Zero laptops per child

When California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out an ambitious, if hazy, plan to remove smartphones from public classrooms in the interest of kids’ safety, it marked a turnaround that would have shocked any hyper-ambitious Democratic politician from a generation ago. “Connecting kids” was once an obvious political winner. In a 1990s photo op, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore physically unspooled the wires that would connect children to the internet in a California high school. Initiatives like “One Laptop per Child,” the brainchild of MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, popularized the idea that to instill digital fluency in children was to prepare them for tomorrow’s global economy. Now, the mark of political ambition is to pry those tiny computers out of kids’ hands.