Americans like convenience.
Walk into any American convenience store and compare the price of a loaf of bread to the price you pay at a grocery store 2 miles down the road, you’ll see how much extra we are often willing to pay for convenience.
This is all well and good when it comes to a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.
But what about when it comes to educating our children?
Convenience isn’t the only factor driving American public schools to adopt technology, glowing screens, online curriculum and the like, but it’s a big one.
I think we have fallen in love with the idea of our children learning “faster,” “better,” “more efficiently.”
I think if the average public school administrator or school board member in America could, they would educate our children in same way that Neo, the protagonist of popular science-fiction film The Matrix, gets his education and training; by ‘jacking in’ his consciousness directly to a computer.
Are those of us who resist the idea of putting our children in front of glowing screens motivated to do so because we are just a bunch of anti-technological, luddite, backwards, worrywarts?
Nope.
We’ve just been paying attention.
- Technology In Classrooms
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a report this week reaffirming the conclusions that so many parents and educators around the world came to years ago: more time spent in front of educational technology doesn’t lead to better educational outcomes for kids.
“Students who use computers for schoolwork, but do so for a slightly below-average amount of time, performed better than average on both written and digital reading tests, according to the survey.
And students who spend an above-average amount of time in front of a computer at school performed the worse than other students, including those who might not use them at all.“
If you’re a parent who has bought into the sales pitch parroted by school boards, administrators and loudest of all by the producers of these educational technologies, give that underlined sentence above a chance to really sink in.
All that money that your public school district has funneled into shiny touchscreens, trendy apps and the expensive infrastructure required to make it all work has been for precisely nothing.
Guess what all of that money could have been going to instead? Things that are proven to actually produce better educational outcomes.
Namely, better-trained, better-respected, higher-paid teachers.
- Better Teachers Produce Better Educational Results. PERIOD.
Here we go back to Finland again, a country with the best outcomes for public school educated children in the world.
A place where you cannot step into an elementary school classroom as an accredited teacher until you have complete your 5-year master’s degree.
Along with that intensive 5-year degree comes unprecedented freedom and respect to run their classrooms in the way they believe will benefit their students the most:
“In Finland, teachers are largely free from external requirements such as inspection, standardized testing and government control; school inspections were scrapped in the 1990s.”
Teachers are highly-trained, highly-compensated and highly-respected.
The rest of the world has taken notice and many countries around the globe are beginning to put policy in place at the highest levels of government to produce similar outcomes.
But America?
Well, I am forced to conclude is that the policy makers of this great country are content with keeping our general populace as dumb as possible.
In states around the country, the lessons of Finland and others have been completely, totally ignored.
In my own state of Texas, the biggest initiative of the past decade has been to take the money that could have gone to producing better -trained, higher-paid, more autonomous teachers and use it to buy every student their very own IPad.
But why would this be the case? Why would policy makers intentionally ignore educational solutions that lead to proven increases in outcomes in favor of spending on solutions that don’t? Isn’t the education of our children their most important priority? Don’t they have our best interest in mind? After all, how will they get re-elected if they don’t do a good job of educating our kids?
Really, when you look at the way that educational policy gets decided in Texas and other states, the only answers you can arrive at aren’t happy ones.
It’s in the best interest for large corporate entities to keep the public as dumb as possible so that we will continue purchasing billions of dollars’ worth of crap that we don’t need every year. It’s in the best interest of the politicians and policy makers to keep their jobs, which means getting re-elected.
When the only way that a given politician can get re-elected is to out-spend her rivals, as is the case in America, securing campaign funding is the first and most important priority for any candidate.
I don’t believe that each educational policy maker around the country is a nefarious schemer, plotting to keep the populace dumb, docile and controllable.
But I do believe that they drank the Kool-Aid, bought the hype, jumped on the bandwagon that technology was the miracle solution to our country’s educational problems.
After all, it’s so SHINY! And it looks so FUTURISTIC!
And it never hurts when the company selling the technology turns out to be the same company putting billions of dollars back into the pockets of politicians to fund their eventual re-elections.
- So, What Can We Do?
Short of pulling your kids out of public school and decreasing your expenses and consumption to facilitate homeschooling them, make sure you are limiting their screen time at home.
Although, with the current educational culture being what it is in America, you could just take the plunge and join the growing number of parents who are making the bold decision to pull their kid out and give them a proper education, away from the gauntlet of corruption and institutional “idiocracy” that our public schools have become.
We are researching making just such a change in our own home. Will be reporting on this process soon!