At eight in the morning in late July, I arrive at a summer camp in the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina, and unload ten typewriters from the bed of my pickup. The machines sit on folding tables beneath pop-up tents on a blacktop basketball court. This makeshift workspace sits in the shadows of an old building that once served as a mess hall. I unload Polaroid cameras and a repurposed welding screen I’ve converted into a bulletin board on wheels, then I cover the board with pages torn from an old book called “How To Do Everything,” with accompanying diagrams. I particularly enjoy tearing out and stapling the short article “Prank Calls: How To Deal With Them.” This one will really interest the middle-schooler of 2026.
At nine, a school bus lumbers up the potholed gravel road at the end of its half-hour pilgrimage from downtown. The bus unloads forty middle schoolers who spend the day learning woodworking, paddleboarding, beekeeping, and culinary skills from a handful of teachers who have brought along two large, friendly dogs. Today they’ll also learn Typewriter and Publishing, which the camp director believes is just as much a skill as masonry or bike maintenance. Either that or she’s taken a leap of faith and had a gap in the program after the archery guy dropped out. Three hours later, I hold the typed pages of a how-to manual written by middle-school kids, complete with photos they’ve taken of the process they’ve described. Some of the pages are full of errors, though others are shockingly perfect. The Polaroids are sometimes overexposed, sometimes fully abstract, but all bear a certain soulful aliveness some people might describe as nostalgic.
None of these kids has ever used a typewriter, taken a Polaroid photograph, or recorded their voice on a cassette tape. You should see their faces when they try these analog machines for the first time. One student I’ll call Maria, a silent seventh-grader who looms awkwardly tall over all the other girls, titles her page POETRY and uses a 1960s-era Royal to type out the words, “I believe poetry is my expertise because I can write down all my feelings letting words flow through the page… expressing myself on paper that I know will never judge me.”
The famous therapist Esther Perel recently said, “When you live with a phone in your hand, with a bunch of apps that deliver very precise answers—where you go, what you do, what you listen to, what you watch next, how you get there—something happens to curiosity, to experimentation, to dealing with the unknown… So what are many people doing? (And the younger we go, the more they do it.) They avoid.”
Perel has it right, but I think she doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just the phone in the hand, but the phone anywhere at hand (the phantom vibration from the phone in a pocket). And it’s not just the phone; it’s also the laptop. In schools, the thing that happens, the avoiding thing Perel refers to, also happens when an assignment gets submitted online, when the online gradebook posts the grade, when the parents check the grade on their phones at dinner. The thing happens when the teacher assigns an educational YouTube video or asks the students to scan a QR code with their phone; it happens again when the school library digitizes its resources and sends away its physical books.
I started a nonprofit called Offline Arts Institute (OAI) in January of this year. I’ve shown up with my collection of typewriters and antique gear in several schools now; sometimes I bring paper maps and index cards we type on to make gigantic physical versions of Google maps. Students say this mapmaking activity brings them closer to their physical place. Dr. Anna Lembke uses the term “derealization” to describe what happens when a brain gets too much internet: the world, as you scroll through its glittering, dopaminergic, digital fragments, ceases to seem real. The work of OAI experiments with some very simple ways to reverse this derealization effect—it asks the question: what happens if we reintroduce some of the tech that was working beautifully before the internet boom, say an IBM typewriter built the same year we put a human being on the moon? Could these older, more-tactile technologies help students reconnect with the world? And, in doing so, help them find their place in it?
The results are exceeding my expectations. Students love the immersive, puzzling challenge of running a finger over a paper map on the wall and trying to find the places they go in their day-to-day lives, then they love hammering out a caption for the place on an error-prone but beautiful piece of analog engineering. Typos are fine. You can’t delete them, so you have to learn to live with your mistakes—and everyone is making them. In front of a typewriter, every student arrives equally foreign. This makes them feel equal. But what’s the most emotionally significant part of the analog writing process? As my one student wrote, “the paper doesn’t judge me.” Nor can the paper copy and send your words to someone you don’t know. Nor does it offer to finish your sentence as you’re busy creating it.
Offline Arts Institute hopes to be a “third space” where students can go after school and exist in a community of peers, all of whom have agreed to spend some hours fully offline. The space will provide a suite of high-powered offline tools to bring life to the concepts in their imagination, and I’ll pay local artists to come in and teach the sorts of skills that made the world go round in the pre-Y2K era. We’ll print posters on Xerox machines, we’ll make mixtapes, and we’ll publish zines. Millennials, in particular, have a moral responsibility to reckon with the yawning digital abyss that is swallowing our schools. We let tech take over our classrooms during COVID. No doubt it saved lives, but we can’t let it sit there without coming up with creative ways to reverse its impact. A recent report showed that schoolkids don’t want to use A.I. and that digital media use leads to lower test scores. Education is the most exposed to the threats and changes brought on by the advent of large language models. I know this because I was an early adopter of ChatGPT when I discovered in 2023 that A.I. could help me grade 90+ essays a month, all of which were written about the same Ralph Waldo Emerson prompt. My high-schoolers seemed to have heard of ChatGPT on average a year before the adults. Then this year, a school in my county received a brand-new shipment of Google Chromebooks pre-loaded with Google’s Gemini A.I.
Could these older, more-tactile technologies help students reconnect with the world? And, in doing so, help them find their place in it?
Elliot Reed
I’m not an A.I. doomer, I just think we shouldn’t outsource the job of building human beings to artificial intelligence. I also haven’t gone full Luddite like these amazing kids in Brooklyn. I sometimes mindlessly scroll my phone, and my kid even watches a little bit of YouTube now and then. I simply think we need to design educational spaces that allow young people to develop mental musculature by making creative decisions on their own. This is an emergency which demands creative, experimental answers.
I like books that don’t break when you drop them in the bathtub. I wrote a novel on an IBM Selectric and watched it go from there to a giant publisher. Growing up, I heard my parents talk about stories coming in “from the wire,” and saw them take furious notes on paper notepads by hand. I don’t remember the first time I encountered the internet, but I remember the first time I printed a little page from my dad’s half-digital typewriter with a 100-character memory and a miniature screen. What an incredible feeling to see my words be published! Then a fellow sixth-grader in the lunchroom accidentally cleared the memory from the machine and my brilliant work—a fake news story written in AP-style about man-eating squirrels—was lost forever.
HOW TO BE A YOGI. HOW TO TIE A SHOE. HOW TO SWIM. HOW TO CHECK A BEEHIVE FOR THE QUEEN. HOW TO SCRAMBLE AN EGG. HOW TO BREATHE. These are some of the titles of the articles that were written by the middle-school experts in my summer program. It sounds a little benign when I write it, but I don’t think it is. The simplest solution is often the best. I never thought I’d teach in the first place, and I never thought I’d go back to teaching after I left the classroom in 2023, but perspective changes when you become a dad. In 2025, I took a part-time job as a life coach and art teacher at a boarding school for neurodiverse teens down the road from the historic, radical, Black Mountain College. I was surrounded by unhappy young men who seemed to only feel better when immersed in the internet. I’d soon found my new mission, and it felt as urgent as anything I’d done in my life. School systems are on fire, and every school leader must encourage any and every attempt at an alternative, even if it seems as simple as breathing.
You can find more information about the Offline Arts Institute (OAI) here, and you can contact Elliot Reed here.
