Our Children and New Technology

Thrusting in and Leading Out!


Bring into your mind an image of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, speaking (add in Scottish accent) to her girls:

'The word ‘education’ comes from the root e from ex, out and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem trudo, I thrust. Miss Mackay’s method is to thrust a lot of information into the pupil’s head: mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education, as is proved by the root meaning. Now Miss Mackay has accused me of putting ideas into my girls heads, but in fact that is her practice and mine is quite the opposite…' (From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark)


Mmm, I think Miss Jean Brodie could be onto something with the "leading out..."


How does New Technology in all its forms fit into our childrens' education? Before we can answer this questions, we need to have some idea of what a child is, and then, what it is to educate the child.  



Can this be part of the leading out? Should we rush to get it in and get ahead? Should we revel in the new possibilities and creativities? Could it be dangerous or destructive? Should we in fact keep it out of schools entirely? Or is it good at a certain age, and if so, what age is a good age to start?  

How do we judge? Everything is new. We have no traditions and very little theory available to help us with this great challenge.

J-C and I went to a talk on this last night at our childrens school, (by Philippe Pyrenes) on this very subject, which has got me thinking.

First of all, when speaking about New Technology in education,  suppose we start with the child and a good vision of what a child is at every age and stage, rather than starting with, for example, some politician or business mogul's view of economic necessity or politics or money making.  We cannot make any judgements about the suitability in education of the ever increasing, exciting and available gadgetry that New Technology puts on show, without having some understanding of the human child, and the role and effect of new technology.

Our speaker identified three main areas of childrens' education:

Sensory Experience

Internal Experience

Human Contact

(Our speaker, an experienced teacher with children and grandchildren, and a background in information technology, wished to express a certain quality within each of these, 'real' sensory perception, 'true' human contact...)

First of all we have to understand why these things are important.

Sensory Experience

The young child grovelling in the sandpit is doing more than just mucking around...

This is about the experience of being there: and looking round, smelling, hearing feeling, touching... The very young child grovelling in the sandpit is doing more than just mucking around - all the sensations of digging and scooping and dribbling the sand, pouring it, making moulds, jumping on it, are helping to build an inner world to which she will later refer with words, and later still prepare an intellectual understanding of the outer world with reference to her inner one. Experimenting with the fall of the sand to earth, for example, gives us a true understanding of gravity - what it is in relation to us, and our experience, even though we haven't yet learned the name gravity, and all that that word entails.

Neuroscience (which is new, only really getting going in the late 1990s) has something to say about this. Neuroscience can now look at how the brain functions in relation to outside stimuli, it has recently become possible to wire people's brains up and see which parts of the brain are responding to an accuracy of fractions of a second. Marcus Kiffer has written about the formation of words from experiences.

A virtual cow

Imagine that you go to a farm and you meet a cow, you stroke it, smell, watch it, are fascinated by the huffing of its dewy nostrils and so forth. Your brain responds with a corresponding set of neural excitation. From now on, when someone mentions the word 'cow', the same set of neural excitations will be visible in your brain!

Now imagine that you have no sensory experience of a cow. For you, the word cow refers to the cartoon picture on your milk carton, or the plastic beast from your farm set, or the cariacuture on the telly or the dull drawing in your interactive educational computer programme. Gone is the rich pattern of neural excitation. Instead, the word references a virtual reality, with a rather dull pattern, and for you the word is stunted, shallow and superficial. Your understanding of the world becomes abstract - you have virtual, rather than real understanding. What is the consequence of this happening en-masse in our society? We don't really know...

Now, based on this, how do we 'lead out' a child's experience of life and development of language? Could it be by, for example, lots and lots and lots of exploratory, free, sensory play?

'Play is the exultation of the possible' writes Martin Buber.

All those of us who have children, have been children or know anything about them know they love to play. Perhaps they know what they need. Perhaps if we start by letting children be, they will be better able to learn and acquire the skills we require of them, when the time comes. We let them do the exploring they are drawn to, with safety checks, and a little light encouragement, and then when the child is ready to emerge from this process, we could begin to 'lead out'. This would not mean teaching intellectual tricks, but involving children in learning by doing: touching, moulding, watching the dance of the world around them, exploring, in all the ways made possible by our bodily existance, allowing thems to put themselves in relation to their beloved world. Gone are the objectives, targets and measures. In its place a gently unfolding cirriculum designed to appeal to the child we see before us. If we get it right, the child will have no need to have knowledge thrust upon him, he will seek it, welcome it and absorb it with delight. This might sound Utopian, but I've seen it done.

Internal Experience

Our speaker pointed out that children nowadays are continually bombarded by outside stimuli. To decide whether this is ok or not, or how much, we need to have an understanding of what we could term 'inner experience'. A vital part of learning, of a child's education, is the 'down time', to use, ironically, a computer term, for processing, reflecting, developing, organising our thoughts, and making sense of our world. Our speaker would see this as vital to building up a sense of self, an ability to think freely. There is nowadays much more 'stimulation' (of a certain type) that threatens to swallow up any quiet, reflective time available to the child, until perhaps the child no longer feels the need for this or notices its absence. What effect would this have on children?

Our technologically equipped children are never alone: always trackable by portable phone, at the slightest niggle they phones or text, are phoned or texted with the niggles of others, they never falls back on himself. Any remaining quiet moments in the busy schedule, such as a wait for a bus, a walk, a bike ride, they experience to the accompaniment of portable music.

What is this doing to the inner world of our children? Are any of the things we are complaining about (increase in attention difficulties, hyperactivity, violence in schools etc) be a symptom? Are there others? It's difficult to measure when there are so many influences on a child's behaviour, and we haven't even had time to do any longitudinal studies, even if there were any that were well thought- out. We don't really know.

Human Contact

Virtual Educator Carmen SanDiego

We can bring in a DVD to enhance a topic, it's easy, quiet and clean. We talk a lot about teaching methods, but what is the role of the educator, that is the person, the very human being,  in education? The one who leads out? The one who notices when the child is ready to emerge from one stage, and needs leading out into the next for example?   How does this real contact, this real relationship, compare to our virtual teaching friends, Reader Rabbit, and the rest? What understanding will children gain if they are saturated with virtual images and lead by virtual teachers ? A virtual understanding of humanity?

Virtual Educator Reader Rabbit

There are, admittedly, some teachers who do little more than transmit a formula, who probably couldn't even be accused of 'thrusting in' anything,  but a truly good teacher, and I think we all know at least one, teaches with her whole being. She teaches by example, by attention, by understanding her charges and responding to what she perceives their needs to be. She listens and responds to the children, and they listen and respond to her. She might be eccentric, passionate, sometimes angry, inspired, tireless, but she is loving, and provides a loving education. She is a human, fully present, dedicated. Along with parents and responsible others in the child's life, she gives meaning to the words for human qualities: love, kindness, joy, enthusiasm, dedication, reliability, perseverance, humour...The educator educates, the educater 'leads out'. How much time do children spend without their educators, running through learning programmes, extracting facts from the internet, watching educational DVDs? How is this handled by our educators? Are there any humans there to guide our children through this? Our are children spending enough time with 'significant educators' who are worthy of the title?

One thing that is clear to me is that children should not surf the internet alone or unsupervised, and even supervised, it should not be a requirement of homework, because there are problems with the following:

Pornography (I suspect this is widespread, and no longer an innocent matter)

Selling and all types of manipulation

Problems with sourcing and accuracy of information

It's an art

You have to know the pitfalls and how to avoid them

It requires maturity

And experience

Even adults haven't got there yet.

Is this kind of thing important? Are these three factors important in education, are they threatened by NT, can we happily introduce some aspects of NT without upsetting the balance, does it depend on the age and stage of the child? These things need thinking about.