There’s something quietly important going on in Madrid‘s education corridors, and it has nothing to do with fancy technology or reform packages worth billions of euros. That’s almost not true. The regional government of the Spanish capital has said that kids in primary schools will only be able to use screens for two hours a week. That’s it. For kids ages three to six, they’ll only get one hour of supervised time. For babies and kids younger than three, screens are not allowed at all.
When the rules go into effect in September, they will affect about 500,000 kids in 2,000 public schools in and around the capital. Tablets, computers, and phones will not be allowed as homework. There will be no screen-based homework. This seems like a big change for parents who remember watching their kids use iPads before they could tie their shoes.
The conservative regional government in Madrid is carefully putting this together. It was called “getting back to the essence of education” by a spokesperson, which sounds like a nostalgic phrase at first but makes sense after giving it some thought. Orders of war. Writing by hand. Books. These are not old things. These methods have been used for decades and have been shown to work. However, it seems that officials here think that the balance tipped too far somewhere along the way.
The scale is what makes this important to look at. These aren’t rules or suggestions that have been sent to each school separately. They are the first laws of their kind in Spain and have to be followed. They set clear weekly limits for each age group and are very detailed, which shows that real policy work went into them. Students in grades 3 and 4 will be able to use screens for up to 90 minutes a week. Five and six years old get no more than two hours. Secondary schools will have more freedom to set their own rules, and kids with special educational needs will not have to follow them. This is a smart exception that keeps the rules from becoming too strict.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t just happen. People all over Spain are talking more and more about screen time. The national coalition government of the country has very different ideas than the regional government in Madrid. At the same time, they are working on laws to raise the age limit for creating a social media account from 14 to 16 and to make parental controls the default setting on all smartphones. A “zero use” policy for phones in preschools and elementary schools across the country has been proposed by the education ministry. This is more clear: Madrid is moving faster.
Something is still not clear about all of this, though. The real-world questions aren’t small. In dozens of classrooms, how do schools keep track of the weekly screen time? What happens when a teacher who wants to help students learn finds that digital tools really do help with that need? Some of this seems to be planned for by the rules—supervised use is allowed, and the rules aren’t applied the same way to everyone—but good policy ideas always run into problems when they are put into practice on a large scale.
Madrid seems to be arguing, and he has a point, that too much time spent on screens at a young age poses real risks that haven’t been fully considered in schools. Although you may not agree with where they’ve drawn the line, the fact that they are drawing one at all, in a public way, shows that Spain’s views on technology and children are changing. People in other areas, and maybe even other countries, will be very interested in what happens when those school doors open in September.
