Are online classes to be written off as a problem for families who want to limit their children’s screen time, or is there more to consider? In this episode of Veritas Vox, Dr. Bob Cannon and the Detweilers explore the growing concerns surrounding screen time, online education, and what the research actually reveals.

Discover why not all screen time is created equal, how meaningful human interaction can take place in virtual classrooms, and why online learning may offer unique advantages that traditional schools simply cannot. This episode will help you guide your children as they learn to approach technology with wisdom and strike a healthy balance between on and off-screen activities.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us two people who are probably quite familiar to you, my wife Laurie, and Dr. Bob Cannon, the headmaster of Veritas Scholars Academy, our online school, a division of Veritas Press. Welcome, guys.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

Thanks, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:

We're going to talk today about screen time and online learning. There has been over the course of the last few years, particularly in the shadow of the pandemic a few years ago. Talk about these things. And it seems of late, it has reached a new level of interest and conversation and even concern. So let me start with you, Bob.

You are the headmaster of the largest classical Christian school in the world, Veritas Scholars Academy. One of its unique features is it is entirely online. And I guess maybe for those people out there who have concerns about their students being their children, being online too much, or the idea of lots of screen time and the concerns that have been expressed in the marketplace about that, especially in recent years. How would you answer them? How would you interact with them?

Dr. Bob Cannon:

Well, if it were just a 30-second elevator ride, which it often is when I enter into these kinds of conversations with people who have that sort of question, I would say it's about making good decisions about how exactly a student is spending time, or a child is spending time online. There are fruitful ways to spend your time. And by the way, this isn't just about online learning.

It's a bigger, broader principle. How are we, even as adults, spending our time? Are we being fruitful? My wife and I sometimes talk with our children about being creators versus being consumers. We want them to be creators. We don't want them to simply consume. And it's so easy to jump on Amazon and to start looking around and seeing what we might consume.

But we all have gifts and talents that we've been given, and we should seek ways to be creators. And that's such an enjoyable way to approach life. So similarly, is there concern about being online too much? I'd say absolutely. There should be concern about being online in a general sense, too much. But the the more salient question I think is how is one spending his or her time online?

Is it a fruitful activity or is it a wasteful one? Are students being educated or are they being entertained?

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. Great distinctions. Laurie, what many people might not know in our marriage now of decades, you come from a librarian and research background as one of your areas of expertise. So when we have something that needs to be pursued and researched, you are obviously and routinely the starting point for us and subsequently for Veritas. Tell us what you have found when you've looked into the questions and concerns about screen time.

Laurie Detweiler:

So there has been a lot on this recently. I mean, it's been all over Fox News. You're hearing Elon Musk talk about it. You're hearing lots of people that are in the space of technology talking about screen time. And you know, I agree with Bob. We as parents, we as grandparents, as adults ourselves have choices that we make.

You know, there's a big difference between endlessly scrolling Pinterest. You know, women like Pinterest, right? It gives them ideas. But if all you ever do is scroll Pinterest and don't do anything with it, then you know, honestly, what good is that? You know, Bob talked about being creatives, and that's true. I love how one of our granddaughters who loves to crochet, she looks at Pinterest, but then she comes up with her own thing. And, you know, it seems like all she does is make things.

And you know what a great way to spend time. But as I look at children, the thing that I'm seeing in the research is they're talking about, you know, whether or not children are passively looking at something or if they're engaged with it. So the big thing that's coming out now, is there a human connection?

Human interaction, human connection. So what I mean by that is and I'm going to put this in the context of the three of us, because people can understand this for decades. We all met around a table before Covid every Monday morning, and all our vice presidents would meet for Veritas Press. Now, if we're going to all meet around a table on a Monday morning, there's something that's assumed in that, and that is that everybody is in with proximity of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to meet around the table. Well, what we learned during Covid was that really limited us getting the best people in some instances, Bob excluded and Carl.

But, you know, when we went to look for all the Bob doesn't live here. He had a long drive to get here, but he did.

What we realized, and I'm telling this story because it's true of our children, right? So what we realized during Covid, when we took all of our service people off out of our sales center, man, now we can hire moms that understand Veritas, know Veritas, love Veritas can talk to other moms. And I'm not limited to finding those people in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Well, that's true with education, but I still have the same connection. You know, when I'm on a Monday morning meeting and we can see each other and talk to each other, I don't feel like I'm not interacting. I have I contact, I get, you know, I get social clues as to how people are feeling. You know, I remember the other day, I won't mention the person we got on, and I knew they had been having a hard day, you know.

So afterwards I got my phone and I called them and I said, hey, what's going on? It's obvious that, you know, you're struggling right now. And they were struggling. It was a difficult circumstance. And so one of the things that we're seeing in the research is that it's that human interaction and connection that is the difference between screen time and what I'll call screen time.

You know, and if a child just sits and stares at a screen or is playing video games, that is not the same thing as having a conversation with somebody that lets you know how they're doing. You know, and I've had moms say, well, you know, my kids play video games with other kids. I said, they're not talking about anything personal.

They're not talking about ideas. They're talking about who they're killing, more than likely, you know, and strategy for that.

Marlin Detweiler:

I don’t want the people listening to think that we are opposed to gaming and video games and screen time and that sort of thing. What we are opposed to is people grouping what we do in that, as if it's the same thing.

Laurie Detweiler:

Yeah. And let me just say this to we years ago, before Covid, way before Covid, we did Veritas, self-paced history and Bible. And I wrote a lot of the history and Bible. I taught a lot of the history and Bible and I have something to tell you. Give me 40 children who are taught by a person that is well qualified and 40 kids that do the self-paced.

And I can tell you, the 40 kids who got the self-paced always, always, always have the information down better than the kids that don't. Now do I wish you could have both where they got to talk about it? Of course I do, but I'm. But it does work. And Bob's choices is it learning? What are they doing? Is it productive?

But that's also why live classes are so important. Because imagine talking to kids all over the world about ideas. I mean, it's just it's a whole it just opens up the world to you.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, yeah, we. Bob, I'll bring this to you, but talk to us. I'm so tempted to answer the questions because we've all we're talking about these all the time, and I know the answers are. But I'm going to ask you anyway, tell us what the advantages are in online learning that are not present in other situations.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

Something that I've appreciated about what we do here for more than a decade now. So to your earlier comment, Marlin, this is way before Covid way on our radar. The fact that we have students from all parts of the world in our classrooms has always been one of my favorite features about what we're doing here. Incidentally, that has become even more the case, and there's no way that we could have ever done this before.

But not only are we inviting students from other parts of the world into our classrooms, where we sometimes have 3 or 4 countries represented in a class, and that's just remarkable. Other heads of school would give their right arm to make more of that bricks and mortar settings, but it's just not it's not feasible. The tools aren't the same for them as they are for us.

But now, taking that a step further, I'm thinking of what we've done in the past 5 or 6 years to make ourselves even more accessible. Having classes that are quite literally on a 24 hour schedule.

Now, not only are we bringing students into our classrooms at 2:00 in the morning, but who in the United States is going to find it reasonable to teach at 2:00 in the morning? We do have some teachers who would believe it or not, be willing.

But beyond those couple teachers, what do we do? And now we have teachers who are in China and who are in Australia and who are in Hawaii and in Europe. And so now our faculty, as it continues to grow, is becoming more international. That's not so easy to do when you don't have the tools like like our virtual environment at our disposal.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. The other thing that we routinely mentioned in these kinds of conversations is the quality of teachers that we're able to select for not being geographically bound, like every bricks and mortar school is to some level. Some schools are successful at getting people to move to them to teach. We were quite successful doing that in the two bricks and mortar schools that we have been a part of in the past, but not like now because today there is no need to relocate it.

It is an immediate doesn't matter where you are, you can teach from anywhere kind of thing. It really has enhanced the quality of our teachers as a whole.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

So it is certainly about quality, but it's it's really it's a profound consideration, the accessibility that students have to learning when they're able to do it online.

Laurie Detweiler:

And I would say not all asynchronous education is the same too. And we get lumped into that with our self-paced. One of the things that I've seen is, you know, when a student is just there's a lot of online learning that is just in a learning management system. And it's like, go read page 79 and then come answer these seven questions and move on.

And in all honesty, you can probably answer half the questions without even reading the thing and going to get a score passing that'll move you on. There's a big difference than that. When we did our self-paced, you know, we were getting research. We, you know, we went to Carnegie Mellon, we went to a couple different places. But at that point in time, we're studying online education.

There weren't many places that were when we did our self-paced originally. This was what Marlin 15, 20 years ago.

Marlin Detweiler:

It was. Yeah. At this point.

Laurie Detweiler:

And so, you know, one of the things we found is that students need to have interaction every so many minutes, and if they don't, you lose them, because if it's just coming at them, if they're just watching a video and you're not making sure that you're engaging the student, it doesn't work. Well. It's the same way. In our live classes.

I was looking at an archive of class the other day for a reason, and one of the things that I thought was so great was that the teacher regularly had polls running. Now I knew why they were doing it. They were doing it because they wanted to make sure that the students were engaged, but they had turned it into a game about who could answer the question the fastest.

These were grammar school kids, right? And so I'm not kidding you. She had those kids captivated. And the other thing that she was doing is they never knew when she was going to tell them to get on screen, on camera. Right. It was almost like a cat and mouse game. It was great. And you could tell they were ready, like they wanted to get on camera.

And I know Bob has been doing that a lot with our teachers. You know, when we started live courses, bandwidth was an issue like you couldn't get all 20 students in the teacher, on camera, on webcam at the same time. If you did, you crashed. And so we were not able to do that. That's not the case anymore.

We might have somebody in a remote village in Africa that can't do that. But for the most part, all of our students are able to get on at one time. And so now they're engaging with one another and they can see each other and they put, you know, they're able to talk to one another. And I can tell you they recognize each other.

I watched it last weekend at end of year gathering. I mean, these kids are just their best friends. You know, whether or not I should say this on this podcast, I don't know, but I heard that one of our families, the parents, went out with the kids on a date because they wanted to date each other. It's like, okay.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, we've had quite a few marriages.

Well, staying focused on the whole category of screen time, we're coming back to it for just a moment. It's very easy for hasty generalizations to become how we make judgments. And one of our purposes today is to help our listeners understand that we believe that too much screen time is just that, too much, but that it's just like television or telephone or any other technology.

There are good and important uses, and then there are superfluous ones. It's one thing for me to, I don't have any daughters, but I imagine daughters being more likely to do this than a son. A daughter laying around on the phone for hours at a time, talking to her friends or whatever. And it's another thing to use the phone for important communication, including casual communication, but not overusing it.

Those are a category. But then there is, as Bob said, at the onset of this, the making good choices has to do with how we're using it, right? Interaction is a whole lot different than playing Minecraft, and I don't object to Minecraft, but it's not the same as the kind of human interaction that we have being in three different locations right now.

Although my wife and I are only separated by a few feet in a couple of rooms. But the point is, we're able to have very real interactions. Now, I will say that there is something lost in our corporate setting for the conversation that we might have said happens around the photocopier or the water cooler. In a sense, we didn't really have a water cooler, but maybe the break room.

Do you have any thoughts that talk about how we replace those kinds of things that are valuable? They're incidental, but they're missing in an online world.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

I have found. And first, I'll answer your question, Marlin, and then I'm going to bounce to something else that you remind me of, if you'll permit. First of all, I interact very frequently. I know that we all do. But just speaking for myself, I interact with our colleagues here in this kind of venue where it's through Google Meet or Zoom or some other way through Adobe Connect, and the interactions that we're having, I think are close to, if not as fruitful as when I'm able to sit down face to face in a room with someone.

We're accomplishing much of the same. It's really not far off. In reality, the interactions are not that far off for me. But I think that something Laurie said reminded me that even when our teachers are interacting with students, it is so important. And I remember 12 years ago when we basically made it policy that teachers need to be on camera when they're teaching their students.

And that's so important because students not only are hearing from their teachers, but they're seeing their body language as well. And I believe that there is something in the way that we've been created that when we can see one another's eyes, for example, it's significant in a way. There's something relational that happens when you can see one another this way.

Laurie Detweiler:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Bob, you worked for us for far more than a decade at this point, and in 2026, I'm going to guess, well, let me just take 2025. We probably work together in person less than ten times.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

Yeah. Oh for sure.

Marlin Detweiler:

A couple of them were extended times, couple of days of planning, that kind of thing. But I honestly have found no difference. There's no ramping up. There's no adjusting that our interactions, our relationship is no different online than it is in person. I can shake your hand better in person or give you a hug. And we're not hugging type, so that's okay.

We don't do that much in person either. But the point is, it's an adept, an adaptation of the 21st century that I think has become quite seamless. And I'm not suggesting that it's always ideal or in every relationship, I wouldn't want to be married to a woman that I only was with ten times a year and was online otherwise.

Thank you dear, but it really is a seamless relationship that has developed. Go ahead.

Laurie Detweiler:

I think what we need to realize too, though, is there's a difference between a three year old, a five year old, four year old, five year old, six year old, a seven year old. Then there is with a, you know, a 15 a I didn't even say a ten year old. And what I mean by that is there is good research showing that young children and you have to realize what we're talking about and what we're combating today is the amount that the average.

I'm not talking about your typical homeschooling family or family that's committed to this, but the average child, the amount of time they spend in front of a screen with mindlessness, whether it's watching TV or playing video games or I'll just say it this way, moms using it as the proverbial babysitter, right? Like I remember with the television when our kids were little, I had to tell myself, they can only do this for so long because to be honest with you, it was a whole lot easier to cook dinner with the children watching television than it was to have four little boys that were one, two, three and four underfoot in the kitchen.

And, you know, I've watched one of my daughter in law as well. Many of you know her, Lexi, and she's just incredible. She gets that having a mess in the kitchen and letting them be children and do it with her is more important than sticking them in front of a TV and making it easier for her. She's taught me a whole lot in that, you know, 66 years of age, but there is a really, really, really, really big difference between younger children being on screen time.

They need to be in the yard, in the dirt, digging, looking at butterflies, rolling in the grass, getting dirty smelling, touching, feeling and screens, don't do that for you. They just don't. Now, at the same time, I say that we did a phonics app for young children. I think that's a great way to learn phonics, but I wouldn't want them in front of a screen for more than about 20 minutes at a time. That’s it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

Laurie just referenced something that I've been thinking about as much of this conversation has unfolded, and that is and it goes back to good decision making. At the beginning of this talk, when students are online in their live classes, interacting with one another, interacting with a teacher, they're learning for a period of time. When they're done with that class, there's nothing better.

And I hope, I hope this comes as an encouragement to any parents who are listening to this. Yeah, there's nothing better for them to do than to step away from their computer, to go outside and to enjoy creation for a time. Let them, as Laurie said, play in the dirt and enjoy the butterflies and enjoy the sunshine. Get some vitamin D, I and my wife as we see our children educated through Veritas.

They're online there on a screen, but we also saw them for a time, then engaging with things, and Marlin referenced it like Minecraft or video games, online or other things online, and we scratched our heads one day and said they're spending too much time in front of their computer. We need to be more discerning about this and to help them discern.

And so when they're done with class, we kick them out, they go outside, and they enjoy another part of life that they ought to. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I'm in some sense lamenting that children today don't get to be children like I got to as a ten or a 12 year old where we were doing our own pickup games with baseball and basketball and competing at all kinds of things that we did on our own. I was of the generation that was told when the street lights come on and the sun goes down, you need to come home, okay?

Laurie Detweiler:

It did have to do with where you lived.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, it's. Yeah, there's a funny story there. Laurie, of course, is from Miami and I'm from a little town outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That and of course, she grew up during a time where Miami Vice was being played out for real in the city of Miami, and she had to be quite careful about where she stepped and where she was.

And her parents need to know where she was. When we moved from Florida to Pennsylvania, it took some getting used to it for her to realize the kids could be out and didn't have. She didn't have to see them every moment they were outside. And so some of it does have to do with practicality and where you live and that sort of thing.

But the point that Bob's making is what I want to emphasize too, and not really the difference in bringing and that is that life is filled with choices and filled with opportunities. No one of them carries all the benefits, right?

Laurie Detweiler:

That's right.

Marlin Detweiler:

Bob, do you have any last words for us here with regard how when parents say to you, I'm concerned about screen time, what would you like them to hear? What would you like them to consider?

Dr. Bob Cannon:

There are a lot of things I would love to share with parents, and talking over a cup of coffee is always a lot of fun when I get to do that, even if it is virtual like this.

Marlin Detweiler:

And I was going to say that can be done online. Unfortunately, I'm dealing with two different brews and it might be better than others.

Laurie Detweiler:

Our teachers do that to share ideas. Everybody gets a cup of coffee and they do that.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

They do. I'm going to step a little bit to the side here and make an observation that might be on some people's minds. And that is, you know, Marlin Laurie, Bob, it's easy for you to talk about the benefits of a virtual environment because after all, this is your world. This is where this is what you live in.

And maybe you're a little biased. And so I'm thinking of outside sources, and I look to an institution like Harvard University. That's right. Do they value online learning. And the answer is yes they do. And actually accessibility is one of the best things about online learning for Harvard, MIT values it for another reason. Effective learning gains is something that's important in MIT's research.

If there are effective learning gains, well, then it's valuable. And actually, in at least one study that MIT conducted, they found that students who were learning online had the same learning gains as those who were on the ground.

Laurie Detweiler:

Yeah, there was a Harvard study with that, too. That's what I was just looking up to get you.

Dr. Bob Cannon:

This is validating, right? Perhaps. Well, one of Marlin's favorite institutions, the University of Pennsylvania, had some of the same conclusions, and Stanford did as well. So when I look at these top tier institutions and I think, how are they perceiving this? They're doing research in these areas. Now, looking back to almost 20 years ago, I would have said and research would have said at that point in time, on the ground learning is superior to online learning still.

Because online learning was still relatively new. And then maybe a decade ago, it was fairly conclusive that hybrid environments, learning online, and learning on the ground were perhaps the most effective. Today, the distinction has shrunk even more. And you have institutions like MIT saying there's no substantial difference between the two, but it has to be done well. So you can't just turn to any organization.

Marlin Detweiler:

People who have to talk about that have heard me also say that with the quality choices that we have for selecting teachers and teachers being arguably the most important part of education, that the breadth that we can select from, I think increases the advantages of what we do in online education.

Laurie Detweiler:

Absolutely.

Marlin Detweiler:

Laurie, do you have a last word for us?

Laurie Detweiler:

No. I mean, I just go back to much of the stuff that's coming out now. That's negative really is about younger children, and I don't disagree with that. I don't want a two and three year old in front of a screen six hours a day. Their their brain is actually still being wired at that point. And they need well, I'll be honest with you, I don't even really want them learning in the sense of, you know, a traditional classroom and organized learning.

I want them to explore God's nature. I want them to explore the beauty around them. That's the time when they need to be creative. And so whether it's a game or even a class, you know, I don't want a little child doing that. But then they get to where they need to learn. And I think this is a good way to do it as any.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. Very good. Thanks, guys. Great. Great to do this. Great to have this conversation. And folks, thank you for joining us on this another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education. We hope to see you next time.