The Erosion of Deep Thinking And What It’s Doing to Our Kids

How tech-driven attention habits are reshaping learning, reasoning, and the future of civic engagement

Let’s be honest: most of us struggle to focus for more than a few minutes without checking something. But kids? They're not just distracted, their brains are being built in this environment.

The modern digital world is designed to compete for attention, not sustain it. Platforms use design tricks like infinite scroll, autoplay, and rapid feedback to keep users hooked. These systems don’t just steal time, they reshape how the brain prioritizes what’s worth noticing. Over time, this environment teaches us to chase novelty, avoid friction, and stay in a loop of reactive consumption.

And increasingly, education is starting to follow suit.

When Learning Starts to Look Like Scrolling

Many learning platforms today are built with the same logic as social media. Short videos, flashy animations, and gamified rewards are everywhere. Even AI-generated influencers are cropping up, like the recent viral TikToks of deepfake Sydney Sweeney and Drake teaching math. These tools can capture interest but they also raise serious questions about the kind of cognitive habits we’re reinforcing.

Yes, novelty boosts engagement. But researchers have long shown the novelty effect is fleeting unless it's paired with depth. When tools optimize for ease and speed, the habits that matter most—like sustained focus, grappling with confusion, and reflection—don’t get built.

The result? Not just shorter attention spans, but a shift in how students think. Deep thinking works like mental endurance in that it has to be trained. If students only do short mental sprints, they won’t be ready for the marathon of complex reasoning.

Quick, bite-sized content has its place, but when it replaces slower, more effortful learning, students miss out on what psychologists call productive struggle—the kind of challenge that makes ideas stick and builds real resilience.

And these habits don’t stop at the classroom door. They shape how kids interpret information, form opinions, and engage with the world around them.

In a world full of information but short on shared understanding, deep thinking is a civic skill. It takes effort to follow a long argument, examine opposing viewpoints, or revise your assumptions. It takes cognitive resilience to stay curious when there’s no easy answer. These are the exact muscles that shallow learning environments fail to strengthen.

The AI Fork in the Road

Now enter generative AI. It doesn’t start the trend but it accelerates it.

There’s a big difference between an adult using AI to extend their thinking and a 12-year-old using it to avoid thinking altogether. Adults draw on years of mental scaffolding; kids are still building theirs. If AI does too much of the cognitive work too early, those foundational muscles never form.

Personalized AI tools add another layer. Done well, personalization can support real growth by helping students revisit what’s unclear, move at their own pace, or push forward when they’re ready.

Still, even the best intentions can fall short.

The risk of personalization in education isn't the tailoring itself, but rather the failure to push students beyond their existing perspectives. While surface-level customization may suffice for objective topics like, say, the basic mechanics of the greenhouse effect, it falls short when students need to confront complex issues such as climate change, its societal implications, and their role within it. Without exposure to diverse viewpoints and constructive intellectual friction, students miss crucial opportunities to deepen their understanding and prepare for meaningful engagement in a complex world.

We’ve seen this movie before. Social media algorithms feed users more of what they already engage with: reinforcing bias, filtering out dissent, and amplifying extremes. We need to be intentional to ensure that education doesn’t fall into the same trap where every student receives a different stream of facts and feedback, but no shared foundation for conversation, let alone constructive disagreement.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

This isn’t a call to abandon tech, it’s a call to design it better. If we want students to think critically, not just respond reflexively, we have to:

• Design AI tools that support challenge

• Treat attention as a skill to build

• Follow fast content with slower thinking, reflection, and iteration

• Normalize confusion, boredom, and struggle as part of learning

• Build shared experiences into digital spaces, not just personalization

The goal isn’t to resist the future, it’s to shape it, because what we build today won’t just define how kids learn, it will shape how they think and who they become.