In recent years, we karate teachers at the YMCA were routinely brought two types of tubby kids to shape up. One type had COVID fat from inactivity during lockdown, and the other type was fat from excessive screen time. The kids with the COVID fat would get into better physical condition, and if they quit karate, it was to focus on some other enriching activity, such as swimming, tennis, or a balance of sports and arts. The kids with the techno fat never lost it, and if they quit karate, it was to go back to the game console or computer screen. I think this difference was because the COVID fat kids' parents were concerned with their improvement and the tech screen fat kids' parents were enablers, which was how they got fat to begin with.
A few weeks ago, I was standing with a woman who wanted to take up karate together with her two small sons. The smaller of the two boys refused to participate out of sheer defiance. The woman told him, okay, he can sit at the edge of the gym while she and the other boy trained. Then she automatically pulled out the boy's tablet and headphones to occupy him while he sat there. I told her I thought she'd get better results if she didn't give the kid the tablet and made him watch. She told me, "You're right!" and stuffed the gear back into her bag. So she and the older boy trained while the smaller boy just sat there, with me occasionally coaxing him. At the end of the hour, he still wasn't training, but he'd made it across the gym and was sitting next to his mom and bother while they trained. Ultimately, he'll be participating. However, it struck me at how knee-jerk the mother's reaction was in pulling out a tech distraction for the kid.
Ms. Winkleman:"A healthy childhood should involve lots of free fun: ...writing stories..."
Top CBT scientist: CBT is written
IMHO: "We all constantly guess what others are thinking... we constantly get it wrong"
"Feeling Great" by Dr Burns
page238
"I did a study at a community mental health clinic in New York to evaluate the accuracy of therapists’ and caregivers’ evaluations who brought children in for treatment. I asked the children, their therapists, and their mothers to rate how they thought the children were feeling.
When I analyzed the data, I was amazed to discover that the therapists’ accuracy was about zero. And the mothers didn’t do any much better! There was pretty much no correlation between how the children felt and how their therapists (or mothers) thought they felt.
The errors were not trivial. For example, the mother of one little boy rated his depression and suicidal urges at zero. She was convinced that her son did not feel depressed, and the therapist agreed with this assessment.
How did the boy actually feel?
His depression and suicidal scores were at the top of the scale! In the margin of the assessment test, he wrote that he had borrowed a gun from a friend and had plans to kill himself on Friday. In this case, mind reading* almost resulted in the death of a little boy, but the assessment test alerted the mother and therapist to what was really going on and likely saved his life."
"...smartphones should be permanently excluded from the school day, ideally from children’s lives altogether." Our lives have become so enmeshed with our technologies that they have become part of the fabric of who we are. Children in particular should have the freedom to grow and learn in an environment free of the gravitaional pull of digital devices. Amidst all this hubbub of making sure our kids keep up with the technological tsunami, we forget to teach them “reality literacy”, the most fundamental language of all.
My husband and I are leading a Communal Digital Fast starting March 3rd. Three years ago the invitation went out to 73 readers, this year it has reached 16,000. People are growing increasingly aware of the harms of attentional traps and are keen to recover cognitive liberty. For a detailed digital fast game plan and practical resources (all free) see "Factory Reset: 49 days to restore your human default" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/factory-reset-49-days-to-restore
Our lives had become enmeshed with asbestos too...
The difference is that we were not addicted to it. Addicted to seeking attention, approval, to express anything that passes through our mind, the illusion to matter to many people... voila so whatever it takes has a lot to do with switching from a toddler mind to an adult mind.
About a quarter century ago, an astronomer and computer expert named Clifford Stoll made a compelling case against tech in schools for many of the same reasons people talk about today. One interesting point he made was what a fallacy it is that children need to be immersed in high tech from an early age in order not to be "left behind". He pointed out that adults become tech proficient very quickly, negating the idea that tech has to be taught from the very early years.
Ms. Winkleman makes the important point that has already been scientifically shown, which is that the psychomotor activity of writing makes learning stick better than keyboarding does. This was shown in foreign language teaching years ago, but nobody listens.
Imagine the situation of the tech-savvy teacher who doesn't want to use the technology. He'll be evaluated on how much he uses it, whether it's effective or not. Canned technological presentations can't react to the immediate needs of the students as well as I could with chalk on a blackboard, but I still got hassled about not using the ed tech, as if I were some kind of Luddite, even though I avidly use tech in other aspects of my work where it's appropriate.
Yep. The same happened to me in the US. "Prove the use of technology in your classroom." I was on computers, teaching PageMaker and InDesign as the yearbook advisor, and I used to joke to my students that there was nothing we could do with a computer that couldn't be done with considerable more difficulty by hand. But the other truth was that the activities of a person speaking and responding, the action of hearing and choosing and writing notes on a presentation, of writing and crossing out and connecting on the page were the most vital activities for my students, just as they were for me decades ago.
I think I understand what you are saying, but here is where I feel conflicted. In the English or yearbook classroom, Google Docs and layout software could be replaced by typewriters, pens and paper, but that feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water. There is value in taking notes, brainstorming, writing by hand, but there’s also great benefit to a word processor. I began my education with a typewriter and was very happy when I finally obtained MS word to facilitate the writing process. It saved me a lot of time during the editing phase. I was still reading books and taking notes by hand, but there’s no way I would have wanted to write my master’s thesis on a typewriter. Likewise, student are much more amenable to revision when they can do it without having to rewrite the entire document each time they make a change—I think most of us feel this way.
Similarly, with yearbook, design software facilitates layout with much greater ease and provides many visual features that can’t be done well or quickly by hand—but it doesn’t replace good design, intelligent questions, or thoughtful interviews.
All of the digital tools mentioned above are precisely that, tools, that allow an active lively mind to work well—just like a calculator.
The problem comes when all these tools are inevitably connected to the internet. With the internet comes distractions and cheating, and now with AI chronic cheating and flaccid minds.
I mourn—really, it’s depressed me this year, that I can only teach writing in timed sessions using a lockdown browser. I mourn it because I see students that could be much better writers if given more time and space, but cheating with AI is so rampant if they work on their own and the lockdown software is too inflexible to permit other options. Even allowing students to write on paper outside of class just leads to them copying AI generated text off their phones.
Thank you for bringing this up. French Philosopher Georges Bernanos said “The danger is not to be found in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from childhood to desire nothing more than what machines can give.”
The sad part Is that the Power of propaganda and financial pressure and having no values put Big Tech in the advantageous position to create and enroll and army of users advocating for them: teachers included (usually the lazy - or with awful self-esteem- ones)
I appreciate the needed discussion. My perspective is that government run school based schooling is the harm. A system based in making “good workers” or obedient citizens is a distortion of teaching focused on nurturing exceptional humans. But i also realize that’s still way too radical for many yet. Baby steps. Thank you for speaking up where it’s possible to be heard.
Omg, right? Full disclosure—I wasn’t familiar with the terminology around the UK school system, so I was confused at first. But once I realized that ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools have different meanings in the US vs. the UK, I really appreciated this additional dimension to the topic. If I understand correctly, you’re highlighting how the UK’s education system reinforces social class divisions, and that closing elite ‘public’ schools (which are actually private institutions in UK terms) is along the same lines as closing us govt schools. That’s a powerful angle I hadn’t considered—thank you for sharing! And for helping us ‘Mericans see a cross-the-ocean perspective. 🦅
I am a retired American private and public high school and college teacher. Closing the elite [tuition] school worked very well, at first anyway, for the Finnish system. We have the same problem in the US. The wealthy who can afford to send their own children to schools that c out 40-80k/year are eager to convince the rest of us that our public schools are wasting money. But class is always a big issue in the UK—every British novel concerns class.
Our school has given out about 750 "wise" phones. The phone changes what it can do as the student gets older. When the kid is 10, all the phone can do is call, text and share location. The camera is disabled. By the time they are 13 the teen can use group chat and play music. No browser, no social media. They still ban phones during school, but this "wise" phone helps beyond the school day. https://www.pymblelc.nsw.edu.au/pymble-wise-phone/
I just read about this on the link you provided! Wow, that's incredible. Thank you for sharing. Are you a leader at the school or parent who has experienced this or both? I'm fascinated.
As an artist, I can tell you that cursive writing is an art form that requires more dexterity than using a paintbrush. As an actor I learn lines by writing out my character’s dialogue in a single block. The act of writing rather than typing makes learning lines far easier. The fact that the Tech Bros. Including the inventor of the smartphone, didn’t and don’t allow their children to use the products they created should tell you everything you need to know. In fact, Steve Jobs’ favorite book which he gifted to many people was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. I always found that slightly odd if not a little hypocritical but then I believe what we do for a living and how we do it should mirror our Spiritual beliefs not counter them.
I agree with the premise and find banning cell phones while providing students with a school issued device solves absolutely nothing. What’s not discussed enough is…Moderation is necessary with devices. EdTech should be used when it’s beneficial and supports high quality instruction and learning. However, cold turkey isn’t the way out of this. I’ll keep following along with the overall discussion. It is needed!!
As an aside…There is some irony as I thumb type this comment on my iPhone. After reading (and finding) this post online. While sitting next to my 15 year old daughter who is watching science videos on her district issued Chromebook. I’d suggest us both are modeling appropriate usage of EdTech. There isn’t an alternative to any of these scenarios. This is a new way to learn and if good enough for me, with guardrails, it’s good enough for my children.
There is power in this EdTech. It’s can’t solve it all but in moderation is an amazing. We must find the appropriate balance.
As human beings, we're programmed it seems not to be able to find balance. For instance, we should be able to moderate our and our children's consumption of junk food. In reality:
"According to current projections, child obesity rates in the UK are expected to continue rising, with forecasts indicating that by 2040, nearly a quarter of Reception age children (ages 4-5) could be overweight or obese, with around 12% projected to be obese; for Year 6 children (ages 10-11), the figures could be over 40% overweight or obese, with almost 27% classified as obese."
I was under enormous pressure to use [and to prove that use of] technology in my classroom. As an English teacher, I most often required handwritten first drafts, and that they be handed in, stapled to the back of the final. I taught note-taking as a study technique, research in books and journals, diagramming, and I demonstrated basic mathematics in calculating grades, etc. My students could use a graphing calculator but not estimate their grade on an exam worth 50 points. They were no longer doing their own thinking.
While I agree with many of Sophie Winkleman's arguments, from a human and empirical point of view (I have been a secondary school teacher for 36 years), I cannot agree with the spreading of false ideas just because you want to make a point and influence your audience. Ms. Winkleman bombards us with facts, statistics and names. I have just fact-checked two of the most popular, probably best well-known ones: Sweden and Australia. Her information is wrong. It took me only 2 minutes to do so, thanks to technology. I cannot waste my time checking all the others, but I am inclined to believe that many would be wrong or inaccurate.
My experience shows me that ed-tech and mobile phones are to blame for a lot regarding education and young people's well-being. However, I do not think that technology carries the most responsibility. Despite all, technology has not been around long enough for us to draw such dogmatic conclusions on the benefits and drawbacks of its use, both privately and in education. I do not have any stats or names to support my opinion. Sorry!
Apologies for the length of this but here's something I wrote for my daughters (then in their early 20s) 20 years ago in response to the question "how did you manage without computers?". This was well before smart phones, of course.
How old do you think I am??? The first electronic computers were invented (by the British, of course) in the 1940s. But I know what you mean – you mean the Windows/Mac PC things without which no home of office desk is complete.
Well, remarkably well, as it happens. Most of humanity’s greatest achievements were done without the use of computers. Shakespeare didn’t use a word processor and nothing quite beats the organic flow of the words from the brain, down the arm, through the quill and onto the page, the dance and scrape of the nib (do quills have nibs?) reflecting the emotions of the writer and feeding back positively to his creative mind in a way that a keyboard and screen can never do. OK, I’m waxing a bit lyrical there but show me something half as good as Macbeth that’s been composed on a laptop.
When I was at school, you couldn’t just Google your homework, do a bit of copying and pasting and then start chatting to your mates on Facebook. We had to look things up in encyclopaedias. You know, things like the annual wheat harvest of the Soviet Union in 1950-1955 for our geography homework. The point was that you couldn’t copy out great chunks of text by hand, you had to read, understand and summarise it. Aaah! Those were the days.
Even mankind’s greatest technological achievements, moon landings, nuclear power stations, Concorde, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, were all achieved with a minimum of computing power and certainly not with Word or Excel. When I started work, we had a typing pool staffed by ladies with electric typewriters and carbonless copy paper and I’d never even heard of a spreadsheet. And if you wanted to send a message quickly you sent something called a telex. (Didn’t even have fax machines then!)
Engineering calculations were done with slide rules (you’ve probably never seen one) which was a very slow process but it gave you time to think about what you were doing and you gained an intuitive feel for whether the answer was right or wrong. Now, computers churn out answers that look so authoritative being displayed in nice neat figures on colour display screens but as a lecturer at university told us, “the time to disbelieve a computer is when you think it’s giving you the right answer”. The point was that you stopped checking when you thought the answer looked right, whereas when you did it by hand you just knew there was a good chance you’d made a mistake.
Take the financial world. Stacks of computing power and loads of sophisticated programs that allow complex modelling undreamed of a generation ago. And what happened? They were all using models that were very precisely, exactly and beautifully wrong. And they believed them. If you were to look at the history of financial disasters over the last 300 years I bet you couldn’t spot the time at which bankers started using computers to model their risk. The same crises just keep coming round again and again. Well, maybe you could – spot the time: the crises seem get worse and happen more frequently since the 1970s.
Computers are seductive. There’s something about them that’s deeply absorbing in a way I’ve never found in anything else. There’s just something about their behaviour that is so massively frustrating but at heart is totally logical that it fascinates men in particular. Yes, even more than women fascinate them. How many hours have I spent tinkering with a PC trying to get it to do something or stop doing something and every time I’m about to give up I think of just one more thing to try. You know what they say: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; give him a computer and he’ll never bother you again.
Yes, the access to instant information via the internet is astounding and a great boon to the knowledge junkie like Dad. Being able to instantly settle and argument like “what were the names of the five Tracey boys in Thunderbirds” is something men have dreamed of since they sat and argued around the camp fire on the savannah. But what a time waster! Do you think Shakespeare would have got around to writing his plays if he’d had the ‘net? No, he’d have been too busy emailing rude jokes to Christopher Marlowe or playing “Angrie Byrdes” on his iPadde.
I love this ... so very spot on. Oh, the hours I have wasted trying to 'automate' something I just could have pounded out. The other day I was walking on the breakwater in Victoria - something they constructed in the early 1900's ... while not super complex it did require some engineering and muscle to quary and move these massive blocks into place. The signs says that less than 100 of these 1000's of blocks needed to be tweaked over the years. No computer involved at all. So, yes there are countless accomplishments that were achieved without the aid of a machine.
The computer has always been a fascination for me and using it has been my career. I always thought ALL or none ... but I don't think it needs to be that way. As many other have commented that perhaps when it comes to schools we may have passed the point of option. We might need some cold turkey before we can bring it back.
I do believe there is a place for tech in the classroom, but it needs to be running behind the scenes and not insert itself between teachers and students, and students and students. At the risk of blatant self-promotion, I just published a book (liberally quoting Jon Haidt and posts on After Babel in the epilogue) about how successful classrooms work and how AI tools can be built that support, and not interfere with, these important human-to-human drivers.
Thank you Gregory, this would have bene great ...20 years ago. There s notime left we Need to kick out Tech from schools, no compromise. it's like inviting a psychological rapist back in the classroom After destroying millions of children, but Just a little. Schools Doors must be shut to any merchant (be it of products or ideologies) and go back to be the place where you learn basic social and good citizenships skills, besides Reading writing and calculate.
Our brain Is still the same and so are the basics principles of Living and thriving in peace together - Tech operating outside the rule of Law (Section 230) has sabotaged those and gained immense power to shape society to fit and grow their Power over us. No rule of Law no human wellbeing -no human wellbeing no Democracy.
Her speech was so eloquent and she makes such a compelling argument regarding the harms of educational technology in schools. I have been sharing her speech with everyone I know in the education field. This gives me hope that we can undo the death grip that big tech has on education and reclaim and restore childhood, we are humans first after all!!
Sophie’s message is brilliant. Agree wholeheartedly! “
We must employ tech as our slave, not as our master”. Absolutely. We need to heed Sophie’s, and your warnings, Jonathan. I am a teacher (just retired ) and we are seeing this loss of childhood, loss of play, loss of focus, loss of love of books, loss of imagination, loss of patience, loss of contemplation and wonder. Here in BC, Canada, our school district has adopted no phones during the school day, thanks to voices like yours and Sophie’s. It’s still not enough, but it’s something. It is honestly so sad to see what is happening. It’s a true loss of childhood. I will be sharing this piece with many colleagues and parents, as well as reaching out to you and Sophie to be on my podcast. Thank you so much for your work.
OK, we've become illiterate, obese imbeciles. I've said for 10 years that Apple, and quickly afterward, Samsung, turned a previously marginally-functional species into idiots. Now it's documented.
Brilliant! I’ve shared with many like-minded educators, former educators like me, and parents. Keep flooding the zone, but let’s also look to re-visioned models of schooling and not just go back to traditional “analog” systems. Out-of-the-box/out-of-the-building pedagogical models that embed learning IN the real world of nature and community are ripe for helping solve this digital dilemma as well as our broader educational morass.
In recent years, we karate teachers at the YMCA were routinely brought two types of tubby kids to shape up. One type had COVID fat from inactivity during lockdown, and the other type was fat from excessive screen time. The kids with the COVID fat would get into better physical condition, and if they quit karate, it was to focus on some other enriching activity, such as swimming, tennis, or a balance of sports and arts. The kids with the techno fat never lost it, and if they quit karate, it was to go back to the game console or computer screen. I think this difference was because the COVID fat kids' parents were concerned with their improvement and the tech screen fat kids' parents were enablers, which was how they got fat to begin with.
A few weeks ago, I was standing with a woman who wanted to take up karate together with her two small sons. The smaller of the two boys refused to participate out of sheer defiance. The woman told him, okay, he can sit at the edge of the gym while she and the other boy trained. Then she automatically pulled out the boy's tablet and headphones to occupy him while he sat there. I told her I thought she'd get better results if she didn't give the kid the tablet and made him watch. She told me, "You're right!" and stuffed the gear back into her bag. So she and the older boy trained while the smaller boy just sat there, with me occasionally coaxing him. At the end of the hour, he still wasn't training, but he'd made it across the gym and was sitting next to his mom and bother while they trained. Ultimately, he'll be participating. However, it struck me at how knee-jerk the mother's reaction was in pulling out a tech distraction for the kid.
Ms. Winkleman:"A healthy childhood should involve lots of free fun: ...writing stories..."
Top CBT scientist: CBT is written
IMHO: "We all constantly guess what others are thinking... we constantly get it wrong"
"Feeling Great" by Dr Burns
page238
"I did a study at a community mental health clinic in New York to evaluate the accuracy of therapists’ and caregivers’ evaluations who brought children in for treatment. I asked the children, their therapists, and their mothers to rate how they thought the children were feeling.
When I analyzed the data, I was amazed to discover that the therapists’ accuracy was about zero. And the mothers didn’t do any much better! There was pretty much no correlation between how the children felt and how their therapists (or mothers) thought they felt.
The errors were not trivial. For example, the mother of one little boy rated his depression and suicidal urges at zero. She was convinced that her son did not feel depressed, and the therapist agreed with this assessment.
How did the boy actually feel?
His depression and suicidal scores were at the top of the scale! In the margin of the assessment test, he wrote that he had borrowed a gun from a friend and had plans to kill himself on Friday. In this case, mind reading* almost resulted in the death of a little boy, but the assessment test alerted the mother and therapist to what was really going on and likely saved his life."
*
https://www.google.com/search?q=cbt+%22mind+reading%22
**
some parts of this video may help the jury selection process(needs editing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqn6UYx4SCY
"...smartphones should be permanently excluded from the school day, ideally from children’s lives altogether." Our lives have become so enmeshed with our technologies that they have become part of the fabric of who we are. Children in particular should have the freedom to grow and learn in an environment free of the gravitaional pull of digital devices. Amidst all this hubbub of making sure our kids keep up with the technological tsunami, we forget to teach them “reality literacy”, the most fundamental language of all.
My husband and I are leading a Communal Digital Fast starting March 3rd. Three years ago the invitation went out to 73 readers, this year it has reached 16,000. People are growing increasingly aware of the harms of attentional traps and are keen to recover cognitive liberty. For a detailed digital fast game plan and practical resources (all free) see "Factory Reset: 49 days to restore your human default" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/factory-reset-49-days-to-restore
I love the therm cognitive liberty.
Our lives had become enmeshed with asbestos too...
The difference is that we were not addicted to it. Addicted to seeking attention, approval, to express anything that passes through our mind, the illusion to matter to many people... voila so whatever it takes has a lot to do with switching from a toddler mind to an adult mind.
About a quarter century ago, an astronomer and computer expert named Clifford Stoll made a compelling case against tech in schools for many of the same reasons people talk about today. One interesting point he made was what a fallacy it is that children need to be immersed in high tech from an early age in order not to be "left behind". He pointed out that adults become tech proficient very quickly, negating the idea that tech has to be taught from the very early years.
Ms. Winkleman makes the important point that has already been scientifically shown, which is that the psychomotor activity of writing makes learning stick better than keyboarding does. This was shown in foreign language teaching years ago, but nobody listens.
Imagine the situation of the tech-savvy teacher who doesn't want to use the technology. He'll be evaluated on how much he uses it, whether it's effective or not. Canned technological presentations can't react to the immediate needs of the students as well as I could with chalk on a blackboard, but I still got hassled about not using the ed tech, as if I were some kind of Luddite, even though I avidly use tech in other aspects of my work where it's appropriate.
Yep. The same happened to me in the US. "Prove the use of technology in your classroom." I was on computers, teaching PageMaker and InDesign as the yearbook advisor, and I used to joke to my students that there was nothing we could do with a computer that couldn't be done with considerable more difficulty by hand. But the other truth was that the activities of a person speaking and responding, the action of hearing and choosing and writing notes on a presentation, of writing and crossing out and connecting on the page were the most vital activities for my students, just as they were for me decades ago.
I think I understand what you are saying, but here is where I feel conflicted. In the English or yearbook classroom, Google Docs and layout software could be replaced by typewriters, pens and paper, but that feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water. There is value in taking notes, brainstorming, writing by hand, but there’s also great benefit to a word processor. I began my education with a typewriter and was very happy when I finally obtained MS word to facilitate the writing process. It saved me a lot of time during the editing phase. I was still reading books and taking notes by hand, but there’s no way I would have wanted to write my master’s thesis on a typewriter. Likewise, student are much more amenable to revision when they can do it without having to rewrite the entire document each time they make a change—I think most of us feel this way.
Similarly, with yearbook, design software facilitates layout with much greater ease and provides many visual features that can’t be done well or quickly by hand—but it doesn’t replace good design, intelligent questions, or thoughtful interviews.
All of the digital tools mentioned above are precisely that, tools, that allow an active lively mind to work well—just like a calculator.
The problem comes when all these tools are inevitably connected to the internet. With the internet comes distractions and cheating, and now with AI chronic cheating and flaccid minds.
I mourn—really, it’s depressed me this year, that I can only teach writing in timed sessions using a lockdown browser. I mourn it because I see students that could be much better writers if given more time and space, but cheating with AI is so rampant if they work on their own and the lockdown software is too inflexible to permit other options. Even allowing students to write on paper outside of class just leads to them copying AI generated text off their phones.
Thank you for bringing this up. French Philosopher Georges Bernanos said “The danger is not to be found in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from childhood to desire nothing more than what machines can give.”
The sad part Is that the Power of propaganda and financial pressure and having no values put Big Tech in the advantageous position to create and enroll and army of users advocating for them: teachers included (usually the lazy - or with awful self-esteem- ones)
Let's collaborate(between your "Fail Your Way to..." and my: "Killing Your Ego With the Joy of Rejection Desensitization"... there's an overlap? :-)
There's no overlap.
I appreciate the needed discussion. My perspective is that government run school based schooling is the harm. A system based in making “good workers” or obedient citizens is a distortion of teaching focused on nurturing exceptional humans. But i also realize that’s still way too radical for many yet. Baby steps. Thank you for speaking up where it’s possible to be heard.
The UK is deeply committed to maintaining social class. Close your "public" schools and see what is done to improve education for all.
Omg, right? Full disclosure—I wasn’t familiar with the terminology around the UK school system, so I was confused at first. But once I realized that ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools have different meanings in the US vs. the UK, I really appreciated this additional dimension to the topic. If I understand correctly, you’re highlighting how the UK’s education system reinforces social class divisions, and that closing elite ‘public’ schools (which are actually private institutions in UK terms) is along the same lines as closing us govt schools. That’s a powerful angle I hadn’t considered—thank you for sharing! And for helping us ‘Mericans see a cross-the-ocean perspective. 🦅
I am a retired American private and public high school and college teacher. Closing the elite [tuition] school worked very well, at first anyway, for the Finnish system. We have the same problem in the US. The wealthy who can afford to send their own children to schools that c out 40-80k/year are eager to convince the rest of us that our public schools are wasting money. But class is always a big issue in the UK—every British novel concerns class.
"I never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Twain
Our school has given out about 750 "wise" phones. The phone changes what it can do as the student gets older. When the kid is 10, all the phone can do is call, text and share location. The camera is disabled. By the time they are 13 the teen can use group chat and play music. No browser, no social media. They still ban phones during school, but this "wise" phone helps beyond the school day. https://www.pymblelc.nsw.edu.au/pymble-wise-phone/
I just read about this on the link you provided! Wow, that's incredible. Thank you for sharing. Are you a leader at the school or parent who has experienced this or both? I'm fascinated.
Will contact you.
Thanks for taking an interest and the encouragement!
Anthony
As an artist, I can tell you that cursive writing is an art form that requires more dexterity than using a paintbrush. As an actor I learn lines by writing out my character’s dialogue in a single block. The act of writing rather than typing makes learning lines far easier. The fact that the Tech Bros. Including the inventor of the smartphone, didn’t and don’t allow their children to use the products they created should tell you everything you need to know. In fact, Steve Jobs’ favorite book which he gifted to many people was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. I always found that slightly odd if not a little hypocritical but then I believe what we do for a living and how we do it should mirror our Spiritual beliefs not counter them.
I agree with the premise and find banning cell phones while providing students with a school issued device solves absolutely nothing. What’s not discussed enough is…Moderation is necessary with devices. EdTech should be used when it’s beneficial and supports high quality instruction and learning. However, cold turkey isn’t the way out of this. I’ll keep following along with the overall discussion. It is needed!!
As an aside…There is some irony as I thumb type this comment on my iPhone. After reading (and finding) this post online. While sitting next to my 15 year old daughter who is watching science videos on her district issued Chromebook. I’d suggest us both are modeling appropriate usage of EdTech. There isn’t an alternative to any of these scenarios. This is a new way to learn and if good enough for me, with guardrails, it’s good enough for my children.
There is power in this EdTech. It’s can’t solve it all but in moderation is an amazing. We must find the appropriate balance.
As human beings, we're programmed it seems not to be able to find balance. For instance, we should be able to moderate our and our children's consumption of junk food. In reality:
"According to current projections, child obesity rates in the UK are expected to continue rising, with forecasts indicating that by 2040, nearly a quarter of Reception age children (ages 4-5) could be overweight or obese, with around 12% projected to be obese; for Year 6 children (ages 10-11), the figures could be over 40% overweight or obese, with almost 27% classified as obese."
https://www.local.gov.uk/publications/future-health-challenges-public-health-projections-childhood-obesity#:~:text=Line%20chart%20showing%20projected%20levels,cent%20projected%20to%20be%20obese.
I was under enormous pressure to use [and to prove that use of] technology in my classroom. As an English teacher, I most often required handwritten first drafts, and that they be handed in, stapled to the back of the final. I taught note-taking as a study technique, research in books and journals, diagramming, and I demonstrated basic mathematics in calculating grades, etc. My students could use a graphing calculator but not estimate their grade on an exam worth 50 points. They were no longer doing their own thinking.
While I agree with many of Sophie Winkleman's arguments, from a human and empirical point of view (I have been a secondary school teacher for 36 years), I cannot agree with the spreading of false ideas just because you want to make a point and influence your audience. Ms. Winkleman bombards us with facts, statistics and names. I have just fact-checked two of the most popular, probably best well-known ones: Sweden and Australia. Her information is wrong. It took me only 2 minutes to do so, thanks to technology. I cannot waste my time checking all the others, but I am inclined to believe that many would be wrong or inaccurate.
My experience shows me that ed-tech and mobile phones are to blame for a lot regarding education and young people's well-being. However, I do not think that technology carries the most responsibility. Despite all, technology has not been around long enough for us to draw such dogmatic conclusions on the benefits and drawbacks of its use, both privately and in education. I do not have any stats or names to support my opinion. Sorry!
I appreciate your skepticism, although I wish that you would have been more specific about the difference between what she claimed and what you found.
Apologies for the length of this but here's something I wrote for my daughters (then in their early 20s) 20 years ago in response to the question "how did you manage without computers?". This was well before smart phones, of course.
How old do you think I am??? The first electronic computers were invented (by the British, of course) in the 1940s. But I know what you mean – you mean the Windows/Mac PC things without which no home of office desk is complete.
Well, remarkably well, as it happens. Most of humanity’s greatest achievements were done without the use of computers. Shakespeare didn’t use a word processor and nothing quite beats the organic flow of the words from the brain, down the arm, through the quill and onto the page, the dance and scrape of the nib (do quills have nibs?) reflecting the emotions of the writer and feeding back positively to his creative mind in a way that a keyboard and screen can never do. OK, I’m waxing a bit lyrical there but show me something half as good as Macbeth that’s been composed on a laptop.
When I was at school, you couldn’t just Google your homework, do a bit of copying and pasting and then start chatting to your mates on Facebook. We had to look things up in encyclopaedias. You know, things like the annual wheat harvest of the Soviet Union in 1950-1955 for our geography homework. The point was that you couldn’t copy out great chunks of text by hand, you had to read, understand and summarise it. Aaah! Those were the days.
Even mankind’s greatest technological achievements, moon landings, nuclear power stations, Concorde, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, were all achieved with a minimum of computing power and certainly not with Word or Excel. When I started work, we had a typing pool staffed by ladies with electric typewriters and carbonless copy paper and I’d never even heard of a spreadsheet. And if you wanted to send a message quickly you sent something called a telex. (Didn’t even have fax machines then!)
Engineering calculations were done with slide rules (you’ve probably never seen one) which was a very slow process but it gave you time to think about what you were doing and you gained an intuitive feel for whether the answer was right or wrong. Now, computers churn out answers that look so authoritative being displayed in nice neat figures on colour display screens but as a lecturer at university told us, “the time to disbelieve a computer is when you think it’s giving you the right answer”. The point was that you stopped checking when you thought the answer looked right, whereas when you did it by hand you just knew there was a good chance you’d made a mistake.
Take the financial world. Stacks of computing power and loads of sophisticated programs that allow complex modelling undreamed of a generation ago. And what happened? They were all using models that were very precisely, exactly and beautifully wrong. And they believed them. If you were to look at the history of financial disasters over the last 300 years I bet you couldn’t spot the time at which bankers started using computers to model their risk. The same crises just keep coming round again and again. Well, maybe you could – spot the time: the crises seem get worse and happen more frequently since the 1970s.
Computers are seductive. There’s something about them that’s deeply absorbing in a way I’ve never found in anything else. There’s just something about their behaviour that is so massively frustrating but at heart is totally logical that it fascinates men in particular. Yes, even more than women fascinate them. How many hours have I spent tinkering with a PC trying to get it to do something or stop doing something and every time I’m about to give up I think of just one more thing to try. You know what they say: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; give him a computer and he’ll never bother you again.
Yes, the access to instant information via the internet is astounding and a great boon to the knowledge junkie like Dad. Being able to instantly settle and argument like “what were the names of the five Tracey boys in Thunderbirds” is something men have dreamed of since they sat and argued around the camp fire on the savannah. But what a time waster! Do you think Shakespeare would have got around to writing his plays if he’d had the ‘net? No, he’d have been too busy emailing rude jokes to Christopher Marlowe or playing “Angrie Byrdes” on his iPadde.
I love this ... so very spot on. Oh, the hours I have wasted trying to 'automate' something I just could have pounded out. The other day I was walking on the breakwater in Victoria - something they constructed in the early 1900's ... while not super complex it did require some engineering and muscle to quary and move these massive blocks into place. The signs says that less than 100 of these 1000's of blocks needed to be tweaked over the years. No computer involved at all. So, yes there are countless accomplishments that were achieved without the aid of a machine.
The computer has always been a fascination for me and using it has been my career. I always thought ALL or none ... but I don't think it needs to be that way. As many other have commented that perhaps when it comes to schools we may have passed the point of option. We might need some cold turkey before we can bring it back.
I do believe there is a place for tech in the classroom, but it needs to be running behind the scenes and not insert itself between teachers and students, and students and students. At the risk of blatant self-promotion, I just published a book (liberally quoting Jon Haidt and posts on After Babel in the epilogue) about how successful classrooms work and how AI tools can be built that support, and not interfere with, these important human-to-human drivers.
The book can be found with the link below, but an overview of the ideas is available my Substack: https://gregorybanksphd.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=8adw8
Book: https://a.co/d/efAAIQv
Thank you Gregory, this would have bene great ...20 years ago. There s notime left we Need to kick out Tech from schools, no compromise. it's like inviting a psychological rapist back in the classroom After destroying millions of children, but Just a little. Schools Doors must be shut to any merchant (be it of products or ideologies) and go back to be the place where you learn basic social and good citizenships skills, besides Reading writing and calculate.
Our brain Is still the same and so are the basics principles of Living and thriving in peace together - Tech operating outside the rule of Law (Section 230) has sabotaged those and gained immense power to shape society to fit and grow their Power over us. No rule of Law no human wellbeing -no human wellbeing no Democracy.
Her speech was so eloquent and she makes such a compelling argument regarding the harms of educational technology in schools. I have been sharing her speech with everyone I know in the education field. This gives me hope that we can undo the death grip that big tech has on education and reclaim and restore childhood, we are humans first after all!!
Same here! Remember It Always seems impossible until it's done.
Sophie’s message is brilliant. Agree wholeheartedly! “
We must employ tech as our slave, not as our master”. Absolutely. We need to heed Sophie’s, and your warnings, Jonathan. I am a teacher (just retired ) and we are seeing this loss of childhood, loss of play, loss of focus, loss of love of books, loss of imagination, loss of patience, loss of contemplation and wonder. Here in BC, Canada, our school district has adopted no phones during the school day, thanks to voices like yours and Sophie’s. It’s still not enough, but it’s something. It is honestly so sad to see what is happening. It’s a true loss of childhood. I will be sharing this piece with many colleagues and parents, as well as reaching out to you and Sophie to be on my podcast. Thank you so much for your work.
OK, we've become illiterate, obese imbeciles. I've said for 10 years that Apple, and quickly afterward, Samsung, turned a previously marginally-functional species into idiots. Now it's documented.
Brilliant! I’ve shared with many like-minded educators, former educators like me, and parents. Keep flooding the zone, but let’s also look to re-visioned models of schooling and not just go back to traditional “analog” systems. Out-of-the-box/out-of-the-building pedagogical models that embed learning IN the real world of nature and community are ripe for helping solve this digital dilemma as well as our broader educational morass.