Carmen Gómez-Cotta, a contributor to Ethic, contacted me to talk about how, despite having lived in a world characterized by our continual need for distraction for the last two decades, we still haven’t come to terms with this new reality. Some of my comments appear in an article in the Spanish online arts and current affairs magazine by Luis Meyer entitled “La sociedad de la distracción” (pdf).
My comments focused mainly on what I consider to be my main area of knowledge, the result of more than three decades in education. In short, I don’t blame social networks for fake news or our seemingly insatiable need for junk content, but instead an out-of-step educational system that has isolated itself from the digital world.
What did we expect to happen? Having failed to teach young people how to correctly use a tool that has become a fundamental part of our daily lives, based on the fallacy that they were born knowing how to use digital technologies, we now have a generation of ignoramuses unable to send an email attachment, but who think they are gods because they can doomscroll on Instagram and handle interfaces intentionally created for nincompoops. That’s the thing about learning only from your own experience and from what your friends tell you while at the same time giving way to peer pressure. What could possibly go wrong?
What’s more, all that so-called research affirming that the use of digital technology in schools and colleges lowers exam results, while ignoring something fundamental: exams have always been designed to favor rote learning; and so we get a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not just a matter of introducing technology into education: it requires changing how we teach, and of course, the way we measure performance.
Idiotic rumors along the lines that “Silicon Valley CEOs take their children to schools without screens”, or that “Sweden has banned electronic devices and gone back to the textbook” have done nothing to prevent the appearance of a generation with no critical faculties. The simple truth is that our teaching methods have not been adapted to the technological context in which they have had to live, and moreover, left them completely exposed. If we repeat these mistakes in the era of generative algorithms, the consequence will be even more severe.
In short: we have tried isolating schools from the technology context, and we have realized in does not work at all. Can we now try the other way, integrating technology in schools in a way that actually makes some sense?
The human brain is highly plastic and adapts well to conceptual changes, but that adaptation works best when carried out in a controlled and supervised manner by the educational system. Instead, we have almost completely neglected that responsibility. And now, we are where we are: instead of digital natives, we have digital orphans and a society ill-equipped for the reality around us. In short, a godawful mess. And one we have created ourselves.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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