In recent years, public and private schools have bet big on new technologies: electronic tablets, smart phones, laptops… some are even starting to talk about integrating virtual reality into their classes. It is clear that our education system tends more and more to become virtual. Before the pandemic, very smart one who could have predicted how far our technophilia would stop, when each technological innovation was embraced by educational decision-makers.
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This tech-savvy approach, however, hit a wall in March 2020 with the arrival of the self-explanatory virus. Today, no one questions the failure of virtual education anymore, even if it is true that distance education is better than no education at all.
The pandemic will therefore have had this beneficial effect in education: we will have understood that innovation does not always rhyme with improvement.
We should use this observation of the failure of online teaching as a pretext to revise our judgment regarding the use of technological tools in the classroom. Admittedly, teaching online and teaching in the classroom using technological tools are considerably different, but let’s be serious, do we really think that the disastrous effects of the first do not correspond in any way with the effects of the second ?
Barely a few years after the marketing of these new screens, they were massively entering our schools and the bedrooms of our teenagers. Have we evaluated the effect of these technological tools, or have we simply been seduced by the multiple functionalities they offer? Studies don’t all agree, but they tend to show that screens in the classroom have, at best, little learning benefit or, at worst, a negative net effect. This is therefore a very costly technology, which has to be replaced with each five-year plan and which produces little effect. We would undoubtedly find a better use for all these billions spent.
In addition to these negative effects from a didactic point of view, other cultural and social issues should be highlighted. Cyberbullying, cyberaddiction, lack of cultural transmission, distraction, plagiarism, self-esteem problems: the new screens have acted as a catalyst for all these problems that affect our students, without us deploying devices to alleviate them. .
For too long, the burden of proof has been on the side of those who criticized new technologies and, unfortunately, for fear of appearing to be a dinosaur, a reactionary or a technophobe, many of them kept silent. However, there are good reasons for us today to turn our backs, at least in part, on these new technologies. It is therefore difficult to understand how we could be so passive in the face of the implementation of these new screens, which are now ubiquitous.
Do those who read this article believe that their education was so deficient that it does not even deserve to be defended a little today? Do they believe that teaching methods and ambient technophilia are sufficient arguments to shelve their school, that of paper and pencil? Without replacing technophilia with technophobia, it is high time that the burden of proof in terms of technological innovation changed sides.