The Digital Delusion: A Statewide Book Discussion Series

Join the Conversation

A free statewide community conversation about The Digital Delusion

A teacher watches a class disappear into their Chromebooks and wonders whether the lesson would have landed better on paper. A parent reads a screen-time report from the school portal and has no idea what to do with it.

Those two people should be talking to each other. That's what this is.

This fall, The Balance Project- Central Virginia is hosting a six-part community conversation around Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath's The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning — and How to Help Them Thrive Again. We read about fifty pages every two weeks, meet on Zoom for an hour, and talk it through. On January 25, Dr. Horvath joins us live to answer the questions we've gathered all fall.

It's free, it's open to anyone in Virginia, and you don't need to have made up your mind about technology in schools to belong here. The best conversations happen when people who see things differently actually sit down and talk it out.

If you teach, or lead a school, you'll leave with:
- Language for what you've been noticing: the research behind why a room goes quiet and unproductive the moment the laptops open
- A clear read on what the evidence actually supports, so when a purchase or a mandate comes down you can respond with something sturdier than a hunch
- Colleagues in other divisions working through the same thing. This is a statewide room, not a building-level gripe session
- An hour with a Harvard-trained learning scientist who spent years teaching

If you're a parent, you'll leave with:
- A grounded sense of what screens are doing to learning: separate from the screen-time panic, and separate from the marketing
- Specific questions to bring to your teacher, your principal, or your school board, and the confidence that they're the right ones
- A much clearer picture of what teachers are actually working with, which changes how those conversations go
- Company. 4,041 Virginians have signed our petitions on this. You are not the only one asking.

The details
- Six Monday evenings, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., on Zoom
October 19 · November 2 · November 16 · December 7 · January 11 · January 25
- Free and open to anyone in Virginia
- About fifty pages every two weeks — and come even if you didn't finish
- You will need to obtain your own copy of the book.
- Live only, never recorded, so people can say what they actually think
- Register once; the same link works for all six evenings

Register by October 5 and the reading schedule reaches you in time to start. After that you're still welcome — you'll just be reading a little faster.