By Matt Bailey
Dear adolescent—
You’re owed an apology… Not really from me, but from the myriad other Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers (especially them) about the educational environment that’s been allowed and encouraged to metastasize over the last decade. Every student is required to have a laptop; (nearly) everything you do in school is done and submitted on these machines.
It almost seems ridiculous now to consider the alternative to the big takeover of big tech in classrooms that’s occurred over the last decade or so. Obvi, COVID stuff really didn’t help (anything), but it definitely made this worse.
We were all sold a false bill of goods from a bunch of snake-oil salesmen. We were promised that the World Wide Web would democratize access to info, that it would flatten the pre-existing class structures, and increase human capacity to a level not seen since the Industrial Revolution. We were promised that computers in classrooms would give “21st century skills.” It’s done none of these things. In fact, it’s done the complete opposite.
You exist in an increasingly undemocratic, unequal, and dumber world than the one I come from. Oops. Sorry, guys. Your curiosity and ability to think critically and creatively have been sacrificed on the altar of increasing shareholder value for a select few weird dudes from a weird place called California.
We teachers have been brainwashed over the last decade by the people in charge… We were given countless and endless professional development sessions telling us to utilize tech and create our classes around it… Any questions about any of this? Any hint of dissent? You must be “old-fashioned”… Shut up and dribble, etc.
Now, recently, in the last couple of years or so, the next evolution of this nonsense has come about… The omnipresence of AI, which is not actually intelligence but is surely artificial. For some reason, and as usual, these people in charge of things are once again “all in” on this thing (clearly they haven’t seen the Terminator films)… In their never-ending effort to appear “with it” and relevant.
At my school, we can’t opt out of this AI Google-Gemini thing that’s been put on our computers. I definitely didn’t opt in… Now every chat message and every email gives me prompts to reply with… I CAN’T EVEN WRITE AN EMAIL reply now without AI poking its ugly and fake nose into my business. So, I guess, in some sense, the world is actually being more flattened. But flattened to sound inauthentic and make people believe corporate-legal-speak is the best way to talk. It isn’t, I promise, and the human soul through creativity is priceless and one of the only things that gives life meaning.
Removing the phones, recently, from the classroom really made the difference stark, but it hasn’t removed the problem… All the games and other crap you do on the internet (bought and paid for by designers whose job is to keep you glued) are still readily available and still taking your attention away from developing your brain. They are isolating you and making you sick on purpose to monetize your attention. It’s not really your fault, and of course, it’s not all of you, but it really is a lot of you (and generally boys) whose growth is being stunted and your potential is being wasted. For what? For whose benefit?
In education/pedagogy, if you actually want to look “towards” the future, always look to Sweden to see what’s up over there. Recently, they’ve been making attempts to get away from the digitalization of school back to the good old pen, paper, and physical books era that I grew up in. Also, Australia this week became the first place to ban social media for people under 16. Changes are afoot— the paradigm is soon to shift. They’re trying to wean their kids back to health and away from the evils of the laptop. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.
Yours sincerely,
A Luddite Teacher,
Matt Bailey
