By David Averre
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Wealthy families working at Silicon Valley tech companies are shelling out vast sums of money to give their children the kind of education their grandparents might have endured—just without the corporal punishment.
This week, it emerged that private institutions offering screen-free schooling are attracting growing interest from tech-industry parents worried about the effects of screen time on their children's development. In other words, the architects and biggest beneficiaries of the digital revolution are paying to protect their kids from its consequences.
Here's a modest proposal: any Silicon Valley executive hastening the technological transformation of society should have to send their own kids to a school that hands out iPads to 5-year-olds on day one.
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Sound unfair? Of course it is; children shouldn't be punished for their parents’ sins. But if Silicon Valley really considers their technology too harmful for their own kids, why should everyone else’s have to suffer it?
Rules for Thee, but Not for Me
Software engineer German Gil, whose tech career spans Netflix, Facebook and GitHub, told The Guardian earlier this week why he enrolled his daughter at San Francisco Waldorf—a private school that does not allow screens in the classroom.
He said he wanted to create an experience in which his "kid could be a kid," ensuring her school days are entirely screen-free. Victoria now reportedly spends her days binding books by hand and attending classes outside, instead of tapping away on a screen or laptop.
She’s not the only one. The school says applications for early-childhood places, which cost the parents almost $40,000 a year in tuition fees, have risen notably, with many of the prospective parents employed in tech. A year of high school tuition at Waldorf comes in at nearly $60,000—more than the average American makes in a year.
"People in Silicon Valley love to profit from selling technology to the world, but we don't necessarily want to buy it ourselves," said Aran Johnson, a teacher in Palo Alto interviewed by Newsweek last month. San Francisco Waldorf should offer him a job in the marketing department.
Funnily enough, technology brings all kinds of benefits to the education sector. Text-to-speech software and dyslexia-friendly fonts can transform the learning experience for children with dyslexia, while automatically generated subtitles can boost visual learning for deaf pupils. Education apps help to structure and deliver proven learning pathways, while immersive learning and virtual reality simulations can bring the magic of science and math to life before a child’s eyes.
None of these tools would exist without the kind of ware hard and soft developed in Silicon Valley and beyond. So why are the tech heads willing to pay a small fortune to shield their kids from their own creations?
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Good Luck Opting Out
The most obvious problem posed by tech in the classroom is distraction.
The OECD in 2023 reported that nearly a third of kids surveyed across all member states reported being distracted by digital devices in most or every math lesson they attended. Not exactly mind-blowing news; notifications from social media apps scientifically engineered to hijack your brain chemistry are more engaging than algebra—who could’ve predicted it?!
It turns out that having tech at school can do far worse than distract. A 2024 Norwegian study of 36 university students found the young adults experienced far greater brain connectivity when writing by hand versus typing, particularly in networks linked to learning and memory.
The picture gets darker as the research widens. A September 2026 JAMA Pediatrics review covering more than 2.8 million children found that greater screen exposure went hand in hand with poorer academic performance and language skills; there were also more emotional and behavioral problems.
Meanwhile, a separate four-year JAMA study of 4,285 American children found that increasingly addictive social media use was associated with more than double the risk of suicidal behaviors, alongside a heightened risk of suicidal thoughts.
Parents must bear some responsibility for ensuring their children don’t fall into the bottomless pit that is the Internet through a 6x2-inch screen—but that’s becoming harder to do when so many schools foist laptops and tablets on kids as standard.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 88 percent of American public schools operated a one-to-one computing program in 2024—25, providing every student with a school-issued device. Among those schools, 89 percent offered laptops and 27 percent tablets.
A recent Gallup survey also found that 96 percent of public-school teachers reported students using digital devices in class, even though 61 percent wanted children spending less time on them. Screens have become the classroom default, even for teachers who increasingly question their place there.
We're still discovering the true extent of what constant connectivity means for developing minds, even as the technology becomes more pervasive and more persuasive. But clearly, the parents of Silicon Valley know enough to want to shield their own children from it. That alone should be cause for concern.
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Pay It Forward
If you believe the digital, tech-enabled world you’ve created is so magnificent, your kids should be enjoying every second of it, too. But, then again, children shouldn't be guinea pigs. Two wrongs don't make a right.
What their parents are paying for isn't simply fewer screens. It's dedicated, well-paid teachers, high-quality physical materials, access to the natural world, and, perhaps most importantly, undivided human attention. Those things are becoming increasingly scarce, and are certainly more difficult to scale than software these days.
Still, plenty of public schools are trying, especially in California. In Palo Alto, schools have banned smart glasses; nearby San Mateo has stopped providing the younger classes with Chromebooks, and Mountain View is moving away from a computerized learning program.
So, instead of forcing tech parents to send their kids to tech-enabled schools, here's another proposal. The multi-billion- and trillion-dollar companies at the forefront of creating this apparently harmful digital world could help subsidize teachers' salaries, pay for books, and fund screen-free classrooms for families who can't afford them.
If Silicon Valley believes its own children deserve an education free of its machines, then good for them. The rest of America's children deserve one, too.
Unlike most of the industry's grand ideas, this one doesn't require inventing any new technology or satisfying stakeholder demand. That's why it'll probably never happen.
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