What we need in the classroom more than computers
The use of any and all technological devices in class is absolutely prohibited.” That’s what my syllabus says for every class I teach. Students hate reading it. They hate hearing me read it. And they really hate it when I enforce it.
Faculty and administrators have mixed feelings about such policies. Some think that such a policy is a good one. Others do not, insisting that students today need their laptops to learn because that’s how they have learned to learn.
I respond by telling them that these students have never really learned how to learn in the first place. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but the answer can’t be more technology or letting them persist in doing what they have done all along. Those approaches have failed.
Not aided by technology
My support for this argument is largely anecdotal, but I see more every time I get a fresh batch of freshmen. Most don’t know how to read critically or in a way that’s congruent with college preparedness. They struggle with rules of grammar and usage. They lack the ability to make insights that require them to think deeply. (To be sure, the bright spots continue to shine, and thosestudents give me hope.)
And this is happening everywhere. A writer in The New Yorker has reported that Harvard undergraduates now have difficulty reading Hawthorne, an author who at one time was standard fare in high school curricula.
These students, whose education has been aided by every technological advancement, are moving farther away from literacy and closer to illiteracy. Weirdly enough, they’re even technologically illiterate. Most of them have never used Microsoft Word. I have to teachthem how to insert a footnote.
They failed because we have allowed technology to get in the way of what is most fundamental to the enterprise of learning: its inherently human character. The encounter between teacher and student is so fundamental to the work of a classroom that class can’t proceed without it. We even frame the foundations of our western philosophical tradition in terms of this relationship: Aristotle was a student of Plato who was a student of Socrates.
Technology places a barrier between student and teacher. Look into any classroom where the teacher permits notetaking by laptop. You’ll see students absorbed by the screens in front of them. The teacher, meanwhile, lectures into thin air. It’s like watching a dystopian novel in real life.
Remote learning encumbers this relationship even further. There’s no inperson encounter at all when everything is mediated by cameras and screens (if people even bother to turn on their cameras).
Knowledge comes through others
Some will argue that this is irrelevant. The content of the course is getting delivered, and that’s what really matters. This isn’t true. Real knowledge, growth in the ability to see and to think about what one sees, is transmitted and shared in a personal engagement with others.
It’s not primarily facts, not just a “deliverable.” It requires the kind of speaking and listening, the kind of back and forth exchanges, that only really work when people are together,
Human beings are relational. Being with people makes a difference. Long distance relationships often fail. Distant, disengaged parenting fails. Friendships — typically built on shared life experiences— tend to drift apart when life puts distancebetween friends.
One might argue that the human person is utterly unintelligible outside of relationships. We are conceived in relationships. Our sense of self emerges in and through relationships with others. And our identities are defined by relationships with people, places, institutions, ideas, and a panoply of other things.
Perhaps part of our problem is that we have come to view education as an impersonal transaction — one of the great temptations in American life. You pay a fee in exchange for delivery of a service, as if knowledge were a pizza. This kind of market-based thinking crowds out other nonmarket norms and preempts the possibility of realizing a deeper and more enduring reality.
When this happens, who cares if technology creates a barrier between teacher and student? The teacher simply needs to perform the service she or he is contracted to provide. Students merely consume it.
This model of education fails because it entirely misapprehends the nature of learning. Education isn’t consumable. It only proceeds correctly when pursued collectively.
We need each other to understand ourselves and the world better because we are inherently related to each other and that world. If any of us tries to go it alone, we foreclose the possibility of understanding, foolishly attempting to stand over by ourselves that which we canonly stand under together.
Delving, searching, learning
We might do well to recover W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of a classroom articulated in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “Nothing new, no time-saving devices, — simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living.”
For millennia, teachers taught and students learned without the aid of laptops, learning management systems or other classroom tech. If enough of us try to do it again, we might actually build relationships through which we canstart learning again.