What if digital learning is a catastrophe?

There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break… all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our own youth. More than that, smartphones are extraordinarily distracting. How are the children to learn if they’re surreptitiously WhatsApping one another under the desk?

But this focus on smartphones in schools seems to me to ignore another issue: what happens outside school. The comprehensive my two older children attend is, as I understand it, typical in not allowing but requiring almost all its out-of-school learning to be done online. Physical textbooks are seldom seen. Exercise books are barely used. Homework is set, completed and marked in cyberspace. This has certain admirable effects – among other things, email alerts can let parents know when homework hasn’t been handed in, and you can see in one place which assignments are required for all the different classes.

Schools seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning

And yet and yet. The first problem with this is the obvious one. The school carefully and conscientiously insists that during school hours children should not be distracted by smartphones. But then come the end of school hours, the point at which children are expected to develop the vital skills of self-guided learning, unsupervised, the work must be done on one of the very devices that are most likely to distract and interrupt. On a laptop, or on an iPad, you are only an alt-tab away from TikTok, YouTube shorts, Spotify, Instagram, or any of the other internet timesinks that Silicon Valley has engineered to be addictively more-ish. Grown adults struggle to disengage from them, let alone teenagers with their spongy and unformed brains.

Yes, parents have a role here. I am all too aware of it. Do not imagine, reader, that I am not by now intimately familiar with the ins-and-outs of Broadband Shield; that I do not frequently (and at some cost of time and grief) block various sites at the router during homework hours; that I have not got to the stage of hiding the master password to the parent account offline after discovering my kid was using the saved passwords on my Chrome profile to place TikTok on the always-allowed list. Do not think I haven’t spent a lot of time googling whether it’s possible to prevent a child deleting their internet history (it isn’t). Or arguing about whether homework could be done somewhere the student in question can be supervised full time (student in question very aggressively not keen on this). It’s exhausting.

So, there’s that: the do-your-homework-on-the-distraction-machine thing. That’s the obvious one. But there is something more, and it’s deeper. I worry it may be a nationwide or first-worldwide generational problem. We have shifted learning almost entirely online, and as far as I know we have done so without any evidenced consideration of whether kids learn in the same way, or as well, reading and writing on screens as they do when reading from physical textbooks and writing with pen on paper. Not for nothing has this distinctive mode of online engagement been described as ‘continuous partial attention’. There is good reason to believe you just don’t take in what you read on a website in the same way you do what you read in a book.

Memory and spatial awareness are intimately connected in the brain. We have known this since ancient times. The ‘method of loci’ – popularised by Hannibal Lecter’s ‘memory palace’; you remember things by placing them in an imaginary architecture – goes back to Simonides of Ceos (circa 500BC; absolutely the man you want on the scene if your temple has collapsed and you need to identify some mangled bodies) and is still used by competitive mnemonists. The hippocampus, which is notoriously enlarged in black cab drivers, is the seat of memory and of geography.

This isn’t a trivial point. When you read a physical book you have a series of spatial clues in the process: a sense of left-hand page or right-hand page; orientation with regard to the corners; the physical memory of how far through the book you are, and so on. You can flick back and forth much faster than you can scroll a long document. Everyone who has ever looked for a quotation will know that feeling of three-quarters-up-a-left-hand-page-ness. It may be that a new generation of digital natives will navigate online pdfs with the same ease – that the problem here is old dogs and new tricks – but I have my doubts. Cognition and memory are much more embodied than we like to imagine. Other associative sensory cues – smell, sound, touch, colour – contribute to memory (just ask Proust). Those sensory cues are not present in the nowhere of cyberspace.

My wife and I – even allowing for the teenager’s natural resistance to interference – have really struggled to try to help our daughter with her exam revision. It’s quite impossible to follow what she’s doing as she flicks uncertainly back and forth between Google Classroom, online textbooks, half-written documents, gamified quiz programmes like Caboodle and Seneca and Lord alone knows what else. She’s pursuing her work through a trackless wasteland of tabs and windows. It gives me palpitations just watching her.

As it happens, when you look closely, you see that her school has supplied her with excellent teaching materials, notes, textbook extracts and so on. It’s navigating them that is the challenge. The closest we’ve come to being able to make sense of them was when we printed out hard copies – just like an old-fashioned book. We have even, tentatively, suggested that taking old-fashioned longhand notes might here and there function as an aide-memoire in a way that the provisional, ephemeral, disembodied quality of a note in a Word document may not.

There are lots of reasons why this shift to digital has been made. Some are practical: it’s a lot cheaper and easier not to have to buy textbooks or gather up handwritten essays for marking, to be able to distribute and check homework through tools like Google Classroom. These are quality-of-life improvements for teachers, and quality-of-budget improvements for schools. Others are more utopian. There’s the seductive sense in the culture that learning online must be better because the digital world is the future. There are all sorts of big tech companies with shiny PR machines and billions to gain economically from inserting their products into the education of our children.

But it’s far from clear that – in terms of cultivating deep reading, structured learning and the sort of continual focused attention that educational attainment requires – this is an improvement on the use of dead trees and ink rather than otherwise. Such academic studies as we have on the subject seem to suggest that it is not – though of course it’s tricky to make rigorous or authoritative comparisons, and the data are complex.

A forthcoming study from Columbia University Teachers College, reported a few weeks ago, concludes that: ‘Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning’.

A 2018 meta-analysis of studies involving more than 170,000 participants, published in Educational Research Review, found a consistent advantage to comprehension on paper over that on screen (at least in digesting informational rather than narrative texts). What’s more, it tentatively suggested that digitally literate users might actually get worse rather than better at taking in texts on screen, citing as a possible explanation ‘people’s stronger inclination toward shallow work in digital-based environments than in paper-based ones’.

I don’t demand we return to blackboards and chalk or inkwells and exercise books. But I do note that schools up and down the country seem to have made a put-everything-on-black-and-spin-the-wheel sort of bet on digital learning, and done so before much in the way of data on the subject was in. It’ll be a generational betrayal if, ten years from now, it becomes clear that the roulette ball’s going to clatter into red.

Education should be one of the things, surely, that helps growing people make sense of hectic chaos of the world – an anchor against being swept up in what Cory Doctorow has memorably called the internet’s ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies’. It will be a catastrophe if education itself is co-opted by that very ecosystem.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/what-if-digital-learning-is-a-catastrophe/

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UK: Why shortening the school summer holidays helps no one

A new report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has recommended that the six-week school summer holiday should be reduced to four weeks, and the two weeks redistributed so that schools have a two-week half-term in October and February. Lee Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said that spreading out the holidays more equally throughout the year would ‘improve the wellbeing of pupils and the working lives of teachers, balance out childcare costs for parents, and potentially boost academic results for many children’.

I’m not convinced shortening the summer holidays would actually do any of those things. Firstly, I highly doubt that having extra time off in October and February – two of the darkest, coldest, wettest months of the year – would do much to improve staff or pupil wellbeing. Teachers would inevitably end up working through most of it, and pupils would spend the extra time festering inside, probably glued to multiple screens, because sports camps and social clubs don’t run over winter when the pitches are waterlogged and the energy bills are too high. Instead, we would have them locked up for the whole of July, sweating away in non-air-conditioned classrooms, when the days are longer, lighter, and warmer. Anyone who has ever taught in a school, or read Romeo and Juliet, knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour.

I’m also not sure how it would balance out childcare costs, given that employed parents still get the same number of annual leave days a year, and so would still have the same administrative issue to resolve. Here’s one thing it would definitely do though: push up the already eye-wateringly expensive premium on holidays out of term time. Parents will probably be less willing to go abroad in October and February, where you have to fly long-haul for guaranteed sunshine, meaning that the vast majority of families will be competing to go away in the same four weeks: cue larger costs, larger crowds, and a large impact on seasonal economies like Cornwall’s. Some will choose, understandably, to take their children on holiday in term time instead, as a £60 fine is insignificant compared to the hundreds or even thousands you might save on an off-peak all-inclusive holiday or some earlier Easyjet flights.

Anyone who has ever taught in a school knows that heat is a catalyst for bad behaviour

There is an argument that cutting the summer holidays may help to mitigate the learning loss that happens over a longer break, sometimes called the ‘summer slide’. Yet other countries with excellent education systems have much longer summer holidays than us: Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have 12 weeks; Estonia and Finland have 11 weeks; Canada has ten weeks; America and Sweden have nine weeks; whilst China and South Korea have eight weeks. The UK is already an outlier in many respects: we have the fewest public holidays of any country in the world bar Mexico, the shortest summer holidays of any country in Europe, and we also start school two or three years earlier than most OECD countries. I am not sure quantity of education is the issue here.

Maybe I am just being nostalgic and sentimental, but I genuinely believe that the summer holidays are a sacred time: a precious break from the pressure of homework and tests; a chance for children to spend time outdoors; an opportunity to learn important life skills or pursue extracurricular activities or, God forbid, to cope with being bored. When I think of summer holidays, I think of disappearing on bikes with friends until the sun went down, or setting up makeshift camps in the garden with a hastily-assembled picnic, or endless made-up games with my siblings in the driveway: precious, formative experiences that probably would never have been achieved over this February half-term, where it rained everyday except one.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to keep the summer holidays the length they are (something the majority of teachers and parents want), and instead seriously consider how we can better support working parents, single parents, or disadvantaged families. For example, in Sweden, parents can apply for income-linked summer camps, where children can try fishing, drama and sports, as well as helping out with chores including cooking and cleaning, all for as little as £0 to £28 per day. There are some similar, more affordable options in the UK, like Forest Schools, National Citizen Service, or YMCA and YHA Camps, but the reality is that discounts are limited, and often only for pupils on free school meals. If you are not eligible, then one charity estimates it will cost you on average £943 per child for provision over the holiday, and so the subsidies or opportunities on offer do not go anywhere near far enough.

Shortening the school summer holidays therefore does nothing to ease financial pressures or logistical stresses, but it does take away from the welcome reprieve and mental and physical freedom those six weeks bring. If anything, we should be giving families more flexibility to choose when to take holiday rather than less, because education happens as much outside of school as it does inside.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/why-shortening-the-school-summer-holidays-helps-no-one/

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Decolonising (or radicalising) the Australian curriculum

It appears our educational elites have learned nothing from 2023’s referendum on the Voice to Parliament. Despite promises of a ‘back to basics’ curriculum, this year Victorian teachers will have to contend with a curriculum blinded by Woke racial ideology and historical myth.

One of the ‘texts’ teachers can select for VCE English is a four-minute video of an Australian Indigenous actor reciting a monologue from his play City of Gold featured on Q&A in June 2020. Described as a ‘howl of rage at the injustice, inequality and wilful amnesia of this country’s 21st Century’, an ‘urgent and necessary play’ in light of ‘the global Black Lives Matter movement’, and a ‘powerful message’ urging students to ‘offend your family, call them out’ – the monologue asks that we ‘re-write’ the ‘colonial narrative’.

Classified by the IPA as a text that fits with the agenda of ‘decolonisation theory’, which, according to the pedagogy, involves combating ‘systemic racism’ by not simply including ‘token intellectual achievements of non-white cultures’ into a curriculum but by occasioning a ‘paradigm shift from a culture of exclusion and denial to the making of space for other political philosophies and knowledge systems … a culture shift to think more widely about why common knowledge is what it is, and in so doing adjusting cultural perceptions and power relations in real and significant ways’, the artist addresses students as a ‘Blak Australian’ and tells us that they ‘hate[s] being a token. Some box to tick, part of some diversity angle’.

The monologue then mentions the regularly repeated, but historically incorrect claim that Indigenous Australians were covered by the Flora and Fauna Act which did not classify them as human beings, and that this only changed when the Constitution was amended following the 1967 referendum. ‘C’mon man we was flora and fauna before 1967’ cries the monologue, cadit quaestio. ‘Adjusting cultural perceptions’ and ‘making space for other knowledge systems’, indeed, the play is ‘decolonisation’ theory in action.

This long-debunked myth about the Flora and Fauna Act has made its way into a text set for year 12 Victorian English in 2024. So much for ‘back to basics’. And where are the fact checkers when you need them?

Interestingly, in the VCE annotation for teachers that accompanies the text, the VCLAA warns that the play ‘contains explicit language’. No mention of the historically incorrect claim, of course, as decolonisation theory dictates that ‘anti-racism’ trumps facts. The IPA analysed the list in full here where I also show how the 2024 rules mean that teachers cannot avoid selecting Woke, in particular, ‘decolonisation theory’ texts.

This is all despite Australians voting overwhelming against dividing our country along racial lines only last year. It seems that the educational Powers That Be did not get the memo. The VCLAA, the body responsible for the 2024 text list teachers are to select from, insists on continuing to indoctrinate students with critical race theory largely imported from the United States, providing a list of texts that purport to ‘directly explore Australian knowledge, experience, and voices’ but are thinly veiled anti-colonial or ‘anti-racists’ manifestos.

This monologue is just one of an inordinate number of texts on race in the VCE 2024 English document, with the first post-colonial African novel in English, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 Things Fall Apart, topping the list. Of the 16 texts assigned under the ‘Framework of Ideas’ section, over half deal directly with race, with this monologue and another titled The Hate Race standing out as particularly overt.

The Hate Race is a memoir that links the experience of Indigenous Australians to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The teachers’ resource states that the text ‘is framed by the racist policies and politics that define Australia’ and gives suggestions on how to approach teaching the text. It illustrates explicitly how Critical Race and Decolonisation theory is weaponised for our Australian context. ‘The Atlantic Slave trade’ is to be considered alongside ‘the impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australian communities’, while ‘the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, Enoch Powell in the UK, and Pauline Hanson in Australia’ are all grouped under the heading ‘white supremacist political movements’ and suggested to teachers as ‘aspects of history and contemporary politics’ relevant to a discussion of the VCE text.

Faced with a text list that more resembles the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement than English literature as we once knew it, students will miss out on not only the ‘greats’ of the Western canon, but a wealth of Australian literature that celebrates our distinctively Australian way of life based on fairness, equality, freedom, and tolerance. As executive director of the IPA Scott Hargreaves pointed out in 2021, classic works in which Australian artists and writers told their countrymen of our nation and asserted the innate worth of a national culture are now either explicitly cancelled or simply crowed out by a right-on national curriculum full of Woke preening and second-rate texts. Disturbingly, the new 2024 rules mean that the teaching of this ideology is now unavoidable.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/decolonising-or-radicalising-the-curriculum/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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