasis on handwriting. He has at least two more books planned — one on whether genius can be taught, and another titled “The Learning Blueprint.”

“I’m not inventing a new school model,” he said. “I’m just nudging us back into something good.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com.