You may have thought, like me, that the pandemic had definitively put an end to the enthusiasm for the digital school and for distance education. Forced, by circumstances, to experiment with these methods, students and teachers, after months, could not bear it any longer and cried out for mercy.
Since then, we have seen, painfully, that these methods have had catastrophic effects on school results and the mental health of young people. The school on the screen was perhaps better than nothing, but it did not replace, far from it, the school in the presence.
So perhaps you thought, quite logically, that the digital school thurifers would finally retreat in the face of the evidence of the failure of their program. Well, think again! In the current negotiations of collective agreements for teaching staff in the college network, the employer party, made up of the Fédération des cégeps and the Ministry of Higher Education, pleads for the digital shift.
All the technofetishist clichés are invoked to justify this bias. It would be necessary, write the bosses of the college, to adapt the training to the reality of tomorrow, to show flexibility and innovation, thus allowing better time management and limiting travel.
Of course, there are obstacles on this sunny path, such as teachers’ resistance to change and their digital incompetence, but moving forward is imperative. That students and teachers, in their majority, refuse this model, that the pandemic experience has illustrated the indigence of these methods, that does not change the matter. The leaders, without democratic consultation but under the influence of lobbies, have decided: the future of training is digital and remote.
It is precisely this discourse, also proposed, on a global scale, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which denounces with virulence and brilliance Eric Martin and Sébastien Mussi, both college philosophy professors, In Welcome to the machine. Teaching in the digital age (Ecosociety, 2023, 184 pages).
“The disaster is there, they write. Our decision-makers have designed and created a society obsessed with economic and technological development, with no regard for respect for what makes up the human, the common, nature, life in general. This obsession now colonizes even our educational institutions. »
To be human, they add, is to live in community, with others, to cultivate empathy, sensitivity and solidarity as well as openness to the beauty of the world. “However, they note, the computerized school is precisely the negation of these sensitive and concrete relationships in favor of a virtualization and robotization of the pedagogical relationship” which only benefits “sellers of tricks and gizmos” .
The harmful effects of digital and distance learning are known and documented: drop in motivation, loss of attention and memory, insufficient pedagogical supervision, increase in cheating and, due to the lack of socialization caused by this model, drop in the capacity for empathy and increased feelings of loneliness.
Basically, therefore, it is a failure on the academic and human levels. A study by researchers Christian Boyer and Steve Bissonnette has also shown that, even before the pandemic, virtual schools, at the primary and secondary levels, mainly in the United States, obtained negative results for all children.
This computerization of the school, also underline Martin and Mussi, is extremely expensive, makes the institutions dependent on the digital giants and has absolutely no ecological virtue, despite what its supporters say. All this computer hardware pollutes abundantly. You have to be ignorant or a liar to link the digital school to ecological concern.
The worst is the dehumanization that awaits us. The role of the school, write Martin and Mussi, is not “to train young people with a view to making them into a versatile labor force” in the service of the “narrow technical and economic priorities of a short-term elite”. sight”, but to form citizens capable of understanding the cultural and natural world in which they arrive and to which they wish to contribute in all conscience, with the others.
To really fulfill its mission, insist Martin and Mussi, the school does not need more machines, but physically welcoming premises, classes on a human scale, libraries with real books, multiple art classes and sufficient teaching and extracurricular staff.
Students are not resources that must fit into machines to boost economic growth. They are human beings, citizens in the making, who need human beings.