Learning on Credit
An adult chooses convenience now. The child pays the cost later.
We borrowed a logic from the checkout line and brought it into the classroom — take the convenient thing now, settle the cost later. But in school, the one who enjoys the convenience and the one who pays for it aren’t the same person.
Fintech companies like Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay have revolutionized financial credit in recent years. Their “Buy Now, Pay Later” products are expected to become a US$180 billion industry by 2030. To put that into perspective, music streaming, dominated by media giants Spotify and Apple Music, is currently less than half the size.
Why does this matter? Because, as marketing professor Miranda Goode explains, BNPL schemes aren’t a new form of credit; they’re “debt in disguise.”
Goode asks us to imagine buying a $132 bean bag chair. Instead of paying the whole cost at checkout, we’re given the option to pay $12 per month for the next eleven months. The installment price seems more manageable to many consumers. But research suggests that deflating consumers’ initial “sticker shock” encourages BNPL customers to spend more than they otherwise would.
The industry likes to claim that BNPL is “credit on training wheels,” but because the wheels are built right into the checkout flow, it habituates consumers to a debt-intensifying behaviour. Those who manage their payments and cash flow poorly are susceptible to “debt stacking,” where customers find themselves juggling multiple BNPL products on top of traditional credit options.
Frictionless access combined with deflated sticker shock makes these companies the perfect Trojan horse for unintended and unnecessary debt.
But the costs they impose aren’t limited to their own customers. BNPL firms charge higher interchange fees than traditional credit card companies do. Ultimately, retailers may pass those additional costs on to all consumers through higher prices.
The mechanism is what should worry us, because it isn’t unique to retail. Anything that severs the moment we choose something from the moment we pay for it will pull us toward choices we’d otherwise reject. And that same dynamic has found its way into our classrooms.
Increasingly, schools make pedagogical decisions the way shoppers click “confirm” for installment payments. When given a choice, we often select the option that makes the day go smoother — the YouTube video that calms the room at lunch, the AI tool that grades the assignment for us, or the grammar extension that polishes students’ prose. The cost, however, is left for later. Each of those choices feels free because nothing is debited at the “point of sale,” when the decision is made. The lesson is engaging. The work is completed. The room stays quiet.
But what seems free is just a deferred cost. We haven’t escaped it.
When a shopper uses Klarna to put off a payment, the bill eventually comes back to him. But at least he made that decision himself. The student sitting in front of a YouTube video at lunch is pacified in the moment, but doesn’t know that her future self — the adult she’ll become — will not have benefitted from the creative attention one learns to harness from boredom. Unlike the Klarna customer, though, she didn’t make the choice herself; an adult made it for her.
I’ve called this “developmental cost” before, using it to help us sort which tools belong in which hands. Here, I want to look at the cost itself: what we’re trading away, why we’re struggling to see it, and why we keep choosing to reduce friction.
What Gets Displaced: Three Kinds of Developmental Cost
A cost of what, though? When a tool carries out a task, or part of a task, the student doesn’t. Every time we ease a student’s workload or divert their attention from active engagement to passive consumption, we make a trade on their behalf, without their permission. While these choices buy some convenience — efficiency and a little quiet in our younger classrooms — those gains come with at least three kinds of costs:
The first is cognitive. When we use tools that outsource exercises that require thought and consideration — from something as simple as deciding where to place a comma to something as complex as imagining the outcome of an experiment — we cancel the cognitive rehearsals that develop deep and durable habits of mind.
The second is social. When schools stop building environments that require students to face each other and their teachers, when learning is “personalized” through an AI tool, or when a young classroom is placated by a video, the interactions that demand attention, patience, and tolerance give way to those a screen mediates. We displace the practices of collaboration, of belonging, of learning to read a room, and of working through disagreement.
The third is dispositional. When these tools become normal, students are habituated to them, just as shoppers grow accustomed to paying later. If using AI to do research becomes routine, reading primary and secondary sources starts to look inefficient and dull by comparison. A student who never pushes through the boring stretch of a difficult task lacks an important skill and they lose their taste for the effort.
None of these costs show up in a grade. Students can carry all three and still bring home an unblemished report card at the end of the semester. The surface of their academic performance is the last place where these costs appear, which is exactly the problem.
Invisible & Delayed: Why the Cost Stays Hidden
Why is that a problem, and not just an inconvenience? Because these costs share two characteristics. They’re invisible: the usual measures of academic performance don’t capture them. And they’re delayed: their developmental consequences persist and grow long after the decision that introduced them, by which point almost no one thinks to connect the harm to its cause. A cost with only one of these would be manageable; we catch hidden costs eventually, and we plan for delayed ones when we can see them coming. It’s the combination that does the damage.
Invisible: The Finished Work is Not the Evidence
A 2025 study by Fan et al. published a finding in the British Journal of Educational Technology found that university students who used ChatGPT produced better work on the surface, but their knowledge transfer didn’t improve. The visible thing — the submitted essay — got better, but the invisible thing — whether they could apply their knowledge across contexts — was unaffected. If AI-enhanced texts can mask the thinking of a motivated undergraduate, it conceals more of a child’s, whose capacities are still forming.
Were K-12 students to produce work for the collective benefit of a popular audience, encouraging the use of a tool that enhances the quality of the final product makes sense (ethical quandaries aside). But in my experience, very few people are interested in reading an eighth grader’s review of The Outsiders.
I’m interested in that book review because I want to assess the quality of their writing before it’s been subjected to the compositional equivalent of a Botox injection. Even more importantly, I want to evaluate whether my student can, with any level of sophistication, distinguish a gang fight that advances the plot from the underlying class division — the one that animates the conflict, provides characters with identity, and reveals difficult questions about loyalty and innocence.
If ChatGPT were involved, I’d be reading a review with a facelift. I’d know nothing of my student’s independent ability to discern plot and theme, track character development, or notice the subtleties of authorial craft. AI makes their cognition, and its development, invisible to me. That’s a problem because their review isn’t going to be published in The New York Times. What I’m assessing is the thinking, and that’s exactly what the polished product hides.
Delayed: The Bill Arrives Later
In 1983, the cognitive psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge published a pioneering research paper titled “Ironies of Automation.” She explained that when a task is automated, the operator stops practising the relevant skill, so when the system fails and the human must take over, they’re rusty and struggle to act at exactly the moment they’re needed the most. When an automated system is running smoothly, the human’s rust stays hidden. In other words, everything looks fine until it doesn’t.
This is what’s happening in our classrooms en masse. When a student uses an AI tool to seek feedback for their written work, they interact with a technology designed for attachment. That accommodation is the problem. A tool tuned to flatter and adapt demands no social flexibility in return: no negotiating a disagreement, no reading a mood, no tolerating friction. AI sycophancy has been well-documented over the past couple of years. A recent study found that reliance on AI companions could lead to “the potential transformation of relational norms in ways that may render human-human connection less accessible or less fulfilling.”
Tools that are engineered to recognize and adapt to the idiosyncrasies of an individual demand very little, if any, social flexibility from that person. When we automate social interaction, even for academic purposes, the cost is the corrosion of their social capacities.
In this sense, the classroom isn’t separate from the rest of the students’ day. Whether they seek frictionless feedback from a chatbot at their desk or distract themselves with the video game that lives in their pocket, the accommodating screen offers them an always-available recess from discomfort.
When I first launched The Walled Garden Education, I recounted a time when I took my class outside, without their phones, to read a chapter of a novel on a sunny day. We finished early, and I gave my students some free time:
“As expected, many eagerly took to the playground. Yet, a quarter of my class lingered, clearly hesitant. I tried to entice them with suggestions: ‘Why don’t you borrow a ball from the gym? Have you ever played Capture the Flag?’ But my appeals fell on deaf ears. For half an hour, these 13-year-olds sat — and in some cases, merely stood — barely interacting with one another.”
This was the delayed cost made visible. Whether traded away to a screen at their desk or at home, the social reps they were missing surfaced at thirteen; they no longer knew how to fill thirty empty minutes with each other.
Their age matters. In Bainbridge’s analysis of automation, operators lose a skill they once had. These students are failing to build it in the first place, which is worse because there’s no prior competence to fall back on.
We already have clear evidence of this dynamic. For roughly fifteen years, our kids have proceeded through their primary and secondary education with near-unfettered access to phones and school-supplied laptops that house software engineered to capture and monetize their attention. That generation is now arriving at university. Professors from community colleges to the Ivy League report that their students struggle to complete readings already modified to be shorter. The number of young people who read for pleasure has collapsed. What post-secondary instructors report is students who not only have lost a skill, but lost a lost appetite. They feel unequipped to grapple with difficult texts, and uninterested in trying.
All three costs are visible in today’s lecture halls. The cognitive capacity to read critically is underdeveloped. The shared and social practice of deliberative analysis expected in an undergraduate seminar is lacking. And the learning disposition — the simple desire to push through difficulty in pursuit of personal growth — has gone missing.
But notice what we do with this evidence. We argue about whether it’s the phones, the pandemic, or the curricular choices we made to read excerpts instead of whole texts (it is, of course, all of these). We won’t settle those debates because we can’t. The cost arrived fifteen years after it was incurred, in settings where no grade recorded it, and it’s so far downstream that identifying a single decision that can be labelled “The Cause” is impossible.
This is what “invisible and delayed” looks like in education. When the bill finally comes, all we see on the receipt is a vague, system-wide deficit that we can’t assign blame for. The damage is undeniable, while the cause is deniable. And the young people at the centre bear the greatest burden.
The Loss and Its Receipt
We arrive at these costs, which are neither agreed upon nor understood by those who have to bear them, through what the sociologist Diane Vaughan called the “normalization of deviance.” After the loss of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986, she explained that clearly substandard practices become accepted as normal inside institutions that don’t immediately produce catastrophes — “non-event feedback,” in her words.
The absence of a disaster makes small deviations commonplace until the lowered standard becomes invisible to the people working inside the institution. It’s an elegant idea, and it tells us why the logic of Buy Now, Pay Later subtly took hold in schools: each frictionless choice failed to affect report cards, and the unblemished report cards represented the non-event feedback that authorized the same practices.
Knowing what we know now, we shouldn’t turn our backs on technology, but we should become far more serious about how it’s mobilized in our classrooms and managed in our homes. If you’re a school administrator and your students still spend their lunch breaks on Snapchat, a bell-to-bell phone policy is long overdue. If you’re an elementary teacher relying on Netflix to mollify an oversized class, please stop; collect evidence of harm, galvanize your colleagues, raise the concern with parents, and demand the conditions that make better practice possible. If you’re a high school teacher, the take-home assignment that assesses only a final product is due for a rethink: consider collecting Artifacts of Attention alongside the finished work.
Consider this: if you’re making a choice on behalf of children that makes things easier in the moment, and that choice wasn’t available to you fifteen years ago, you may be buying now and asking the kids to pay later. The adults those children will become aren’t in the room when the decision is made, but they deserve consideration. So before playing another Kahoot, ask: Will the adults these kids grow into thank us for this?
The crisis is already underway; you only have to read the statistics and the professors’ accounts to see it. Mortgaging our students’ futures for a quieter afternoon is the Klarna of the classroom. It’s time to stop.
If you teach, lead a school, or are raising a child inside all of this, you already know which convenient choice you'd reach for tomorrow. This piece is an argument for pausing before you do, and for passing it to someone who makes those choices too.
Please like, comment, and share if this piece resonated with you.
Interested in reading more?
Great extended analogy here--I enjoyed (and agree with) your insights. It's interesting that there has been so much research on delayed gratification in children, yet teachers often fall into the same trap of pursuing the short-term at the expense of the long-term.
As always, an excellent read Andrew! You are right on the money. As I sit here, finishing up another School year, I recognize all of the things that you listed in your article and have been noticing them for 10 years, which is why I wrote a curriculum on technology addiction 10 years ago for my psychology classes. I will share this with all of the staff and our admin, and I’m hopeful that people will read it, and seriously consider the ramifications of our decisions to opt for convenience.