We’ll Never Improve Cybersecurity Until We Start Educating Our Children Properly

We’ve known for many years that huge numbers of young people going through the education system will spend a good part of their lives working with a computer or a similar device, such as a smartphone, and in most cases, with both. And yet all the evidence shows that most people still have no idea about cybersecurity and cyberculture.

For example, not only is the majority of the population unaware of the most basic principles of cybersecurity, they mismanage their devices, impinging on their work and their personal lives. Disinformation and fake news, spam, scams, identity theft and information theft are widespread: in fact, it is difficult to find anybody whose habits allow them to keep their devices free of junk.

While it’s true that cybersecurity is constantly evolving, it’s still relatively straightforward to manage privacy, protect oneself from disinformation and related issues. But this is only the case when it is not taught as specific, top-down knowledge, and instead comes from developing a wider culture of cybersecurity on a daily basis. When we talk about teaching cybersecurity in school or making it a graduation requirement, people think this means specific courses dedicated to technology, when the reality is that technology should be an integral part of every subject taught in schools and colleges.

How should we approach integrating technology into education? Quite simply by using our readily available technology. In the UK, for example, one in five children between the ages of three and four already have their own smartphone, which they learn to use on their own and with very little supervision thanks to increasingly intuitive designs. The use of technology at such an early age fails to comply with the recommendations of the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t matter: for most parents, the important thing is to keep their children entertained.

However, despite the fact that huge numbers of children have smartphones and computers at home, when they get to school they find an almost total absence of education regarding their use other than a course on word processing, or how to make a presentation or tackle a spreadsheet. Many institutions even ban smartphones: “no, we don’t teach that here, learn it on your own”. And it is precisely this neglect of responsibility that lies at the root of the problem: if children learn by trial and error, or from the advice of other children, how can we expect them to acquire responsible habits?

To start with, we know what doesn’t help: banning smartphones from schools. This is irresponsible at the wider level, condemning young people to learn something as fundamental as the use of technology without any guidance. It simply does not make sense, is dangerous, and is largely responsible for our increasingly uninformed society where more and more people are falling victims to cybercrimes of all kinds.

If anyone really believed that things were going to improve with the arrival of so-called digital natives, they were wrong. There’s no such thing as digital natives: their use of smartphones is limited to launching a few apps to amuse themselves with. When it comes to cybersecurity and responsible use, they are as bad as their parents and grandparents, or perhaps worse, due to a false sense of confidence. They too are inundated with spam, their online activities are tracked, they too fall for scams and phishing, they too use simple passwords and believe disinformation and fake news. And the reason for this is because the education system has failed them. So maybe it’s time to review the ban on smartphones in schools, and to consider putting chargers on desks and integrating the smartphone in each and every subject that a child goes through in their education.

Our governments are obsessed with reforming the education system, but none of them pay attention to what is really relevant: preparing young people for the ecosystem they live in. Isn’t it time to stop being so melodramatic , to stop thinking that technology is a threat, and instead face up to reality?

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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