AI photo of Joe’s Congressional response.
Chairman, Senators, Dr. Horvath — thank you.
I agree with much of what Dr. Horvath has said today, though I come from the world of educational technology itself.
For over thirty years, I have designed educational software and digital curriculum on screens for children.
In the 1990s, I helped create titles like A to Zap, Easy Book, Muppet Math, Web Explorer, and dozens of other learning platforms during the early CD-ROM era. Perhaps some of you encountered these titles in grade school. Back when software came in boxes, I often had four titles on the shelf at once in Apple Stores and CompUSA. Our work was featured on television morning shows, recognized by national magazines and trade journals, and considered cutting-edge educational innovation.
So in educational technology, I know whereof I speak.
Our original vision was, in many ways, a good one. If we could combine image, sound, interaction, agency, and play, perhaps children would learn reading, writing, and mathematics more naturally through multiple senses.
But Dr. Horvath made a profoundly important observation today. He did not point to 1994 as the beginning of the decline. He pointed to roughly 2010.
That matters enormously.
Before 2010, technology had a place. Children went to the computer lab - a destination, a room designed for a purpose. Technology was something students visited for part of the day before returning to ordinary class life.
Around 2010, smartphones and tablets stopped being novelties and became infrastructure. Like roads. Like plumbing. Like telephone poles. Today, even a Maasai tribesman in Africa has an iPhone nearby. The internet moved into the pocket and began following us everywhere. Social media became ambient. Video became endless. Algorithms became personal. The boundary between "online" and "offline" quietly dissolved.
Technology is no longer somewhere children go. It is where they live.
This changes the educational conversation entirely.
Home life is now saturated with dopamine-driven platforms engineered to exploit attention - the endless doomscrolling, the FOMO, the mindless swiping, the algorithmic clickbait designed to keep young eyes locked on glass. Children did not choose this environment. They are born into it.
If that saturation is now the baseline of daily life, then schools must become something radically different than we originally imagined.
Not more of the same. The opposite.
I am proposing that we reimagine schools as analog islands — places deliberately designed as relief from the relentless digital saturation children experience everywhere else.
Not silent rooms full of children managing tabs and clicking boxes while their posture collapses, their eyes strain, and their attention fragments into smaller and smaller pieces.
Instead: places where face-to-face interaction is unavoidable. Where eye contact matters. Where movement matters. Where children rediscover patience, empathy, negotiation, and imagination - with each other.
We are rediscovering something ancient and important: human beings are social animals, and cognition itself is profoundly social.
Subtract that, and cognitive decline follows. Mental health declines as well.
Children learn through imitation, humor, conflict, collaboration, emotional presence, and shared attention. They learn by reading nonverbal cues and responding to real people in real time.
And I want teachers listening today to hear this clearly: artificial intelligence will not replace great teachers. The AI era may make human teachers more important than ever.
As machines become increasingly capable of delivering information, the uniquely human dimensions of learning become more valuable, not less. Mentorship. Encouragement. Judgment. Socialization. Presence itself.
These are not software features. They are human experiences.
For years "Learn to code" was a mantra in STEM. Perhaps that made sense for a season. But increasingly, artificial intelligence itself is learning to code, do the math, and write the songs. To do all the things.
So we are forced to ask a deeper question:
What is education actually for?
If machines become extraordinarily capable of processing information, generating code, composing media, and optimizing systems, then what remains uniquely human?
I would suggest we consider this: human beings are meaning-making creatures.
We live by stories — the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what matters, what is beautiful, and what is worth building together.
Even today, Dr. Horvath has told us a story. A sobering, data-driven story, certainly. But a story nonetheless. We still cannot download meaning directly into the human mind. We must wrap it in narrative.
This is what I have been helping children explore for the past fifteen years through our curriculum. We teach children the foundations of media persuasion, of Hollywood-style storytelling in the earliest grades using nothing more than tablets, cut paper, glue, crayons, and wildly imaginative collaboration.
We have seen children create stories in classrooms, museums, zoos, homeless shelters, after-school programs, and libraries. And what we discovered is this: story animates children viscerally. Once children have something meaningful to say, they come alive.
We have now helped over 30,000 students, K through 12, create animated stories together — using technology as an active creative tool rather than a passive consumption device.
And we do it in a deliberately clunky and peculiar way.
Never one-to-one with devices.
We use stop-motion animation — one of the oldest forms of filmmaking — to force children to make movies one frame at a time. Rather like using an abacus to do mathematics, only for media creation. They cannot press a button and have the machine do the work.
They must invent stories using language skills. Build sets with engineering skills. Sequence shots from scratch. Pose characters physically. Bring them to life frame by frame. Work out the mathematics hidden inside timing and frames per second. Record voiceovers through acting. Design sound effects. Edit scenes. Solve continuity problems.
In other words, we deliberately slow the process down and break apart what AI is increasingly automating, but into something handmade, original, and irreducibly human.
And we do it as teams. Always as teams.
Because this is what an analog island looks like in practice. Technology is still present — a tablet captures the frames — but it is peripheral. The hands, the voices, the negotiation, the shared imagination: these are central. The device serves the children's story. The children never serve the device.
I have personally watched children create more than a thousand films this way. Yes, they make films about the mitochondria, the water cycle, ecosystems, and history. But they also create wildly imaginative nonsense that could only emerge from human collaboration.
Stories about turtles surfing. Pimples conducting orchestras. Pink elephants who walk on their ears, live on Pluto, and speak Cuban Chinese.
All invented by teams of children. Not one child alone with a screen.
As I said, they: negotiate, revise, storyboard, animate by hand, voice characters, edit scenes, solve problems together.
And in that process, something extraordinary happens. Children learn compromise. Timing. Applied mathematics. Engineering. Sequencing. Planning. Empathy. Persuasion. They learn that every decision must ultimately serve the story.
The technology becomes secondary. The meaning becomes primary.
Our original impulse was simple. We wanted to make content creation as fundamental as reading and writing for the generation growing up inside this new infrastructure.
Because since 2010, few are being taught to truly "read" or "write" media actively as a foundational literacy.
How editing shapes emotion. How music changes meaning. How images persuade. How narrative structures attention itself.
Perhaps that is one of the great educational tasks before us now. Not merely teaching children to use technology, but teaching them to remain deeply human while surrounded by it.
So my proposal to this committee is this:
Let schools become analog islands — predominantly handmade environments where children stand, build, move, negotiate, perform, create, and solve problems together. Where project-based teamwork is not a supplement to education but its central architecture.
Technology may still play a role — but always as a tool in service of human work, never as a one-to-one replacement for human interaction. The abacus, not the algorithm.
I am not a Luddite. I have helped kids produce animated team based stories for screens with footage that equals all the Pixar movies ever made. I’ve facilitated thousands more via our programs.
What I am saying is: Let schools become the one place in a child's day where screens are peripheral and people are primary. The counterbalance to a world that offers children infinite stimulation but shrinking opportunities for genuine human connection.
Write policy mandating this, before our next generation declines any further.
Because in the end, education is not about producing efficient users of technology.
It is about forming human beings capable of wisdom, judgment, creativity, cooperation, imagination, and shared purpose.
And those capacities have always emerged most powerfully, person to person.
Thank you.