Should young children use technology in school? Lessons from South Korea

Credit: jamesteohart via Adobe Stock.

17 December 2024

By Rachael Levy and Jennifer Chung

‘Technology is bad for kids!’ This statement has become something of a slogan in recent years with parents, teachers, educationalists and health workers, among others, raising the alarm about the ways in which technology is deemed to be damaging children. You may have seen the recent Channel 4 programme ‘Swiped’, which removed smartphones from children in an attempt to improve child well-being. Recurring themes include concerns about harmful online content, cyberbullying and screen addiction, often resulting in the call for all children, especially young children, to be protected from the digital world as much as possible.

However, the world we live in is digital. To take the example of literacy, we know that learning to read now includes developing skills to make sense of screen texts, and learning to write now includes learning to code using programming languages. This raises challenging questions for the field of early childhood education, particularly in relation to potential tensions between the desire to offer children opportunities to develop the digital literacy skills needed to succeed in the future and the desire for them to avoid the harmful effects of technology.

Recognising this tension, we recently conducted a UCL Global Engagement funded study to understand how early childhood practitioners in the UK and South Korea used technology within their classroom practice and viewed the use of technology in early childhood settings. Our headline finding was that 3–5-year-old children were exposed to a far wider pool of technology in South Korea in comparison with the UK. For example, while children in both contexts used tablets and iPads, children in South Korea were also regularly engaged in coding activities, and used robotics, virtual reality and green screens.

Picture from a South Korean classroom. Credit: Jennifer Chung.

In and of itself, this was no great surprise, but what was really noticeable was the difference in practitioners’ views and perceptions. While practitioners within both contexts were concerned about harmful content, this seemed to be much more of a barrier to its use within the UK. One UK-based practitioner reported that while technology ‘is essential nowadays’, it should be used to record children’s activity ‘but children shouldn’t be allowed to use it’. Another practitioner spoke of concerns she had about ‘the amount of unstructured time children have using digital devices’, while another reported there are ‘dangers that it can become ‘digital babysitting’’.

Picture from a South Korean classroom. Credit: Jennifer Chung.

The impact of these views was especially manifest when practitioners spoke about the use of technology when children returned to school after the pandemic. Several UK settings reported they deliberately withheld using technology in the classroom following the pandemic, because they believed children had had ‘too much’ exposure to technology during school closures, which had negatively impacted their communication and social skills. This contrasted starkly with the schools in South Korea, which actively capitalised on children’s confidence in using technology in order to support them in managing the return to the classroom. One school identified that the children in their care were nervous about going on a field trip to a museum as they had not been able to travel during the pandemic. The teachers used online maps to allow the children to ‘practice’ the journey and prepare for the trip. Following the trip, the children recreated the journey once back in the classroom, using chairs and blocks to make trains and buses, but as they ran out of space teachers introduced them to a green screen. Before long the children were comfortably using the green screen to add features such as restaurants, shops and imaginary landscapes into their mapping. Teachers reported they noticed a growth in the children’s ability to work as a team and problem-solve, arguing this was mediated by the use of the technology. Interestingly, all activities were connected with the Nuri Curriculum, a national level curriculum for children aged 3 to 5 in South Korea.

Picture from a South Korean classroom. Credit: Jennifer Chung.

It was notable that while practitioners in the UK commonly spoke of digital technology having a ‘place’, or there being a ‘space for technology’, practitioners in South Korea were more likely to speak of it in terms of embeddedness. They used terms such as ‘essential’, ‘increasingly necessary’, ‘so prevalent in society’ and ‘required’ when asked to talk about the role of technology in early childhood education. This suggests that while practitioners in the UK think that technology should be visible with the early childhood classroom, practitioners in South Korea view it as being a critical part of the everyday lives of children, both at home and at school.

Picture from a South Korean classroom. Credit: Jennifer Chung.

This is not to say that the practitioners in South Korea were unconcerned about potential dangers associated with technology. To the contrary, they spoke about making sure children are exposed to ‘the right content’ and about the practitioner’s role in making sure children are not harmed by technology. However, rather than this being a barrier to the use of technology, practitioners in South Korea seemed to embrace these challenges with confidence, confident in their own knowledge of the age-appropriate affordance of the technology, and confident in knowing how to keep children safe.

Picture from a South Korean classroom. Credit: Jennifer Chung.

It therefore appears that early childhood practitioners in South Korea do not focus on technology being ‘good’ or ‘bad for kids’, but see it as part of life and learning. Technology is embedded in all aspects of the South Korean curriculum from children’s earliest years in school, but careful attention is given to the purpose of using the technology, child engagement and child safety. Learning from this, if we want our children to gain the digital skills and competence needed to compete on the future world stage, there is an urgent need for the government to invest in appropriate technology and the practitioner training needed to support, develop and safeguard young children in using technology within early childhood education.