If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will?
All the ed bloggers during this pandemic are consumed with whatever we’re calling our frantic attempts to reach out to our students–to ‘keep them on track’—or (more realistically) provide whatever educational succor can be squeezed out of phone calls, emails and glitchy electronic platforms. Or, God forbid, packets.
The academic show, it seems, must go on–and the in-the-trenches edu-commentariat has done some great work, asking the right questions, sharing their tools and materials and philosophies, and warning us off predatory data capture and greedy education commerce. There’s also been a fair amount of righteous bitching. All of this is justified—and welcome.
It turns out that technology cannot, will not replace the human touch, when it comes to learning that is worthwhile and sticks in our students’ brains and hearts. We already knew that, of course. But it’s gratifying to know that school—bricks and mortar, white paste and whiteboards, textbooks and senior proms—is deeply missed.
Public education is part of who we are, as a representative democracy. We’ve never gotten it right—we’ve let down millions of kids over the past century or two and done lots of flailing. There are curriculum wars that never end and bitter battles over equity, the teacher pipeline and funding streams.
It is at school where a kid who might otherwise be looking at a series of low-paying jobs gets interested in science when looking through a microscope for the first time. It CONTINUE READING: If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will? | Teacher in a strange land