Want to improve students’ thinking, behaviour and learning? Get technology out of schools!

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The issue of technology use in schools has recently been in the news. First, between the end of March and the end of May, a number of Ontario school boards serving almost a million students sued major technology platforms for designing their social media products for compulsive use and for consequently changing how children think, behave, and learn. In a related move, at the end of April the Ontario Ministry of Education reinforced an already-existing ban on cell phone use during class time. Finally, the growing use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in schools has led to calls from, among other organisations, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), for regulation and training to ensure that the tools are used in a human-centred way. 

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The harm being done is real. Students are distracted in class by their devices, and students often use generative A.I. tools such as Chat-GPT not to enhance their learning, but instead to complete their assignments without engaging in any learning whatsoever. 

As to what is to be done, however, it is very difficult for educators to duck accusations of hypocrisy when it comes to banning technology for students, as they have themselves grown very dependent on their platforms and devices. Across the province, teachers are expected to maintain an online classroom, often using Google Classroom. Further, after 20 years of shrinking textbook and materials budgets, educators are increasingly responsible for creating their own learning materials from online sources. Unsurprisingly, some have high hopes that generative A.I. tools will help them to prepare course materials and quizzes and even to grade student work.  

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Faced with this drift, perhaps the time has come for schools to reduce their own dependence on screens and online platforms, for the following three reasons over and above improving the ability of students to think, behave appropriately, and learn.  

First of all, we need to place education outside of the reach of the big technology platforms and the surveillance capitalism that they practise. While these companies do provide us with free tools, they also are collecting data on us as we use them. Do we want companies like Google to know everything about our children from their first day of school onwards? 

Secondly, do we want to provide these corporations with the data and content they need to train and power their artificial intelligence tools? Every lesson prepared by teachers and every assignment passed in by students on a platform like Google Classroom is used as material to train and refine large language A.I. models. Only after being “fed” gigantic quantities of human-generated material are such tools able to create “new” material for users. 

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However, how “new” is such material if it is derived from the human-generated writing used to train the A.I. tool in the first place? At best, everything written with the help of A.I. involves the theft of intellectual property. However, as the vast amount of text fed to A.I. models make it impossible to identify which human sources were used to generate any particular A.I.-generated piece of writing, this fact can be obscured. To use an analogy, though, if one were to steal five bottles of wine from 20 different wineries, mix the wine together in a vat, and then re-bottle it, the resulting 100 bottles nonetheless remain stolen property.  

(As an aside, perhaps even more alarming is the possibility of A.I. tools using A.I.-generated content to create even more A.I.-generated content. Where this has happened, the results have been garbage but, as such material is so easy to produce, the internet could quickly become overwhelmed with such dreck and rendered unusable. The “dead internet theory” asserts that the internet even now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content propagated by programs designed to manipulate people while minimising organic human activity. But I digress….) 

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Finally, the third reason to drastically reduce the use of technology in schools is to prioritize human connection in education. At their core, schools succeed where there exist strong relationships between and among teachers and students. Both the students looking at their phones during class and the teachers half-heartedly presenting slide decks placed on their school’s online learning platform are missing out on opportunities to connect with one another more authentically and effectively. As explored by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his recent book, “The Anxious Generation,” this lack of connection is a major contributing factor to the epidemic of anxiety and depression afflicting young people today.  

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However, reducing our dependence on technology in education will not be easy. If the world outside education continues to be dominated by technology, critics will assert that schools using less technology are not preparing their students for the real world. Against this, though, perhaps we should, like the early Bolsheviks, aim to educate people to understand and control the machines of the modern world, rather than become enslaved by them. It is interesting that the technocratic elite of Silicon Valley send their own children to Waldorf schools that largely shun technology. Another school, VanDamme Academy in southern California, has very successfully educated its students with great books, rich classroom discussions, and no computers for 25 years.  

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To sum up, if we truly want to improve the thinking, behaviour and learning of our young people, as well as protect our privacy and intellectual property rights and foster greater interpersonal connection and improved mental health, we need to look beyond quick and superficial fixes like banning student cell phones, suing social media firms, and regulating the use of A.I. tools. Instead, we need to take a broader approach and reduce our own institutional and professional dependence on electronic screens and platforms in schools as well. The moment is now, and we would be foolish not to seize it. 

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