The famous story of the Roman emperor who marched a legion of soldiers into the sea in order to stop the waves comes to mind when looking at this poster. The desire to keep students focused and attentive is a good one; the method is ridiculous. The quote at the bottom of this poster really sums up most educational rhetoric – like a scented candle it’s pretty and smells great, but is neither illuminating nor substantive. It smells good but that’s about it.
Instead of using the force and authoritarianism of the school to command attention, incorporating extant technologies into the school day is the better way to go. These devices are not adjacent to daily life; they are daily life. And the incredible power they have – rhetorical and communicative power – is lost on the classroom teacher who is loyal for some unknown reason to methods of teaching that have changed very little since the 19th century – a board behind, a teacher in front, students all facing the same direction.
Imagine what would happen if students were able to find on their phone a video by an expert in what they were studying and share it with the class. Imagine if the teacher could help them identify bad information on the phone when it’s presented. These are things I do regularly in the university, and it’s shocking to me the information illiteracy that the students have. But then I think of signs like this.
If teaching is about control and obedience, information must be limited. Access to information must be limited. In early industrial factories, no other clocks were permitted on the premises – only the official clock of the factory was allowed. In the contemporary school, only the teacher can be a source of information, no other information sources are allowed.
Most students across the United States primarily use the internet through a phone. The banning of a phone in a classroom is the equivalent of banning notebooks and pens and forcing students to use a slate to interact in class. The mobile phone is a powerful ally in teaching to someone who sees teaching as a cooperative, generative activity – and that’s the heart of the issue. Most professors and most teachers for that matter see teaching not as cooperative and generative, but as adversarial and conservative, i.e. The student must be the passive recipient of the knowledge that I am authorized to and must share with them to determine if they “get it.”
There are a lot of critiques of this model available. I’ll just bring up the one I care about the most, which is the idea that this type of education assumes a world of isolated people. There’s little to no democracy (as modeled through interaction and persuasion), there’s no community, no collaboration, nothing like this. There’s you and your “knowledge,” alone, fighting your way forward through the world. Intelligence and competence are seen as individual successes and failures, not things that are worthy of community intervention or praise. This model of teaching – where one person performs the authorized way to be a subject of knowledge – is not what we need in a world where information is abundant and accessible.
Practicing with this availability is what’s needed, an admittedly harder form of discipline than just banning the phone from the classroom. It’s necessary though – if education, the way we want to practice it, is going to survive, we need to stop placing it in opposition to regular, daily life where the phone is an equal participant in all debates and discussions, providing information and perspective, enriching the intellectual lives of people. To call it irrelevant, troublesome, or alien to the educational environment does nothing but make school irrelevant, a bad cosplay convention of early 20th century information economies.