How Technology Killed Education

“When am I ever going to need to know how to _______ in the real world?” Some variation of this phrase is uttered by students throughout lower and higher education every day all over the world. Referring to some activity where a student doesn’t see value relevant to them. The more technology has advanced, the more common this phrase has become in the classroom. Calculators can do math. Audiobooks can replace reading. AI will soon finish replacing critical thinking.

TECH 101- Intro To Screens

In the early 1970s, home computers were introduced onto the market. It wasn’t until the 90s that they became something you would commonly see in houses. Paired with the internet, these machines promised a bright utopian future. People across the planet would surf the information superhighway to learn more about the world whether it was to see reviews for a restaurant around the corner or catch up on local news from the other side of the country. To some, it may have looked like humanity was not so far away from flying cars and robot maids like in The Jetsons.

Fast forward 30 years and we have toddlers glued to iPads and bigger toddlers glued to phone screens. (The bigger toddlers are you. Get it?!) Buzzfeed sits in the upper half of the top 50 visited news sites, the average attention span is less than ten seconds, and people have trouble watching past 3 minutes of an internet video. The future looks more like WALL-E than The Jetsons. The once mysterious and attractive internet has turned into an abused commodity that threatens education.

Today’s Classrooms

The way people learn, fundamentally, hasn’t changed much in the past hundred thousand years. The brain has been the brain. Education practices have changed. Research and collaboration have brought more effective instruction into the classroom. Even though students ask why they have to learn math, they are still required to learn it. Accounting classes still require students to make journal entries even though software will aid them when they graduate. Procedural understandings of concepts are still seen as necessary in professional fields. (For now.)

While learning hasn’t changed, the students have. Most of them carry attention leeches in their pockets whose telepathic cries can drown out instruction. I’ve seen even the most entertaining professors lose the battle to the evil box of blue bubbles. While they may be less common, this doesn’t mean exemplary students or teachers’ pets are extinct. It does mean that the stragglers, the ones who were already having trouble paying attention, are having a lot more trouble now. The professor who drones on for an hour and a half is passively listened to, their words transcribed and summarized later. Learning is under threat.

Tomorrow’s Classrooms

Tomorrow's classrooms are either going to be a lot better or a lot worse. Augmented reality lenses will allow students to stream Netflix over projector screens. Brain implants will feed students answers to test questions. Deepfakes of students will attend virtual lectures, participating with the student's artificially generated voice.  

No matter how advanced the technology gets, people are still going to learn the same way. Technology can be a powerful amplifier for learning when implemented correctly. The problem I have seen is that it is often not. Despite its growing popularity, online learning is mostly in-person learning put online. Online content needs to be designed to be learned online. A shoe may be a shoe, but you can’t expect to hike effectively while wearing Converse. That’s because Converse are designed for basketball and skateboarding. Educators need to learn how to implement technology correctly and overcome the distractions it adds.

In addition to evolving the way they teach; educators need new ways to check for comprehension. It is easy for students to trick themselves into believing they know something when it is always a Google search away. The stragglers may not even know that they’re struggling.

The biggest threat to education is not more advanced technology but changing the definition of learned. It only makes us dumber if we allow it. Is the ability to prompt a question about a concept and interpret the answer enough to declare a person knowledgeable of the subject? I may not be able to identify all the literary devices employed in Romeo and Juliet but if I can ask an artificial intelligence capable of doing so and understand its response, what’s the difference? "When am I ever going to need to know how to identify literary devices without AI in the real world?" A fight needs to be made for understanding.

Conclusions

The promise of a connected future where almost all information is accessible to everyone is here. It’s just not what many pictured. In the world where we can know almost everything, we end up learning nothing. Our attention is easily stolen but rarely kept. We depend on search engines and prompts to appear knowledgeable. But the problem isn’t the technology, it’s how it’s being used.

We don’t think reading a summary means that we’ve read a book so why do we let the convenience of tech fool us into believing we're so well-read? How do we change this?