For more than a decade, educators and parents have watched the smartphone reshape childhood in real time.

We have seen attention fragment. We have watched social media alter the social landscape of adolescence. Teachers have competed with notifications for students’ attention, while parents and school leaders have wrestled with questions about sleep, anxiety, belonging, academic integrity, and what healthy technology use should look like.

Schools are responding.

By March 2026, UNESCO reported that 114 education systems—58 percent of countries worldwide—had national policies banning mobile phones in schools. This is significant progress.

But it also raises an important question for Christian educators:

What if removing the phone is only the beginning?

The technologies entering our students’ lives are changing faster than our policies can keep up. Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate their writing, answer their questions, simulate conversation, and increasingly provide a form of companionship. Smart glasses can put cameras and AI assistants at eye level. Brain-computer interfaces are moving from science fiction into clinical reality.

If our digital strategy is primarily about controlling particular devices, we will always be responding to the last technological disruption.

Christian schools have an opportunity to do something far more ambitious: form people capable of living wisely and faithfully in a technological world.

From Restriction to Formation

A phone-free school can create the conditions for something good. It cannot, by itself, produce that good.

I have seen the difference firsthand.

During a recent visit to a Christian high school with a daytime phone ban, teachers described a remarkable change. “Kids are talking before class,” one told us. Students said lunch had become loud again. Another student described how the policy had brought their group back around one table instead of leaving everyone absorbed in separate games and feeds.

Those moments matter.

But they also reveal something deeper: We were never really trying to create empty pockets. We were trying to recover attention, relationship, presence, curiosity, play, and the capacity to notice the person sitting beside us. And the same students still go home to social media, gaming, streaming, group chats, algorithms, and AI. They still need to learn how to navigate those environments.

The goal, therefore, cannot simply be less technology. The goal must be greater wisdom.

From Values to Virtues

Christian education has always understood that rules alone cannot produce virtue. We don’t merely want students who comply with a phone policy while an adult is watching. We want young people increasingly capable of practicing wisdom, courage, justice, self-control, integrity, and love when no one is watching.

For years, those of us working in digital well-being have encouraged students to identify what matters to them and align their technology choices with those values. That remains useful. But Christian education invites us deeper.

Values ask, “What matters to me?” Virtues ask, “Who is God forming me to become?”

The historic Christian virtues give us a remarkably practical vocabulary for life in the digital age. For example, the virtue of prudence teaches us to perceive rightly and choose wisely, and justice calls us to love our neighbours through responsibility, fairness, generosity, and respect.

These virtues show up every time a student decides whether to send the cruel message, reach for the phone, trust the AI-generated answer, record someone without permission, keep scrolling when they need sleep, or stay with a difficult assignment rather than escaping the discomfort of not knowing.

Digital formation is virtue formation.

This shifts digital well-being from a technology-management problem to a formation question and helps students begin asking:

“What kind of person is this technology helping me become?”

“What is this influencer training me to love?”

“What capacities is this AI tool strengthening and which is it weakening?”

“Does this digital habit help me connect more deeply to God and others? Or does it get in the way?”

These questions will remain useful long after today’s devices have disappeared.

Prepare for the Post-Smartphone Future

And disappear, they will.

The post-smartphone future is already beginning to take shape. Google, for example, is launching AI-powered eyewear that allows users to navigate, send messages, capture photos, translate conversations, and interact with AI without taking out a phone. The screen in our pocket may not always be the primary way we interact with the digital world.

That is why preparing students to manage this particular device will never be enough.

We need to develop capacities and virtues that travel with them.

Protect Human Capacities

AI presents extraordinary possibilities for education. Used wisely, it can help teachers differentiate texts, generate discussion questions, create vocabulary supports, brainstorm possibilities, and reduce administrative burdens.

Christian AI experts Paul Matthews and Jason Gulya offer a helpful principle: Use AI for options, not answers.

The distinction matters because the purpose of education is not simply producing work. It is developing human beings capable of doing the work of thinking, reading, writing, reasoning, creating, and discerning.

UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Teachers raises a similar concern: Overreliance on AI can erode human agency and allow essential competencies to atrophy.

For Christian educators, this should sound familiar. Efficiency has never been the highest good of education. Oftentimes the struggle is the education.

Writing the difficult paragraph, sitting with an unanswered question, resolving conflict with another human being, memorizing something worth remembering, developing an argument, practicing a skill, and learning to tolerate frustration all form capacities in us.

The virtue of fortitude develops because some things are hard.

Prudence develops because some decisions are complicated.

Humility develops because we discover we do not already know everything.

Before asking, “Could AI do this for my students?” we should ask: What does doing this themselves develop in them? At JOMO(campus), we recently invested in deepening our understanding and teaching of AI practices for Christian school staff and students by partnering with Paul Matthews to develop a theologically-rich professional development series addressing exactly this.

Keep Formation Human

The question becomes even more important when AI moves from academic assistance into human relationships.

Students are increasingly encountering AI systems not simply as tools but as conversational partners. These systems can respond patiently, affirm feelings, offer advice, remember details, and simulate relational intimacy. For children whose identities, consciences, and relational capacities are still developing, this raises much larger questions.

Formation has always been relational. Children learn empathy by encountering people whose needs differ from their own. They learn patience because relationships require waiting. They learn forgiveness because people disappoint them. They develop courage by having difficult conversations.

Human relationships contain friction. They are a good burden. Friends interrupt us. Siblings annoy us. Teachers misunderstand us. Parents say no. Classmates have needs that conflict with our own. And that friction forms us.

Relationships require us to apologize, forgive, wait, listen, compromise, risk rejection, and discover that the world does not revolve around us. They are one of God’s great schools of virtue.

AI can remove much of that friction and that may be precisely why we need to proceed carefully.

The central risk is not merely that AI will occasionally give a student a wrong answer. It is that we gradually outsource parts of formation itself—intellectual struggle, moral deliberation, emotional processing, even companionship—to systems designed to simulate human interaction without actually participating in a human relationship.

Christian schools should be asking not simply, “How do we use AI?” but: What should remain irreducibly human?

How We Anticipate What Comes Next

And AI is not the end of the story. Consider smart glasses.

Cameras, microphones, speakers, and AI assistants can increasingly be incorporated into ordinary-looking eyewear. What happens when a recording device is no longer sitting visibly on a desk but resting on a student’s face? What happens to trust when students and teachers cannot easily know whether a conversation is being recorded?

The Christian question extends beyond privacy legislation: Does human dignity require spaces in which people can exist unrecorded?

Children need places where mistakes can be forgotten, awkwardness can pass unnoticed, reconciliation can happen privately, and repentance can lead to a new beginning. The Christian story insists that we are not forever defined by our worst moment. What happens to that possibility when every failure can become a permanent, searchable digital record?

Brain-computer interfaces push the questions further still. In 2026, researchers demonstrated an interface that enabled people with paralysis to type through attempted finger movements, reaching speeds of twenty-two words per minute.

Christians should be among the first to celebrate technologies that alleviate suffering. But what happens when technology moves from therapy to enhancement?

If neural activity becomes data, who owns it? Could students someday be pressured to adopt cognitive technologies to remain competitive? Where is the boundary between restoring human capacity and technologically redefining it?

Schools do not need a brain-computer-interface policy tomorrow morning, but they do need a theological framework capable of answering questions like these when tomorrow arrives.

Build Theology Before Technology

This is why Christian schools should resist beginning technology conversations with products.

Don’t begin with: “Should we allow this device?” or “Which AI platform should we purchase?” Begin further upstream. What do we believe a human being is?

Christian anthropology gives us a rich foundation for technological discernment. Human beings are embodied image-bearers, created for relationship with God and one another. We are creatures rather than machines; persons rather than data sets; recipients of limits as well as capacities.

We are called not merely to productivity but to faithfulness. From those convictions, better questions emerge:

Does this technology honour embodiment or encourage escape from it?

Does it strengthen relationships or substitute for them?

Does it cultivate agency or encourage dependency?

Does it deepen attention or continually fracture it?

Does it help students practice wisdom or merely make choices for them?

Does it help us practice temperance or make endless consumption feel normal?

And ultimately: Who are we becoming through its use?

A theology of technology gives schools something a device-specific policy never can: a foundation to stand on whatever may come.

Lead from Hope

It is easy for conversations about children and technology to become conversations about fear. Trust me, I know. I’m raising three teenagers in the digital age.

But Christian schools have a different story to tell.

Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 ESV). That vision of abundant life should animate our response to technology.

We are not trying to recreate a world before smartphones, eliminate every technological risk, or prepare students to flee from the future. We are preparing them to enter it faithfully.

That means helping students experience the joy of sustained attention—like reading a hardcover book cover to cover and finally, somewhere around page 104, slipping into the slipstream of the story. It means helping kids discover the deep satisfaction of completing challenging work instead of bypassing the struggle. It means encouraging teens to risk healthy vulnerability in their friendships, face to face, rather than retreating behind the safety and anonymity of a screen.

Let’s teach them the wisdom of limits. The responsibility that accompanies technological power. The courage to resist what diminishes them. The freedom to put a device down and the discernment to pick one up for a genuinely good purpose.

Because technology is not destiny. No technological future is inevitable. The future is still being written—and our students will help write it.

Our task, then, is bigger than preparing young people to navigate whatever technology comes next. Our task is to form the kind of Christ-like generation who can enter that future with prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and have the wisdom and courage not merely to respond to it, but to shape it.

Christian schools should be leading the way.

Join the Conversation:

Hear more from Christina Crook of JOMO(campus) during our November 12 In the Loop webinar, Future Ready: Forming Students to Flourish in an Age of Accelerating Technology. Register here.

References

Crook, Christina. “From Values to Virtues: Deepening the Christian Formation at the Heart of JOMO.” experiencejomo.com, 2026. https://www.experiencejomo.com/blog/from-values-to-virtues.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024.

Izadi, Shahram. “Intelligent Eyewear Is Coming This Fall.” Google, May 19, 2026. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/android-xr-io-2026/.

Jude, Justin J., et al. “Restoring Rapid Natural Bimanual Typing with a Neuroprosthesis after Paralysis.” Nature Neuroscience (2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02218-y.

Matthews, Paul, and Jason Gulya. Artificial Intelligence, Real Literacy: A Practical Guide to Using AI for 10 Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in Education, 2025.

UNESCO. AI Competency Framework for Teachers. Paris: UNESCO, 2024.

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report. “Phone Bans in Schools Are Spreading Worldwide as the Policy Debate Rages On.” UNESCO.org, March 17, 2026. https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/articles/phone-bans-schools-are-spreading-worldwide-policy-debate-rages.