I have heard it claimed by some throughout history that America’s education system has long transitioned to an institution that bears the result of dumbing down its students.
And though there are many ways in which one can make a case for this scholastic abnormality, it appears that some additional evidence has surfaced to back up that position.
The incorporation of technology into the schoolhouse is just one way this path can be charted.
Indeed, should readers seek to comprehend how technology transmits consequences to culture, it can certainly be beneficial to look at our instruments of communication.
It is no mistake to say that our culture’s infatuation with digital devices, in addition to their amplitude for altering culture, has been ongoing for a substantial period of time.
Naturally, steadfast watchers of technology have strived to do their part to advance this notion, that smartphones and associated contrivances can not only contribute to society but can also proffer consequences, though the supposition has, thus far, done little to sway the conviction of entertainment-charged Americans.
Nonetheless, because technological change in culture can often lead to total change, it can be useful to magnify such aftermaths.
I should like to say a word about smartphones.
I have already talked about smartphones at length, including their capacity to serve as “man’s best friend.”
I wish now to reference how they impact the world of education.
But it can be first useful to perceive that smartphones are not requisite for the classroom to be touched by technological change.
We may take, as just one example, what has occurred following the introduction of television in school, which bore the result of displacing the written word and orality as the central communication medium for students, for an inevitable consequence of changing mediums in culture is that collisions of world-views are sure to take place.
“In the United States,” as posited by Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology, “we can see such collisions everywhere- in politics, in religion, in commerce- but we see them most clearly in the schools, where two great technologies confront each other in uncompromising aspect for the control of students’ minds. On the one hand, there is the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline. On the other, there is the world of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response. Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television. There, they encounter the world of the printed word. A sort of psychic battle takes place, and there are many casualties- children who can’t learn to read or won’t, children who cannot organize their thought into logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend to lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time.”
One can also detect similar outcomes alongside the importation of the computer in the classroom.
The author adds, “To take another example: In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred-year-old truce between the gregariousness and the openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility, which is the context within which Thamus believed proper instruction and real knowledge must be communicated. Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”
Postman goes on to crystallize the very point I wish to make: “These are the kinds of questions that technological change brings to mind when one grasps… that technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity (italics mine).”1
I bring all this up because this control of students’ minds, as Postman put it, is still alive and well.
One might even say it is thriving.
I am referring, here, to the latest image-based medium of smartphones.
“Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge,“ according to an opinion piece from The Atlantic titled It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber, “have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn’t quite believed that last argument—until now.”
The article references the 2022 results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the world’s most celebrated marker of student ability. The assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, found that Americans scored lower in math than in any other year in the history of the test, to which the PISA report authors observed “an unprecedented drop in performance” globally.
The PISA determined that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored roughly fifty points higher in math than students who used them over five hours a day. The PISA survey further noted that screens appear to generate a kind of general distraction throughout school, even for those who are not always looking at them, and also observed that students who reported feeling distracted by the digital customs of their classmates scored lower in math. As detailed by the article, almost half of students across the OECD detailed how they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they did not have their digital devices near them, apparent anxiety which was negatively correlated with math scores.
The article goes on to say,”… the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention…The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment. Results from a decade of observational research have now repeatedly shown a negative relationship between device use and life satisfaction, happiness, school attention, information retention, in-class note-taking, task-switching, and student achievement. These cognitive and emotional costs are highest for those with the most ‘device dependence.’”
Interestingly, some who have noticed such technological changes in our culture’s education system are beginning to explore some possible solutions to the problem.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this very dilemma “should be patently obvious to anyone who has ever used a smartphone or been on social media. Silicon Valley has spent billions making apps as addictive as possible. They make money by keeping people on their devices. Teachers don’t stand a chance. That’s why Superintendent Jesus Jara should get phones out of classrooms. Students in the Clark County School District have experienced tremendous learning loss.”
As detailed by an article from the Tribune Content Agency, “Many schools and districts in the United States have restricted student cellphone use during the school day because the devices have become an enormous distraction in the classroom. A Common Sense Media report found that teenagers receive a median of 273 notifications a day, with nearly a quarter coming in during school hours. U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation that would require a study on the effects of cellphone use in schools on students' mental health and academic performance.”
The article adds that, “In the Brush school district in Colorado, Superintendent Bill Wilson said part of the reasoning for restricting cellphone use during instructional hours in his district is to help students ‘focus on learning and take one element of distraction and disruption out of their life at least for the time that they were at school.’ However, most U.S. schools now also have 1-to-1 computing environments in which every student has a school-issued learning device, and those digital devices can be a distraction, too. It's more challenging to completely restrict laptop use in class when much of student learning now happens online.”
One article from Boston University Today put matters this way: “Parents, the next time you are about to send a quick trivial text message to your students while they’re at school—maybe sitting in a classroom—stop. And think about this: it might take them only 10 seconds to respond with a thumbs-up emoji, but their brain will need 20 minutes to refocus on the algebra or history or physics lesson in front of them—20 minutes. That was just one of the many findings in a recent report from a 14-country study by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) that prompted this headline in the Washington Post: ‘Schools should ban smartphones. Parents should help.’ The study recommends a ban on smartphones at school for students of all ages, and says the data are unequivocal, showing that countries that enforce restrictions see improved academic performance and less bullying.”
The university’s daily website spoke with Joelle Renstrom, senior lecturer in rhetoric at Boston University’s College of General Studies, to acquire her opinion on the research, who noted that, “I have made the case before that addiction to phones is kind of like second-hand smoking. If you’re young and people around you are using it, you are going to want it, too . . . Students openly acknowledge they are addicted. Their digital lives are there. But they also know there is this lack of balance in their lives.”
It may be sensible here for me to say that I am never quick to advocate for abolishing any technology in culture, even if its downsides are plentiful and clear to see.
The point I am trying to advance is that technology inevitably alters not only culture and the way it communicates, but also, as we have seen, the habits and processes of the minds of students.
Who decided that this should be so, that any and all technology should be utilized in the classroom, that smartphone use in school must be encouraged, that parents, in spite of the costs, must maintain a direct line of communication to their children in the form of a smartphone in class, that technology’s deficits are best not to be contemplated in the face of its wondrous gifts, that it is in students’ best interest to forego the pencil and paper in favor of computer technology, we are not told.
Of course, such answers are scarcely required, for such technological inquiries are not typically asked.
But now that some readers are acquainted to technology’s alterations to schooling, should one be determined to ask such an inquiry, another fitting question to attend to might be, What is one to think in the face of understanding the truthfulness of technological change?
The answer, in short, is that it can be well to contemplate some additional words from Renstrom, who remarked that, “There is a time and place for this, for all technology.”
Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology, P. 16-18
FIY, here's my own proposal to solve a big part, if not the biggest, of this problem: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/honestly-the-problem-with-children