The New York Times Is Half Right About Laptops in Schools
by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn
Molly Worthen’s essay in today’s New York Times, “You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education,” makes a strong case against gamification in schools. Points, badges, cartoon confetti, lonely scrolling for dopamine hits—she nails why turning math class into a video game hasn’t worked.
She’s right about all of that. Where she goes wrong is bundling two separate problems into one.
Worthen’s piece treats gamification and laptops as the same failure. She calls 1-to-1 laptop programs “the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education.” But the computers weren’t the blunder. Filling them with games and calling it learning—that was the blunder.
There are things a laptop can do in a classroom that nothing else can.
Consider a problem every teacher faces: How do you know your students actually read what you assigned? You can quiz them on paper. You can ask questions in class and watch 3 hands go up out of 30. You can hope.
Or you can use technology that monitors whether students are engaging with the specific text you assigned—not a game version of it, not a bite-size video summary, but the actual book—and tests their comprehension of that material in real time.
That’s what BrainStream does. No points. No badges. No animated confetti. Just accountability: confirming that the texts teachers chose are the ones students are actually learning from.
Worthen quotes a speech pathologist who watched students click through iReady math without reading: “They’re just clicking; they want to get through it.” That’s a damning observation—and it’s exactly the problem accountability software solves. When the system tests whether you understood Chapter 7 of the book your teacher assigned, you can’t click through. You have to read.
The article’s other blind spot is bigger.
Worthen ends with Emerson: “No kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.” Beautiful. True. And incomplete.
The world these students are entering requires a skill Emerson never imagined: the ability to work alongside artificial intelligence. We can debate whether schools should have fewer screens or more. But we can’t seriously argue that students don’t need to learn how to use AI as a thinking partner. That skill set isn’t coming someday. It’s here, and students who graduate without it will be at a disadvantage in virtually every field they enter.
AI in the classroom doesn’t have to mean gamification. It can mean a learning partner that helps students engage more deeply with the material their teacher assigned—asking questions, checking understanding, pushing them to think harder about the text. That’s accountability, not entertainment.
Gamification failed because it replaced learning with amusement. Accountability tools succeed because they reinforce what good teachers already do: assign important texts and make sure students engage with them.
A laptop is a blank slate. What schools install on it determines whether students learn or avoid learning.
