Neil Postman argued in 1998 that every new technology arrives as a Faustian bargain. Not bad, exactly. Not good, exactly. A trade. Something is given; something is taken. And the trade is rarely examined carefully before it’s accepted, because the thing being given is usually immediate and visible, and the thing being taken is usually slow and invisible until it’s gone.

He was right in 1998. He is considerably more right now. I was 13 in 1998. I am also considerably more right these days. 

I taught his essay every year of my teaching career that included seniors. I paired it with 1984 and Brave New World every year. And every year, students read about Orwell’s telescreens and Huxley’s conditioning chambers while carrying, in their pockets, devices that were — by any serious reading of either novel — doing exactly what both authors warned about. The students could see it. They could name it. They just couldn’t quite believe it applied to them.

That’s the bargain. That’s always been the bargain.

What We Are Being Offered

Digital tools in classrooms offer genuine things. Speed. Access. Differentiation at a scale that was previously impossible. The ability to reach a student who is not in the room, to provide feedback in real time, to connect a class in Houston to a primary source in a library in London. These are not nothing. These are, in many ways, remarkable.

And I want to be clear that this post is not an argument against them. I taught in a hybrid then full online environment. I built curriculum for digital delivery. I am not standing here with chalk dust on my hands telling you screens are the enemy. I am old enough to have had every color of marker on my wrist from an overhead projector for a few years. To rewind cassettes for mandatory state reading assessment passages. The overhead projector let me overlay a text (on clear paper we don’t buy anymore) with annotations (from the colored markers while joking and calling on kids and giving them turns to try it) to model thinking aloud; there is a technology and there is teaching.
By my 8th year of teaching the technology growth had already outgrown my teacher budget and students had smart phones (data plans!) before I did. But I have already learned, lived, and taught in the time period both before and after that personally and professionally. You notice some things. 

What I am saying is: do you know what you’re trading? Based on the last 20 years– kind of a big tech time eh– I see tradeoffs, winners, losers, systems, and values that warrant discussion. 

What We Are Giving Away

Handwriting slows thinking down to a rate that produces understanding rather than transcription. This is not sentiment — it is a finding from cognitive science. When you write by hand, you cannot keep up with the speaker, which means you have to decide what matters. That decision is the learning. When you type, you can approximate the full content and never make the decision at all.

Physical reading signals to the brain that the content is worth sustained attention. The medium is part of the message, as Postman’s predecessor McLuhan argued fifty years ago. We read differently on screens — faster, shallower, with less expectation that the content will persist. The brain is responding rationally to accurate information about its environment: digital content is, in most contexts, disposable. The brain treats it accordingly.

Sustained attention. The habit of synthesis. The expectation that reading is difficult and worth the difficulty. These are not personality traits. They are capacities that are built through practice and atrophied without it. We are making decisions about children’s cognitive development that will determine which capacities they build — and we are making them under the assumption that the trade is cost-free.

It is not cost-free. It never has been. Y’all know by now about a ‘free’ lunch, right? 

The Part Nobody Wants To Say Out Loud

The pressure to adopt educational technology is not primarily pedagogical. It is institutional, financial, and social. Districts adopt platforms because platforms have contracts and contracts have lobbying and lobbying produces adoption timelines that precede any serious examination of outcomes. Schools adopt devices because not adopting devices looks like falling behind, and no administrator wants to be the one who fell behind.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural incentive. And it is exactly what Postman warned about: the technology does not arrive asking to be evaluated. It arrives having already been accepted, and the evaluation — if it happens at all — happens afterward.

I experienced this directly just a couple years ago. I was assigned a full schedule of reading intervention classes — students of mixed grades retaking their state assessment — where the mandatory online curriculum wasn’t functional for the first seven weeks of the semester. I escalated. IT attempted. Nothing changed on a timeline that mattered. The campus was piloting the platform. No one was flying the plane, but no one would admit it — and no one would step aside and let me. I didn’t have books. I didn’t have materials. I had students who needed to read, a curriculum that couldn’t open, and an institutional structure that had already accepted the trade.

That’s not a technology failure. That’s a Postman failure. The bargain was struck before anyone asked whether the platform worked. But that deal with the devil has never borne my signature; no one has ever asked. Ultimately, I’ve still felt demonized. 

What The Bargain Actually Asks

Postman’s framework doesn’t ask you to reject the technology. It asks you to examine the trade before you accept it. What is this giving us? What is it taking? Are we choosing deliberately, or are we just accepting because it arrived?

And then the harder questions, the ones that rarely make it into the adoption meeting: Who benefits from this trade and who doesn’t? Can everyone access it equally? What are the costs to specific groups — and the gains — when a technology moves through an institution that was already unequal? A Faustian bargain looks different depending on where you’re standing when you sign it. Is it a devil that you know?

The students who will thrive in the current environment — the AI-saturated, high-volume, variable-quality information environment that is now simply the world — are the ones who were taught to read carefully, write by hand, and ask what something is actually doing before deciding whether to trust it. Not because those are quaint skills. Because those are the skills the current environment demands most urgently.

My argument has never been between page and screen. Postman knew that a prescient teacher would be listened to about as much as wagonmakers decrying Ford. The point isn’t to stop the car. The point is to know what you’re getting into before you get in. That’s one of my personal transportation mottos as an ADHD girlie. 

The pen is a technology. So is the printed page. And like every technology, each one arrives as a trade. The question is whether we examine it — and then use it intentionally.

Postman gave us a framework to understand tools — or become them. Orwell and Huxley showed us two versions of what it looks like to get played. We’ve been reading both in classrooms for decades. The question is whether we were paying attention– go figure, I am. 

— A note on what I observed

I’ve been teaching alongside the in-real-time technology changes of the last two decades, and I can speak to psychological, emotional, social, cognitive, and academic details I observed — parceled by group, technology, purpose, and function — in both myself and in students. Once upon a time at the classroom level, I had a say in what tools and technologies best addressed the current learning day. That say has been systematically removed from teachers, transferred upward to contracts and platforms and adoption committees, and students are learning inside the results. I’m just observing, noticing, and writing about it now in real time. If that makes me unpopular in real time— but stands the test of time, then I am probably on the right track.

Read Postman’s speech (approx. 4 pages): https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf