Jay Doubleyou: "As the market develops … education will become organically linked again into … family homes, workplaces, sports centres, town halls, reading rooms in pubs, debating chambers, book stores … but you won't see the youth ghettos we call schools and colleges"
Here is another view on Illich's views from last year:
Michael Gove, please don't go into futuristic overdrive
Coding is just the latest facet of a rush to embrace technology in education that risks cutting children off from the real world
"Hooray! No more contact with the vile earth!" Thus said FT Marinetti in hisFuturist Manifesto, promoting technology and loathing nature and the past. A flavour of Marinetti's technophilia is apparent in the current debate on the use of technology in education; on Monday night Radio 4 will be broadcasting a special programme on it. And 2014 is the "Year of Code", according to Michael Gove: from September computer coding will become a compulsory part of the curriculum for every child over five.
If the technophilic line has a futurist feel, the technophobic narrative can seem like nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. My position is neither of the above. The use of technology – for children above all – needs to be interrogated. The internet is unsurpassable as a way for the mind to follow its curiosity paths, taking new turns, following diversions, self-directing. But technology should answer yes to the question "is it convivial?", in the specific sense that Ivan Illich defined in his seminal work Tools for Conviviality. Does this technology enhance freedom and autonomy? Does it aid imagination and promote creative relationships between people, and people and nature? Or does it reduce us to mere consumers?
Social scientist Juliet Schor shows that extensive screen time encourages consumerism, leading children to value money and brands. It induces depression, anxiety and low self-esteem, and harms children's relationships.
Anonymous users of social media goaded 15-year-old Tallulah Wilson to self-harm: screens turned them off from accountability and empathy, and she killed herself. Toxic technology fails to teach the core curriculum of the human heart: kindness, generosity, self-control, courage and sensitivity.
Children are being treated for addiction to technology, and there can be a fetish quality to their relationships with gadgets. Their animistic imaginations are wrested away from living things to synthetic ones, and cumulatively the authentic world takes second place to the artificial world.
For the Radio 4 broadcast, panellists were asked to sketch an ideal classroom. Mine includes internet and cameras for children to film their imaginations; plus dens, darkness, dogs and trees. Dens (children's DIY classrooms) are good places for thinking; darkness is helpful for reflection. Nature is vital in education: according to David Ingvar, professor of neurophysiology: "It is necessary to be outside for our brains to be stimulated from the flow of sound, light, shapes and colours."
Authentic education includes the human body as part of how we think, through the senses. To check the validity of an argument we say "it makes sense", touching the tactile world and being touched by its contact. When children learn outdoors, studies show improvements in their self-confidence, independence and social skills, better focus, memory and language.
Introducing the Year of Code, Gove's speech made 54 references to the future, speaking of the new, a vanguard of change, transformation, innovation, progress and jobs. This is part of the ideology of progress whose facile prejudice is that the future is preferable to the past. By that logic, Jeffrey Archer is a better writer than Shakespeare. Newer technology is (usually) an improvement on older, but the deeper question is whether it is used to foster a worldview so out of touch with the real world that its future effects (from extinctions to climate change) are far from improvements, or whether its use may be convivial, helping to create a world more humane, wiser and happier, with a sensibility – and an ethic – of authenticity.
Hooray! More contact with the live earth
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