What Covid-19 Is Teaching Me About My Children and Technology
During lockdown I participated in several interesting conversations with friends, colleagues, and educators about the various influences of Covid-19 on our everyday lives. I was asked to write down some of the thoughts I developed and shared in these conversations. Hopefully, my words will provide some food for thought, just as those conversations did for me.
The world has changed drastically in the last few months. We are all facing challenging realities on multiple fronts. As an Italian living and working in the UK the global pandemic has hit close to home in more ways than one, but it has also given me a valuable opportunity to spend quality time with my dear family.
I have three children, all in junior school, eight-year-old twins and a ten-year-old. All three have been learning from home since April. During this time, my wife and I have been functioning as their primary caregiver and helping them adapt to life under lockdown, while working from home.
Now the schools are reopening and hopefully things are going to normalise, but for the last few months seeing my kids all day every day and taking care of their existential needs has been enchanting. It has also gotten me thinking about the future of education in a world that is being conquered by technology.
The starting point is a new reality.
In addition to the severe health implications of Covid-19, the pandemic has accelerated technological development in several areas and forced us to adapt quickly to new routines in our everyday lives. One of the areas that has seen significant change is school. Another is work. In many cases, my household included, both work and learning have shifted from the tangible world to a virtual environment.
For us, as a family the change went quite smoothly, but it was not without challenges. We had gotten used to having a strong support system. Schools helped us educate our children, nannies helped us take care of them, and housekeepers helped with home maintenance. When these facilities fell away, I found myself having to do everything by myself. It took me back to my younger years, when I was a student at the start of my career. One would expect this return to simpler times to be burdensome, but in actual fact it was refreshing, thought provoking, and fun (for a while!)
I quickly got used to juggling daily household chores, work, and childcare, and very much enjoyed the chance to spend so much time with my kids. The lockdown gave me an opportunity to get closer to them, to help them, to be there for them. For the most part, they too seem to have been enjoying the intense family time and online schooling as well, even if towards the end they needed a change in their daily routine.
While change brought us closer it also brought out our differences.
It has been interesting to see my children’s reactions to the new virtual school environment. They are each handling it very differently.
My one daughter, who is generally a good student, a disciplined learner, and very respectful of authority, has become significantly less compliant since she started learning from the safety of her home. As a little bit of an introvert, she has also found seeing herself on the screen and actively participating in the virtual lessons somewhat uncomfortable.
My older daughter, who is usually quite disorganized and uninterested in conventional learning, has become a better student since the pandemic struck. Independent learning seems to suit her very well.
While they are each responding differently there is one very clear common denominator between all three. They want to finish their schoolwork as quickly as possible so that they can go play. And this coveted playtime is not outdoors, but rather indoors, in the depth of their tablet screens.
If it were up to them, they could easily spend a whole day on their tablet/laptop watching clips and playing games without making eye contact or saying a single word to each other.
Their rapid acclimatization has been both impressive and worrying.
It has been amazing to see how quickly they have made the digital world their home and just how skilful they have become. After some technical issues and joint efforts at problem solving they now have a good grasp of Seesaw and Google Classroom , two major remote education tools. They have learned how to search the web for relevant information, and of course, they know all the quickest routes from schoolwork to play.
At the same time, it has been worrying to witness the strength of the digital platforms they encounter. It is scary to see how easily my children are drawn in and how difficult it is to pull them out. Watching them study and play I often wonder how the many hours they are spending online are impacting them psychologically and how these software applications, which are managed remotely, are influencing their formation and perception of the world.
I find myself facing a dilemma.
On the one hand the world my children will live in will be dominated by technology and I want them to be as technologically adept as possible. On the other hand, I want them to meet people, face problems, and communicate often in order to develop their social skills, which are essential for their survival. There is also the matter of fields like music, culture, manners, and sports. How does one keep children engaged and willing to develop in these important areas when their role models exist only on a screen and their intellectual curiosity is dominated by apps?
Seesaw, Zoom, and Google Classroom have many advantages, they make remote learning/work possible, they make education and employment accessible in a way that would not be possible otherwise right now. But these platforms lack some essential qualities. They cannot facilitate human touch. They cannot fully deliver body language.
The success of humanity derives from our ability to flexibly collaborate around myths and stories we create — Yuval Noah Harari
In his internationally acclaimed book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains that the success of humanity derives from our ability to flexibly collaborate around myths and stories we create. These are essential soft skills that we acquire by interacting with each other face to face.
The bottom line is, that as humans we need real and direct social interaction in order to develop, and technology cannot provide that.
Covid-19 emphasizes the fact that schools urgently need to evolve.
Our education system needs to catch up with reality, no doubt. This was true long before the onset of Covid-19. Clearly, school can no longer focus only on the two classic pillars of language and mathematics. We need to add a third pillar of computer science. Our children need to develop high levels of digital literacy. However, we cannot abandon the two longstanding pillars; we cannot let computer science dominate our children’s education and lives. Their ability to think independently, to communicate with each other, their command of language with all its subtilities and complexities, are as pivotal to their lives as their command of technology.
Up until recently, most schools have been stuck in the past while science and technology have been bravely galloping into the future. As a result, many courses and teaching methods have become less relevant and young people have learned to develop their skills elsewhere, mostly online. The children of today are proactively developing their digital literacy, which is very important. But at the same time a whole set of vital skills is diminishing as they are writing less and communicating less in the real world.
So, the challenge is double. We need to figure out quickly how to add a new pillar to our children’s education without marginalizing the two existing pillars. This challenge is not upon schools alone, we are facing it together as a society and in our homes.
As parents it is our responsibility to equip our children with the right tools for life. We need to prepare them for a wide variety of interactions that require different skillsets. But it has become difficult to do so because we have serious competition. Our competitors — social media, online gaming, and digital communication platforms — are getting stronger and more influential. They are dominating the playing field. They are winning in the battle for our children’s attention.
We have some big questions to answer as a society.
- How do we provide a good and strong technological education without giving into it?
- How do we prepare our children for a computer dominated society without having them lose human interaction skills?
- How can we regain our independence from technology or at least manage our technological dependence?
This is not a case of us versus them.
As I see it the key to finding the right balance between the three pillars of education, between social skills and technological skills, is a shift in mindset. We need to stop looking at it as a war between the old and the new, the organic and the digital, and start thinking in terms of cooperation.
We are the developers of the technologies that are conquering the world, and the day in which technology will merge with us physically is not far. It is already happening. Our devices are practically part of our bodies and brains. In other words, cooperation is inevitable.
This does not mean that we must give in to technology. On the contrary, while we need to teach it and make space for it in our lives, major technology developers need to make space for social development and real interactions. Just as it is our responsibility as parents and educators to teach our children computers and acquaint them with technology, it is the responsibility of big tech leaders to help protect the human species from the degeneration of human social skills. Particularly as their power is greatly expanding beyond any historical precedent, they have a moral responsibility towards society that arguably should be above the financial responsibility they have towards shareholders.
Instead of basing our children’s education only on our past and present knowledge, we should be focused on preparing them for the future. At the same time, instead of developing technological platforms that focus on drawing our children in, it is time to think about digital tools that encourage them to venture out.
