School is supposed to be the place where something clicks. Not every day, and not for every kid, but the promise has always been there: sit in that room long enough, with the right person at the front of it, and you will leave knowing something you didn’t know before. Not just a fact. A way of thinking. The ability to look at a problem and actually work through it, rather than wait for someone to summarize it into a four-second clip and deliver it with background music.
That promise is what Jonathan Buchwalter, a history teacher who posts on TikTok as @jonstertruck, put into words recently – and what got the internet talking in a way the internet rarely gets talked about. He argued, on camera, that modern education has slowly replaced the hard, unglamorous work of critical thinking with an endless conveyor belt of engagement strategies: apps, reward systems, simplified content, and classroom approaches engineered to hold students’ attention rather than actually develop their minds. Modern education criticism rarely cuts this cleanly, or reaches this many people this fast.
The video went viral. Which is almost funny, if you think about it. A teacher complaining that the attention economy has colonized the classroom – reaching millions of people through the attention economy.
What Buchwalter Actually Said
Buchwalter’s central argument was that schools are replacing critical thinking with short-form entertainment designed to keep students constantly stimulated, and that education has shifted away from difficult reading, writing, and analysis in favor of apps, rewards systems, and simplified lessons built around keeping students engaged at all costs. This is not a particularly quiet or hedged position. He didn’t say the system had room to improve. He said it has fundamentally changed what it’s trying to do.
He made clear the problem is bigger than technology itself. His belief is that schools have started treating students as if they are incapable of handling difficult material, leading educators to lower expectations instead of helping students build stronger focus and deeper learning habits. That’s the sharper edge of the argument: it’s not just that the apps are distracting, it’s that the apps are a symptom of something more troubling, which is a collective decision to stop expecting much from young people in the first place.
The comment that probably generated the most conversation, though, was about his own classroom. One of the more striking details he shared was that students actively request placement in his class despite its reputation for being more demanding. He says students regularly go to counselors asking to transfer into his history courses because they recognize they are being treated differently there. Instead of lowering standards, he expects students to rise to them. The implication being: kids aren’t failing to rise because they can’t. They’re failing to rise because nobody is asking.
The System Gamification Has Built
The debate arrives at a time when schools are under growing pressure to improve student engagement rates, and many districts have increasingly turned toward gamified learning systems because they appear to hold students’ attention more effectively than traditional teaching methods. The logic is not irrational on its face. Kids who are disengaged don’t learn anything, and a student who is at least present and clicking through an app is better than a student who has mentally left the building.
The problem is what gets lost in the translation. According to a 2025 MDPI review of 118 high-impact publications on game-based learning in history education, while game-based learning holds promise in improving students’ engagement, motivation, and understanding of historical content, its practical implementation is considerably more complicated. Designing and implementing effective game-based learning experiences demands considerable time and effort – requirements that may conflict with the constraints of current formal education systems. Moreover, educators are often expected to possess specialized knowledge in game design and pedagogical integration, but many teachers may lack the necessary training or experience in this area. In other words, a tool that takes real skill and preparation to use well gets handed to overextended teachers and deployed without any of the conditions that make it work.
Critics say keeping students busy is not the same thing as helping them deeply understand material. This is the version of the argument that survives almost any counter-attack. You can defend gamification all day on engagement metrics, but engagement is not understanding. A student who completed every level of an app might leave the room no more capable of constructing an argument than when they walked in.
What the Research Says About Modern Education Criticism
This is where the debate moves from one teacher’s TikTok into something more documented, and more uncomfortable. Research from the University of Melbourne cites a US study finding that 45 percent of college students showed no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing skills over their four-year degree. Paradoxically, while critical thinking appears to be in decline, it is in extraordinary demand – according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, analytical thinking is the most sought-after skill across industries worldwide. The gap between what education is producing and what the world is asking for is not academic. It is concrete, and it is widening.
The anxiety about this inside school buildings is real. An overwhelming percentage of educators fear that students’ increasing reliance on generative artificial intelligence tools to complete assignments will hinder their critical thinking skills and make them dependent on the technology for basic tasks, according to a College Board report covered by Education Week. That report, drawing on surveys of teachers and students administered between mid-2024 and mid-2025, captures something that many parents have been sensing for a while without quite being able to name: that students are getting increasingly fluent at producing outputs while becoming less practiced at producing thoughts.
The relationship between technology and critical thinking is not entirely one-directional, though. Research published in Education and Information Technologies found that social networks could be a useful tool for developing students’ critical thinking, particularly when students engage with information, content creation, and problem-solving functions. However, the different functions of social media use were relatively poor predictors of critical thinking overall, with the strongest predictor being the student’s pre-existing competence at learning to learn. Which puts the emphasis squarely back where Buchwalter would probably want it: on whether students have been taught to engage with ideas in the first place, before any technology enters the picture.
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Why Parents Are Paying Attention
Buchwalter’s comments connected immediately with teachers, parents, and students who say classrooms no longer challenge kids the way they once did. This is not a fringe position or a culture-war flashpoint, even if it occasionally gets treated as one. It’s a kitchen-table conversation that has been happening for years, mostly between parents who notice their kid can find any fact in thirty seconds and cannot tell you what it means, or who ace a quiz and forget everything by Thursday.
The concern isn’t really about apps or platforms specifically. It’s about what the architecture of modern schooling is quietly prioritizing. A classroom built around keeping kids stimulated doesn’t automatically become a classroom where kids learn to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing something yet – the discomfort that precedes actual understanding. The larger question is one the school system has not fully answered: schools may be getting better at keeping students engaged, but many teachers are now asking whether students are actually leaving classrooms with stronger critical thinking skills, deeper knowledge, and the ability to independently process information.
There is also something telling in the way Buchwalter’s message traveled. He isn’t describing some external force doing this to schools from outside. He is describing choices – pedagogical choices, administrative choices, choices made in response to pressures that are themselves real, including rising disengagement rates and an era of attention competition that no previous generation of teachers had to contend with. Nobody set out to build a system that produces students who can perform a task without understanding it. And yet here we are having a viral conversation about exactly that.
The Engagement Trap
The clearest way to understand what Buchwalter is pointing at is this: engagement and learning are not the same thing, but they are often measured as though they are. A student who is clicking through a rewards-based app is producing data that looks like participation. A student who is sitting with a difficult primary source, frustrated, re-reading a paragraph they didn’t understand the first time, looks – from a data perspective – like a student who is struggling. One of those students is doing the harder and more valuable cognitive work.
Schools have mustered significant resources to mitigate in-classroom disruptions, grapple with increasing rates of depression and anxiety among students, and contend with behavior issues and bullying that ripple out of social media. Critically, the increased attention to tackling technology’s role in children’s lives has pulled resources away from the core mission of education. The bandwidth of the average school administrator is not infinite, and every hour spent on a phone policy or a mental health counseling shortage is an hour not spent on curriculum design. Buchwalter’s complaint and the broader technology disruption in schools are not separate issues – they feed each other.
The question his video leaves open, and the one parents and teachers keep circling without resolution, is whether the system can be restructured to expect more without simply punishing the students who are already least served by it. High expectations, delivered badly, without support, just produce shame. What Buchwalter seems to be describing is something different: a classroom where the expectation is high, the support is present, and the students are treated as capable of meeting both – which is why they’re asking to be let in.
What This Is Really About
The reason a TikTok from a history teacher cracked open this particular conversation is not because the argument is new. Teachers and researchers and parents have been saying versions of this for years. The reason it spread is that Buchwalter said it plainly, from inside the building, without the usual disclaimers or the usual caution about not blaming anyone. He named a direction, and a lot of people recognized it.
For many viewers, the question of whether students are leaving classrooms with real critical thinking skills felt far more important than test scores, apps, or classroom trends. That instinct is not anti-technology or nostalgic for some imagined golden age of education. It is a recognition that the thing school is supposed to provide – the capacity to think, to argue, to analyze, to sit with difficulty and work through it – is harder to measure than a completion rate and easier to lose than anyone planned for.
The Part Nobody Has Answered Yet
You don’t have to think modern education is broken to find the conversation worth having. You just have to be a parent watching a kid breeze through something that should have required struggle, or a teacher who notices that the engaged classroom and the learning classroom have quietly drifted apart. The gap between those two things is exactly what Buchwalter pointed at.
Whether anyone in a position to change the system is actually listening is a different question, and probably a longer one. The structural forces that produced this moment – underfunded schools, overwhelmed teachers, a technology industry that profits from attention, and a political environment that treats test scores as the only legible metric – did not arrive overnight and will not reverse because one history teacher made a compelling video. But the conversation itself is real. The discomfort underneath it is real. And the parents who felt something twist in their chest when they watched that clip are not wrong about what they recognized.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.