Ran·dom: /ˈrandəm / adjective / made, done, or
chosen without conscious decision (e.g. a random
sample of 100 households)
Thought: / THôt / noun / an idea or opinion produced by thinking
(e.g. Maggie had a sudden thought)
Ox·y·mo·ron: /ˌäksəˈmôrˌän / noun /a figure of speech in which apparently
contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. random thoughts)
One of my favorite columnists in our daily paper, The Baltimore Sun, is Dan Rodricks. He is among the few local columnists left on the paper, and it is clear from his writing that he and I share some similar values, see our adopted hometown through a similar lens, and are committed to making at least our small corner of the world a little better place to live. I mention Dan because every now and then, he writes a column that should probably be titled “nobody asked me, but…” in which he tackles a mishmash of topics in the same column, ranging from the trivial to the essential, and he begins each paragraph in those columns with “nobody asked me, but….”
Well, in a similar vein, this posting has no central theme, no target, no motive. It simply is a collection of thoughts I’ve been having recently about a variety of topics in education, not least of which has been what my regular readers will know are my intense feelings toward technology in general. We have a new policy at my school this year to collect all cell phones in a bin at the start of class, and because of my background in neuroscience, I was recently asked by my administration to demonstrate during a faculty meeting the practical value for doing so. I had my colleagues perform the same experiment I now do with my anatomy class, and the results were equally dramatic with my adult audience as they are with my students. When asked by our Dean of Students what I thought our school policy should be, I looked him directly in the eye and replied, “I would make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to possess a cell phone.”
And apparently, I am not alone. A recent study in the United Kingdom looked at the impact of removing cell phones for the entire school day, and the results were dramatic and statistically significant. Both mental and physical health as well as grades improved across the board, and now teachers in the UK are apparently getting ready to ban cell phone use of any kind from the time students enter the building to the moment they exit at day’s end. As for any parent pushback about needing access to their child, administrations have basically replied that parents successfully called school offices for nearly a century to contact their child; they can do so again.
However, one element of digital technology that is clearly not going back into Pandora’s Box is AI, and I mention this for the second time in two postings only because of a conversation this past week with our computer science department chair. Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT last fall, he has spoken contemptuously about any alarmism or concerns about the impact of AI on education and society, basically arguing that all the hype is just that and that like any “latest thing” in technology, this one, too, would plateau. But after returning from a conference earlier this month on AI and education, he has now joined the concerned—especially when it comes to education—and when I joked with him about Skynet, he did not laugh. Instead, he deliberately looked back at me with an expression of caution creasing his eyes, and I actually fought the urge to gulp: if he’s worried, the rest of us should be [expletive deleted] terrified!
Of course, there are those who not only embrace the changes digital technologies have wrought on our world; they actively promote and extol them. Apparently, I missed the news two months ago that Elon Musk’s Neuralink company had won FDA approval for implanting a new type of computer chip directly into human brains and is now actively recruiting human volunteers to test the efficacy and safety of this surgical procedure. The chip is intended to help those with neurological damage recover their function through a direct brain-robot interface. But the man who brought us self-driving Teslas may soon have us driving our own automobiles hands-free, and once we have brains that can directly guide our cars, we have brains that can communicate directly with anything electronic. Why waste time texting you, when I can “thinking” you instead? Or more to the point for what I do for a living, why learn anything when you can download it directly to your brain?
Maybe, though, that’s what all the education pundits mean when they keep talking about how we need to reimagine and re-envision our methods for teaching the digital natives now arriving in our classrooms. I recently read one of the latest arguments in this discussion, and while I strongly affirm that the topic is a relevant one—authentically engaged educators already think all the time about how to adapt their teaching and learning to new populations of children—what I always find missing from the proselytizing for this kind of educational change is any basic understanding of how the brain actually works. You can argue all you want about the need to teach creativity and critical thinking over teaching content to prepare students for the careers of the future. But the simple biological limitation of that pesky brain of ours is that it can only think creatively and critically about the content that’s already in its long-term memory, and the only way to get the content into LTM is through repetitious exposure until the brain’s gatekeeper, the hippocampus, deems said content worthy of permanent storage.
Unless, of course, you can have a chip embedded in it with access to the Internet of Everything. So perhaps I’m not preparing my students for the careers of the future after all.
Oh well, at least the autumn colors have been especially brilliant here in Maryland this year. I do not know if it is the result of our below normal rainfall this growing season (parts of the state are in an actual drought) or if it was the smoke-filled skies from the Canadian fires during leaf bolting. But the yellows, reds, and oranges have been more vibrant than any I can recall from recent memory, and it has made my walk to and from school each day an aesthetic experience that has set a positive tone for all the hours in between. My students are at least getting a teacher who is feeling mentally fit and able to focus on them—even if he’s not preparing them for a world where they can argue directly with the AI that’s in their heads over who is really in charge.
At least it may be a world where anti-progressive groups like Moms for Liberty have been marginalized once more. I was excited to learn that through grassroot campaigns around the country, liberal and progressive citizens in their communities have started to take back their school boards and other local offices from the right-wing, neofascists who have been trying to impose their white-privileged, heteronormative beliefs on the children of our society. Apparently, there are still compassionate, thoughtful, and reality-based individuals in this country who support their children knowing that slavery was bad, that gender can be fluid, and that books open the mind. And apparently there are still enough of them to make a difference for positive change.
But that brings me to what I think was the impetus to write all these random(?) thoughts down for sharing. George Lakey (who I had never heard of but whom is apparently quite the renowned Quaker activist, with a recent documentary about him) came and gave a talk this past week at my school, and during it, he shared an insight he had learned from his research as a sociologist about periods of intense political polarization. In his work to identify the times when societies had successfully produced the most liberal change and progress, he kept finding what felt like a paradox to him. The 1930s and the New Deal? A period of hyper polarization. The 1960s and the Great Society? A period of hyper polarization. The rise of the Scandinavian Socialist Democracies? A period of hyper polarization. Again and again, he found that when societies made the most progress toward liberal values and rights was always a time of intense and pervasive social and political polarization, with entire constituencies of a society practically at each other’s throats.
He then went on to share a story of a time he had visited a friend who was an artist who worked with metal. He told us how struck he had been by the delicate twists and curves and almost airy quality of his friend’s work and that he had inquired as to how rigid metal could be made to take such intricate shapes. He shared that his friend had taken him into his studio and showed him the forge where he heated and bent the metal to his will. And it was seeing that forge, George Lakey told us, that gave him the metaphor for what he was seeing in his research. Times of hyper polarization in a society are like a forge, he suggested, softening the existing social structures in ways that allow for the possibility of dramatic social change, and he contended that understanding a period of hyper polarization in a society in this fashion was far more productive than simply assuming that such polarization is an inherently harmful evil, merely to be done away with.
He did point out that forges are by definition neutral. They are simply the force that makes change possible and that 1930s Germany went in a very different direction than 1930s America in response to Germany’s hyper polarization. But his message to our students was to encourage them to think of our own current era of widespread and deeply divisive political and social polarization as the opportunity to achieve a more just, equitable, and inclusive society—the chance to create the kind of world they want to inhabit and share with others.
A forge. I find it a powerful metaphor for understanding times of change, and it got me to thinking about how the brain, too, can be thought of as a kind of forge, its neural plasticity enabling it to take our experience of change and bend the mind’s cognitive structures into new meaning about the world. Furthermore, just as a real forge is neutral, so too can the brain generate both what is positive and constructive and what is negative and destructive in response to any change we experience—making the kinds of educational experiences we provide to children all the more critical and significant.
It’s why I think my concept of authentic engagement explored in this on-line project is so important and why I keep cranking out these additional essays examining education in our society. How we help children forge their minds matters because it is not hyperbole to state that the fate of our collective future depends on it. And as it always has, the clock on that future is ticking.
Coda
Since I first started writing this post, we have experienced a massive storm front come through central Maryland, and on my morning run today, it was impossible not to notice all the barren trees, stripped of their leaves and the damp pavement coated with their remains. All that beauty I spoke of earlier gone in a twelve-hour period.
Of course, it will come back with the arrival of spring, and winter has its own beauty as well. But the experience reminded me of how rapidly in a period of dramatic change (such as autumn) that a single powerful storm can utterly transform the entire world. We live in a time of such storms in our social realm, and I cannot help but wonder what the “trees” are going to look like on the other side.
As singer Don Henley once wrote, “in a New York Minute, everything can change.”
References
Alphonso, G. (Nov. 2, 2023) Educating Digital Natives: Reshaping Educational Models for Future Generations. Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/11/02/educating-digital-natives-reshaping-educational-models-for-future-generations/?sh=3c3bb6832e47.
Mahnken, K. (Oct. 11, 2023) Banning Smartphones at Schools: Research Points to Higher Test Scores, Less Anxiety, More Exercise. https://www.the74million.org/article/banning-smartphones-at-schools-research-points-to-higher-test-scores-less-anxiety-more-exercise/.
Neuralink.com (Sept. 19, 2023) Neuralink’s First-in-Human Clinical Trial is Open for Recruitment. Neuralink Blog. https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/.
NPR (Nov. 18, 2023) The Waning Influence of Moms for Liberty. Weekend Edition. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/18/1213967448/the-waning-influence-of-moms-for-liberty.
Light a Candle 