I have a 15-year-old. Currently, he is on-site in school two days a week, and for two days he is at home. I can compare what’s going on every other day with him. Putting kids in Zoom rooms — running them through the laptop, the computer, the cellphone — is really the acceleration of a long-standing shift that we have seen in young people for the last 20 to 25 years now. They are moving away from books, magazines and print, and toward screens.
This has an important intellectual cost. The National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 12th graders in the United States show that reading scores have gone down again. The SAT scores have been going down for many years now. ACT scores in reading and writing have been going down, as well. The correlation is that the more digital tools have entered into students’ lives, the less intellectual development we see.
The possibilities of remote learning are remarkable. I’ve used a lot of digital materials in my own classes. The problem is: how do we engage in remote learning using the very same tools that the kids use for social media, for games, for fun, which introduces youth culture and peer pressure, all of which are anti-intellectual, anti-historical and anti-eloquence?
I know that this particular pivot in the context of an emergency, during which everybody is gently negotiating their own existential angst, is not the ideal condition for remote learning. I understand that people are under distress, but the possibilities here are really thrilling, and I think they can be paradigm changing.
There are some equity benefits, as well. Remote learning allows for collective activities. We could tap into the wealth of culturally diverse, multimodal, multilingual resources, simulations, immersive learning environments, games and media our children are already using. I’m a huge proponent of that. I think children are pioneering a number of media forms and they all have their place here.