When I began my career as a college teacher, well-advised educational advisors were extolling the unspeakable merits of televoters, a sort of revolutionary controller that supposedly makes it possible to enhance the learning experience in class. To hear from some colleagues, it seemed as if this new tool alone would push the boundaries of the interactive classroom experience. Impressed as I was at the time by these enthusiastic pretensions worthy of the late Jean-Marc Chaput, I wondered most seriously if my role as a teacher was limited only to involving my students in class, to relegate very far in second place was the mandate initially entrusted to me by the State to teach literature.
After fifteen years of career and a few abandoned viewers later, I noticed a strong and worrying trend in the education sector: the voracious appetite of educators of all kinds for innovation at all costs. Year after year, year after year, zealous proselytizers shout to convince us of the new innovations that we should integrate into our teaching to constantly be of our time: from the inverted classroom to the universal concept of learning, by the way by the full-steam conversion to digital tools, it appears that we have no shortage of opportunities to observe our own obsolescence.
And to keep up with the frenetic pace of these great leaps forward, an infinite number of training courses, both short and online, are graciously offered to us. For my part, I find myself becoming increasingly short of breath following this ride of ready-made solutions.
However, I am delighted to be not the only one to cry out against the donkey: credible voices are being raised to seriously question the imperial place given to technological tools in the classroom. To this end, the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ) recently unveiled not a study, but a meta-analysis on the use of screens in a school context and the health of young people under 25 years old. , whose “results invite us to consider the risks entailed by the presence and use of individual digital devices in class and [à] think about their integration in terms of added value.”
Furthermore, the world of education is urged to exercise the greatest vigilance “before replacing paper and pencil with digital media to read and take notes in class”.
Like the INSPQ, the vice-president of the National Federation of Teachers of Quebec Léandre Lapointe recently made a public outing to denounce the use of digital technologies in the classroom as a selling point for private schools , which succumb, in the name of recruitment imperatives, to dangerous fashion effects. These speeches therefore serve as warnings to all those who bow down before the golden calf of educational innovation, and at the same time remind us that the school, above all else, has the duty to serve as a bulwark against the blind attacks of the immediate.
There is therefore every advantage in our reflections and discussions in following the steps of La Fontaine’s turtle, who “knows how to leave at the right time”. However, I have fun imagining that the day artificial intelligence takes wall-to-wall control of our schools, handwriting will perhaps be sold to us as an innovative practice. On that day, the government will undoubtedly deploy colossal sums of money to distribute paper, pens and pencils to the four corners of the province.