Bruner’s enactive stage and Montessori’s materials both understand that abstract concepts must be grounded in physical experience before symbols can carry weight. The touchscreen skips that stage entirely — and the learning data are beginning to show it.
Education is supposed to be the great equaliser. The evidence says otherwise. Bourdieu called it decades ago: schools reproduce the social order they pretend to transcend. Privilege is the entrance fee that nobody admits is being charged.
The German word ‘Barrierefreiheit’ promises freedom from barriers. That promise is structurally impossible. What we can achieve is Barrierearmut — a reduction of barriers. The difference is not semantic; it has consequences for policy, design, and institutional honesty.
The same structural reason a toddler cannot put shoes on before socks is why position and momentum cannot be simultaneously measured. Non-commutativity is not exotic physics — it is the default logic of any ordered world.
In June 2022 I presented on educast.nrw at the Tag der Lehre at HfMT Köln. This is the longer argument behind that talk: why universities should not outsource their video infrastructure to commercial platforms, and what a better alternative looks like in practice.