Rethinking education is the solution to most current societal problems
Carmen Gómez-Cotta, a contributor to Ethic, contacted me to talk about how, despite having lived in a world characterized by our continual need for distraction for the last two decades, we still haven’t come to terms with this new reality. Some of my comments appear in an article in the Spanish online arts and current affairs magazine by Luis Meyer entitled “La sociedad de la distracción” (pdf).
My comments focused mainly on what I consider to be my main area of knowledge, the result of more than three decades in education. In short, I don’t blame social networks for fake news or our seemingly insatiable need for junk content, but instead an out-of-step educational system that has isolated itself from the digital world.
What did we expect to happen? Having failed to teach young people how to correctly use a tool that has become a fundamental part of our daily lives, based on the fallacy that they were born knowing how to use digital technologies, we now have a generation of ignoramuses unable to send an email attachment, but who think they are gods because they can doomscroll on Instagram and handle interfaces intentionally created for nincompoops. That’s the thing about learning only from your own experience and from what your friends tell you while at the same time giving way to peer pressure. What…
