Two crises arriving at the same time
Schools and universities are being hit simultaneously by opposite pressures, and most are responding to each one in isolation.
Crisis one: digital overload
The global policy consensus has shifted with unusual speed. As of March 2026, 114 education systems 58% of countries worldwide have a national ban on mobile phones in schools. In June 2023 that figure was 24%. By early 2025 it was 40%.The UNESCO 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report found that mere proximity to a mobile device distracted students and had a negative impact on learning across 14 countries, and that one study measured up to 20 minutes for a student to refocus after a single interruption.Meanwhile the technology that schools did buy is largely idle. The same report found that in the United States, around two-thirds of education software licences went unused, and 98% were not used intensively.
Crisis two: cognitive debt
The second crisis is newer and less understood.Michael Gerlich's 2025 study of 666 participants, published in Societies, found a significant negative association between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking ability, with cognitive offloading acting as the mediating mechanism and the effect was strongest among younger users.A 2025 MIT Media Lab EEG study led by Nataliya Kosmyna measured brain connectivity during essay writing across three conditions. Participants writing unaided showed the strongest, most distributed neural networks; search-engine users showed moderate engagement; LLM users showed the weakest connectivity. When LLM users were later asked to write without the tool, their performance did not simply return to baseline. The authors named the effect cognitive debt.
The gap nobody is filling
Between these two crises sits a vacuum. Schools are asked to restrict phones and adopt AI, with no framework connecting the two decisions and no way to know afterwards whether either worked.In Brazil, the TIC Educação 2025 survey found that 93% of school administrators already use some digital management system, but only 22% of schools have formal guidance on the use of technology in teaching, learning and management. Seven in ten secondary students already use generative AI for schoolwork. Only 32% report receiving any guidance on how.That is the gap. That is what we work on.
