Who’s Teaching the Digital Revolution?

by Reuben Loewy

The Digital Revolution has changed virtually every aspect of our world. Communication, commerce, entertainment, media, medicine, and education; it is hard to find an area of society untouched, for better or worse, by digital technology. We have seen nothing like this since the Industrial Revolution.

The curricula of our schools today, however, seem almost frozen in time in this regard. If the curriculum is a microcosm of the wider society outside school, where are the lessons about something as basic as how the Internet works? Absent in the classroom are discussions about who actually pays for all those free services that kids so avidly use, or the role of algorithms and tracking in governing almost all of what we see on our screens as we surf. Why are students not discussing issues such as Big Data, whether the Internet acts as an echo chamber, or being made aware of the basics of cyberpsychology, the study of our behavior when we operate in a “virtual” world? The list of topics that are glaringly absent from our schools’ curricula is long and significant.

Knowledge and awareness of the crucial role of digital technology in our society is key in shaping who we are, and how we interact with the world around us. We need to ask ourselves how we can we help our children truly understand what they are consuming, doing and encountering online. Without the basic knowledge and skills, how can they take full advantage of all the opportunities that the Web has to offer? Should it not be our goal to help students function as responsible, ethical, informed and critical members of society, both on- and offline?

Today, however, kids are primarily being taught about the perceived perils of the Internet and social media, the ones that we have become so familiar with thanks to horror stories in the media: cyberbullying, sexting, digital footprint, doxxing, identity theft etc. Don’t post compromising photos on Instagram that might come back to haunt you when you apply for jobs or college, they are warned. Don’t divulge personal details to strangers online. Don’t. Beware. Never.

The online world can, admittedly, be pretty scary. We all want our children to be safe out there in cyberspace, especially as we cannot supervise them every moment they are hunched over their devices. An array of policing and spying software is now being proffered to parents and schools, though it is generally recognized that even kids with moderate cyber skills will eventually find a way to bypass the safeguards put in place to “protect” them.

There is a growing recognition that in teaching a modern version of “stranger danger” we are not serving our children well. In a bid to present themselves as technologically advanced, many schools have competed to introduce laptops and tablets, ripping out the whiteboards and SMART Boards that a few years ago displaced the old blackboard and chalk. Along with the hardware and gadgets, more and more students are being taught computer skills, such as keyboarding, how to use the most common software applications and games in the classroom. We are now increasingly also seeing a surge in the teaching of elementary computer coding, which has a prominent place in the growing list of so-called 21st century skills.

In jobs ads for teachers, the phrase “must be able to use technology in the classroom” is almost de rigueur. Yet most youth still remain ignorant about the broader effect the Digital Revolution has had upon the society that we live in, let alone the inner workings of a World Wide Web that lets them retrieve 490 millions search results on Nepal in 0.49 seconds, or upload 48 hours of video to YouTube every single minute.

How have we allowed our school curriculum to fall so far out of step with the society is it supposed to reflect? Since the early 1980s, educational and curricular reforms have been widely premised on the perceived incapacity of schools to keep pace with technological change and its societal and economic implications, noted a report published by the MacArthur Foundation in 2013 (“The Future of the Curriculum”).

Change, at least at the political and academic level, is slowly but encouragingly afoot. Even a Select Committee of the (British) House of Lords (average age: 70) recommended earlier this year that “digital and technological skills should be considered complementary to numeracy and literacy.”

There is still a significant chasm, however, between lofty declarations and the reality in the classroom. The first obstacle is the widespread and dangerous misconception that the so-called “digital natives”, those born in the digital era, somehow are inherently knowledgeable about the digital world. Many adults confuse youthful technological savviness (should we perhaps call this “app-titude”?) with a deeper knowledge of what is actually going on “behind the screen”. Ironically, the same misconception breeds insecurity in parents and teachers, who dread being “outsmarted” by kids. Teachers who endeavor to teach other aspects of the Internet and digital world than the traditional cyber safety and digital citizenship fare find bare shelves in their school library and blank searches online. Little wonder that most youth are “digital naïves”, as sociologist Eszter Hargittai somewhat cheekily has dubbed them.

Developing a progressive, interdisciplinary curriculum for the digital age is just the first step to get our schools more in sync with the world outside the classroom walls. We also need to update the mindset of those teachers and parents whose approach to the digital world remains governed by fear. Finally, schools may have to jettison some of the existing “legacy” curriculum in favor of teaching more lessons about contemporary and future issues.

The digital world is the world that our children are immersed in a large part of their day, both at school and at home. It is the world in which they are studying, working, communicating, co-operating, playing, and creating. It is this world that we, as parents and teachers, have a duty to prepare them for.

Reuben Loewy, Founder and Director of Living Online Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching Digital Age Literacy, teaches Journalism and Media Studies at an independent school in Princeton, NJ.