By Michael J. McKenna, Headmaster
February 10, 2026
For many parents, the thinking goes, what schools need is a heavy dose of technology in order to ensure their children are “fit” for the future. And so, it should come as no surprise that many schools comply, offering up the mantra that technology is the silver bullet, ensuring that their students receive a “quality 21st Century education.”
Recent reporting, including a 2026 article in The Economist, "Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless," suggests that much of this promise is more hype than reality. The article chronicles experiences at schools like McPherson Middle School in Kansas, where a popular digital program failed to produce meaningful learning gains despite significant investment. Across the country, researchers have found that ed-tech often delivers at best marginal improvements, and sometimes even harms learning outcomes, particularly in literacy and math.
At Mars Hill Academy, on the other hand, we want to approach all that we do, including using technology, in a thoughtful and biblical way. Technology is a tool. As human beings and therefore sub-creators, we make and shape tools for our use. However, the tools that we fashion can, in turn, shape and fashion us as well. Have you ever heard the saying, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" Ever had your family physician tell you that, to a surgeon, everything is curable with a little cutting? Remember all the hype about educational television? It was supposed to make us smarter. All it ended up doing was make us love television more. Today, the same caution applies to the digital tools flooding classrooms: computers, tablets, and apps can shape how students think, focus, and engage—and not always for the better. In short, our tools really do shape and fashion us as much as we shape and fashion them.
Schools must consider how tools shape and fashion the learning environment as well as the students and teachers themselves. Digital platforms often privilege digital movement, image, and instant feedback over deeper engagement with words, ideas, and critical thinking. The Economist article notes that in schools where students spend most of their time on screens, reading scores and other measures of academic achievement have declined.
Because of their emphasis on movement, image, and action, computer technologies necessarily entertain. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a little fun. But when entertainment becomes the standard by which the hard work and pain of learning is judged, students will struggle to learn the joy of working through a challenge. They won’t know the joy of falling into bed at night, exhausted after a hard day’s work. The data suggest that screens often distract more than they teach, and gamified programs may improve performance only “within the game” rather than in broader educational contexts.
Maybe we think that the use of technology should be approached from a more utilitarian or pragmatic perspective. For example, since many students, when they grow up, may spend much of their working lives in front of screens, many schools believe they should focus their time and energies on teaching students typing and keyboarding skills, instead of wasting time on handwriting or other such archaic practices. Yet even in practical matters, research shows that short-term efficiency should not outweigh foundational learning: handwriting, reading comprehension, and thoughtful analysis remain deeply connected to cognitive development and cannot be replaced by a screen.
When it comes to technology and education, schools and parents must ask a fundamental question: Does the use of this technology genuinely advance the school’s mission to form thoughtful, virtuous, and free human beings? Computer technologies are well-suited for handling, locating, accessing, relaying, storing, and processing data. However, what computers are decidedly not good at is encouraging thoughtfulness, contemplation, reflection, socialization, or identifying and valuing Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—all the things that Mars Hill Academy wants to encourage in our students and their families. As such, we take a more measured and thoughtful approach to the use of computer technologies. We prioritize human interaction, discussion, reading, and writing—activities that cultivate enduring understanding, character, and freedom. We recognize that PK-12 education is about far more than developing “technique” in our students, or fitting them for some task, like making widgets.
Students need skills more foundational than those acquired through computer technologies alone. In years gone by, an education that fitted a man for some task—or technique—was not an education for free men, but rather, was an education suited for the indentured servant. Such an education, in which the student was trained in the use of “technique,” fitted that student for one thing (or very few things). As a result, he was less free.
On the other hand, a liberal education—or a liberal arts education—was an education for free men. According to this understanding, the term liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liber meaning free. In this way, liberi signifies free men. Clearly, then, a liberal arts education will be one connected with human freedom. The kind of education we’re discussing is called liberal because it has freedom as its goal; it’s called liberal, in other words, because its intended object is the genuinely free man.
An education that has “technique,” or tools, as its focus, even such modern tools as computers, is not, therefore, the education of a free man. It is its exact opposite: the education of the servile. Technology, when used unthinkingly, risks turning students into passive consumers rather than active, free, and virtuous learners. At Mars Hill Academy, we seek to wield technology as its master, not its servant—enhancing, not replacing, the human relationships, discipline, and intellectual rigor at the heart of a classical education.