Where can we find the time to make art when we spend most of our time in front of screens?
This is the question I asked my art students at CEGEP during the pandemic. Most of them work in food and at the same time work full time for their studies. They spend an average of nine hours a day staring at a device browsing social media in addition to doing their jobs. Due to their busy schedules, there are very few hours of sleep and time left for their research-creation. Consequently, their artistic productions are clearly neglected.
In recent years, I have observed a deterioration in the quality of the artistic concepts of my students. Due to their pace of life, most young people devote less and less effort to the imagination, that is, devoting energy, ingenuity and patience to building meaningful projects for them. With Generation Z, everything has to be done quickly with as little fuss as possible. Coming from a North American culture, a number of students produce works as a result of primary ideas. What they are asking for is the passing grade. Other students will develop more advanced compositions to a certain point before stagnating in their artistic impetus. For lack of effort or will, they stay there, dissatisfied with their work, since they dare not ask for help or validation of the quality of their work. The slim percentage of students who remain stand out from the crowd by supporting an ongoing effort. These students seem more stimulated by discovery and see the effort as something pleasurable, unlike their colleagues for whom the effort is seen as a burden. How to give them the desire to develop their imagination and creativity through art?
Unfortunately, in many cases, young people devote a great deal of their time to their sophisticated machines in the classroom, despite repeated warnings from the teacher.
Cell phones are the new LSD today. They are so often glued to their devices that it is impossible for them to concentrate for more than a few seconds on subjects of study. In my classes, it is common to observe that a significant number of students glance at their cellphones while working on their drawing projects. This need to disperse, to flee reality, to get lost so as not to have to face loneliness, calm and time overwhelms me. With the many notifications they receive, they turn away from what they came to learn in college, which is to devote themselves fully to what they love: to create. If my drawing class was a cellular app, would my students have more time to complete their projects?
Disconnection mission
It would be relevant to develop an algorithm that would lead to a movement of disconnection. This strategy could combat the attention crisis we are living in, because our students have never been so distracted. If the founders and CEOs Apple, Facebook and Twitter are enrolling their children in technology-free schools, our educational mission should follow suit. I think that the disconnection is necessary to refocus on priorities.
Inspired by the ideas of Zack Prager, the creator of a technology that encourages areas without the Internet, I thought of a model for the CEGEP education system. This is a protocol that creates spaces where cell phones would be blocked on campus with the exception of the Omnivox operating system. The latter is a platform used by colleges across Quebec to consult professors’ emails, educational documents and discounts. Activating this block would promote exchanges with others, optimal class areas and a decrease in anxiety and depression, because young people would be in real contact with their friends and less in contact with polarizing news. Students might be less dependent on their machines. This strategy would, in my opinion, be healthier for the learning and development of humanity.
Every year, the government invests huge amounts of money in new technologies to update college institutions. This application for the disconnection would be relevant to find a better quality in our relation to the world. Let us become actors of creation rather than spectators of entertainment. This idea of disconnecting in education is applied in northern Canada to Dechinta at the Center for Research and Learning. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not against technology or progress; however, it is one of the solutions that I imagined to counter the loss of reference points that afflicts our societies. Is it realistic to design such a project?