The pandemic has forced us to massively, albeit momentarily, integrate digital technology into education. The advantages of distance education are numerous: limiting transport, reconciling study and family, etc. However, if the pandemic justified such measures, it is now relevant to question the place we wish to give to digital technology in education in order to mark out its use.
Being myself a bachelor’s student in architecture, I notice that, even if I am registered for face-to-face courses, it has become commonplace to present certain courses at a distance without this being called into question. Without wanting to question the integrity of teachers, I believe that a control of distance education would prevent its trivialization.
The reasons justifying remote presentations seem a priori laudable: professor suffering from flu-like symptoms, guest speaker with an agenda too busy to travel, renowned French professor to whom we would not have been able to access otherwise, etc. Is it justified to neglect the quality of learning in favor of quantity? Less is more, Mies van der Rohe told us…
Perhaps this questioning could take on a broader dimension with regard to digital tools? The efficiency and level of productivity achieved by the computer compared to traditional architectural drawing methods is unequivocal; the place taken by digital at the university prepares us to enter the labor market as good technocrats.
Ivan Illich, in A schoolless society, warned us against an education system functioning as an industry shaping the individual; “a method of producing a man who can fit into a world where everything is planned”. Half a century later, Welcome to the machine by Éric Martin and Sébastien Mussi shows that this concern is all the more glaring since “integrating school [au] one-dimensional system of capitalist labor and technological domination aims to smash all resistance”.
However, the school in the sense of movement or revolutionary artistic doctrine intrinsically implies a form of resistance. The Bauhaus school of the interwar period in Germany is an example of a movement responding to the issues of its time, which was particularly abundant in multidisciplinary creations bringing together art, craftsmanship and industry.
We are now at a pivotal time for the emergence of movements in response to unprecedented challenges, such as the climate crisis and the housing crisis. However, this resistance can only take shape collectively, and technology, despite its willingness to “connect”, seems to further isolate individuals and dehumanize relationships.
Rapid technological progress has atrophied our ability to formulate a global response to issues that end up escaping us individually. Only face-to-face teaching provides an experience of collegiality, essential to the development of fruitful critical thinking. How, then, can we free ourselves from the machine that has enslaved us, but which we can no longer do without?