Students, Smartphones and the Rise of Willful Ignorance

MIS-EDUCATION-Ubiquitous Smartphone technology is now giving us access to more information than ever. It would be reasonable to expect that this should have already led to an explosion of what students know in our society. 

However, any teacher who has dealt with the plague of cellphones in the classroom can tell you that access to greater knowledge has actually caused a steep decline in what students know – not to mention their ability to learn in a way that helps build and develop brain power through the process of sequential thinking. 

Clearly, cellphones are sabotaging normal human development in profound ways that those in power seem unwilling to acknowledge and address. 

Prior to this current generation, a student's ability to deal with increasingly complex bodies of information as they progressed through school was a measure of being considered “educated.” Now Smartphones are undermining this fundamental process, rapidly making people ignorant in the midst of what should be a feast of knowledge – knowledge that should be used to better humankind but conspicuously is not. 

The first victim of the cellphone has been the attention span. It is not uncommon to walk into a classroom and see at least half the students with earbuds connected to their phones, so that the teacher has been effectively tuned out. Even if the students are marginally listening, they are also texting or playing video games. This precludes the focused concentration necessary to learn. 

Now that students rely on computers to do their thinking for them, they are able to completely avoid any normal discomfort necessary to stimulate the brain's development. This manifests itself in what has become an unnecessarily painful process. Students write as little as possible, in the most basic of terms, without developing ideas using the in-depth analysis it demands. 

And even when students use their phones to research and identify issues, they are unable to coherently link ideas or form meaningful conclusions from the given facts. This seems counterintuitive given that access to their Smartphones has literally put information at their fingertips. 

My criticism should not be construed as a condemnation of computer technology, but rather as a condemnation of how it has been dangerously trivialized, creating compliant sheep, instead of a free thinking, engaged, and knowledgeable citizenry we need to keep government and the plutocracy that now runs it in check. 

One example of a better use for this technology might be in the developing a 21st Century leading edge teaching model allowing students to collaborate online on any given assignment. This would enable them to gain insights from each other and learn from the mistakes of class members. Students would have access to a far greater body of knowledge as well as different approaches to the material by sharing ideas. They would benefit from online teacher corrections and be exposed to more points of view about their assignments than any one student could ever come up with on his or her own. 

Science has already employed this method for sharing research and finding possible solutions for targeting resistant diseases like cancer and diabetes. These thorny problems are farmed out around the world to scientific working groups that contemporaneously address aspects of difficult issues, coordinating their work in real time. 

As a child of the 1960s, I must confess that I believe our failure to use computer technology to develop independent capabilities is not an accident. Allowing "we the people" to develop individual power would, in the aggregate, change the self-serving agenda of the corporate oligarchy that has tightened its control on our country's thought and institutions. 

Anonymous texting is no substitute for true freedom of association of people and ideas – something that, in a true democracy, is necessary to question authority in a meaningful way.

 

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

 -cw

  

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 82

Pub: Oct 9, 2015

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