Alarmists warn that schoolchildren won’t excel in the i-economy if they aren’t steeped in technology. Many schools boast of their iPad-to-kindergartner ratio on the theory that children should learn early on how to use a touch pad. Really? Any parent with an iPhone can tell you how long it takes a small child to master the swipe.

OBVIOUSLY there is a place for technology in the classroom. For students of a foreign language, interaction with a native speaker is invaluable. Distance learning can connect a talented inner-city child with a math professor at M.I.T. Schools that cannot manage an incubator in the classroom will benefit from observing an egg crack open on-screen. High school students can study programming, and yes, even learn to design games.

In classrooms, apps may supplement traditional lessons in handwriting, letter recognition and math drills. Digital puzzle games offer none of the tactile effort involved in turning a shape and trying — and trying again — to get it to fit. Multiple studies show that skills learned on-screen don’t always transfer to real life. Is it really advantageous for GarageBand to replace school orchestras?

Many of the games marketed as educational aren’t as much fun as video games children would play if left to their own devices. But the added bells and whistles still make it harder for them to focus on plain old boring work sheets and exams. Imagine how flat a work sheet would seem after a boisterous round of Zap the Math From Outer Space.

Technologists aim for educational games that are “immersive” and “relevant,” “experiential” and “authentic,” “collaborative” and “fulfilling” — adjectives that could easily apply to constructing an art project out of found objects. It’s easy to foresee a future in which teachers try to unpeel children from their screens in order to bring them back to such hands-on, “real world” experiences. To renew their “focus.” “Imagine if kids poured their time and passion into a video game that taught them math concepts while they barely noticed, because it was so enjoyable,” Bill Gates said last year. Do we want children to “barely notice” when they develop valuable skills? Not to learn that hard work plays a role in that acquisition? It’s important to realize early on that mastery often requires persevering through tedious, repetitive tasks and hard-to-grasp subject matter.

How’s this for a radical alternative? Let children play games that are not educational in their free time. Personally, I’d rather my children played Cookie Doodle or Cut the Rope on my iPhone while waiting for the subway to school than do multiplication tables to a beep-driven soundtrack. Then, once they’re in the classroom, they can challenge themselves. Deliberate practice of less-than-exhilarating rote work isn’t necessarily fun but they need to get used to it — and learn to derive from it meaningful reward, a pleasure far greater than the record high score.