I want to focus on three largely ignored issues (among many) that grow out of a fundamental examination of the human-technology relationship.
We might call the first problem one of ‘dead symbols’. Digital technology can provide enormous amounts of information for learning. But there is a huge qualitative difference between learning about something by consuming and manipulating symbolic information (what digital technology traffics in), and learning from something, which requires entering into a potentially rich and complex relationship. A computer can inundate children with mountains of information about trees, for example. But children learn from a tree by peeling its bark, climbing its branches, jumping into its piled-up leaves. These first-hand experiences are enveloped by feelings and associations—muscles being used, sun warming the skin, blossoms scenting the air. Without these physical and emotional associations, the symbolic representations, no matter how vivid, are merely disconnected pieces of data. As cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, consuming symbols without knowledge of what they symbolise ‘is like eating the menu instead of the meal’. It is true that we protect what we love. And it is nearly impossible to love something we have never ‘tasted’.
But what about all of the technical skills children need to learn? Here we need to consider what I call the substitution problem: the tendency for a tool to replace rather than enhance human skills when relied upon too early. We have already seen examples of this problem: children who learned to use a calculator but couldn’t add, a spellchecker but never learned to spell. We are only beginning to witness the more serious consequences of young people who learned to use social media without first learning how to appropriately socialise.
This points to the third issue: the problem of maturation. For centuries, children became grown ups by being immersed in a grown-up world, learning through imitation and attention from caring adults. Schools were invented, in part, to compensate for the lack of exposure and instruction in the use of symbols. That has changed dramatically in the last 70 years. In the U.S., children of all ages spend over 9 hours a day engaged with symbols on screens and very little time with more mature people. Communicating with adults through social media is clearly no substitute. In fact, the difference between learning about and learning from is even more stark here, where non-verbal cues, tone of voice, on-going personal relationships and community context are so crucial to modeling appropriate behavior and attitudes.
Thirty years ago the U.S. actually began putting technology at the centre of education. Billions of educational dollars were reallocated to that end. It was sold through the promise that our children would become better prepared for a global, high-tech society. How did that experiment turn out? Soaring test scores? Zooming up the educational rankings of nations? Exporting thousands of tech workers? None of that has happened.
Meanwhile, civility in the U.S. hovers on the edge of extinction as racism and bigotry are charging out of the shadows. In my state of Colorado, schools filled with expensive technology have so little money to pay teachers that many rural schools only operate four days a week. The most remarkable characteristic of the millennial generation is how difficult it is to get them to move out of their parents’ homes. And we elected a president who dismisses the scientific evidence of climate change and routinely employs social media to insult and bully both his opponents and his allies. Our grand experiment seems to be producing a populace stuck in perpetual adolescence.