“Digital technology, you are hereby charged with perverting the course of human development and preventing the advancement of cognitive ability in our children over the period of the last fifteen years – how do you plead?” Guilty as sin, surely! Guilty, as charged, for sure! “Innocent”, you claim?
We call upon Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (PhD, MEd), an expert neuroscientist and educator, who specializes in human learning and brain development, as our witness. Horvath, you claim (in a short video going viral) before a United States Senate committee that “Gen Z is the first generation to underperform their parents on key cognitive measures despite spending more years in school” and that following decades of research you believe that the “increased use of digital technology in education is linked to declining attention, memory, literacy and executive function”. What then would you conclude from this, Horvath? “When education adapts itself to screens rather than human learning biology, that is not progress. It is surrender.”
What say you, digital technology? My lord, it may be easy to blame a machine, when few are willing to defend it, but is the problem not that the previous generation have not trained the current generation to know how to use or handle the technology? Perhaps they do not have as much cognitive ability as they thought they had or claim to have? Perhaps their cognitive ability did not help them to realise that there is still a human being behind the machine using, misusing or abusing it? The problem with cyberbullying is not the machine that transmits the bullying but the person behind the machine operating the machine. Are we really going to send digital technology to prison?
My lord, digital technology has made life much easier for humans (not just children) to get answers without having to apply their minds significantly, consistently, extensively, but teachers have for generations in education simply helped pupils to get the answer, without requiring them to think, (so they can pass exams and give the teacher a pleasing percentage pass rate) The problem is in the teaching, not in the machines. It is just that machines are better and quicker at giving answers than teachers. We did not complain when teachers through their rote learning and exam revision drilled the pupils into knowing how to regurgitate facts in the pretence that that was learning and education. So, why are we blaming technology for the failure of teachers?
With due respect, my lord, the people who are complaining that technology has led to the decrease of cognitive ability in youngsters today seem to forget that they were the ones, with their cognitive ability, who invented the digital technology and did not have the cognitive ability to know how to use it. Why did they invent the technology if they knew it would be dangerous for the next generation?
Is it not actually cognitive ability that should be on trial here? Surely those with cognitive ability will know and understand that cognitive ability on its own cannot ever enable positive human progress? Is education not far more than cognitive ability? Must children always get higher marks? Are children meant to be brighter? What use is greater intelligence if there are no values to go with it?
Digital technology is being accused of the heinous crime while all along it is perhaps merely an accomplice that lazy humans have sent to do the job for them. Maybe humans do not have sufficient cognitive ability to handle the technology appropriately, helpfully and positively; maybe previous generations of humans did not have as much cognitive ability as they thought they had.
Just as previous generations who have each had more cognitive ability than their parents’ generations have used their cognitive ability to research and define and label numerous learning difficulties (or differences), so they have increased the number of people having the difficulties.
Why do we only focus on cognitive ability, my lord? Does cognitive ability make people better people? Often it only enables them to be smart enough to think of ways to beat the system, to bend the rules. It should not be digital technology on trial here but rather the humans that invent them and who are not smart enough to help people know how to use them. No surrender.
What is your verdict, members of the jury?