THERE'S always a villain. We must ever be on red alert in case something evil comes to seize our children and turn them into zombies or monsters.
In the 1950s, there were horror comics. Later there were videotapes glorifying violence. And there was TV, the goggle box, our children sitting vegetating in front of it for hours. And now it’s the internet.
I remember a man declaring, when the internet was in its infancy, that there was nothing but porn on it. He was partly right. There’s lots of porn on the internet, but an awful lot of other stuff too. Meanwhile, things have got so bad with children’s phones that many in authority believe they’re damaging children’s health. Youngsters have their heads stuck in their phone, ignoring the real world. And in that phone world, they encounter appalling pornography and use messaging systems to bully each other.
It's got to the point where the Minister for Education, Paul Givan, is supportive of those schools who are now considering an outright ban on smart phones during the school day. Girvan appears ready to commit public money to providing shells/cases in which the children’s phones can be locked away during the school day, only being returned to them when the day is done.
I sort of sympathise. I did my time as a teacher, and anything that drew the kids away from what you were trying to teach them could be very irritating. So no wonder teachers and the Minister for Education want to make school a phone-free zone.
Back in the early days of industrialisation, Belgian workers faced their own enemy. Machines were changing their world and they didn’t like it. So in desperation, we’re told, Belgian workers would take off one of their wooden shoes, known as sabots, and hurl them into the machinery, bringing the progress of industrialisation to a grinding halt. That’s where we get the word ‘sabotage’. Today, Givan and a lot of teachers (and parents) are intent on blocking the infiltration of schools by smart phones.
But the stupidity of that blanket ban on smart phones in school (excluding, of course, the teachers’ phones) may be cloaked by the satisfaction of getting rid of the immediate problem. In the end, though, it doesn’t make sense.
Think about it. In their pocket or in their schoolbag, today’s children have a small machine that contains just about all of the world’s knowledge. History, geography, poetry, novels, law – it’s all in there. Is there not something perverse that schools, which are about imparting knowledge, faced with an instrument containing just about all knowledge, want to ban it? Slam and bolt the school door against it?
One small example. When I used to teach English, one of the toughest things was to motivate pupils into writing. By and large they hated it, and by and large they were right, since the writing was part of the world of school. But when smart phones became popular and ubiquitous, what do pupils do, of their own free will, with no prompting by the teacher? They write, or text, as we term it. Agreed, it’s staccato writing, short sentences with thks for thanks and U for you. But the core activity of writing is occurring. Would it not make sense to harness that writing, use the motivation to cultivate wider writing skills?
And that’s just writing. I can’t think of a single subject area that could not be enhanced by tapping into online material in an imaginative, creative way.
Yes, yes, it’d be an awful hassle, thinking out schemes of work that’d include internet material. It'd probably even require some major planning and brain-storming. But doesn’t it make sense? Who in their right mind would want to outlaw a vast storehouse of knowledge that could enhance and enliven what goes on in classrooms?
When he was Minister for Education some decades ago, Paul Givan blocked bursaries that would have gone to children who wanted to visit the Gaeltacht and learn Irish. It was his way of cocking a snook at the Irish language and saying "I don’t feed no crocodile." Let’s hope he’s not given a similar thick-headed opportunity to block smart-phones.
