The first thing we do, let's remove all the screens

'Digital skills' will take care of themselves; it's the other skills we need to worry about

We all know that there are few characters in life more plaintive and foolish than the school music or literature teacher who has decided to teach their subject through reference to modern, ‘popular’ trends - abandoning Bach and Shakespeare for Stormzy and Rupi Kaur. But the sheer lameness of the spectacle is not the only thing that is wrong with such misguided endeavours. For most children, from most backgrounds, school is the one chance they have in their entire lives to be exposed to their rich cultural heritage and familiarise themselves with its quest for transcendance. It is criminally wasteful therefore to devote school time to subjects which the kids will learn about anyway soon enough. Knowledge of Stormzy will take care of itself; that’ll be imbibed through osmosis. School should be about the introduction of ideas that would otherwise remain forever inaccessible.

Just as this is true regarding the substance of what is learned, however, so it is true for the process of learning itself. There is a widespread idea in education and policy circles that it is important for schools and universities to teach ‘digital skills’ to pupils and students, and that this ought to be done through the medium of digital tech. The theory would be that, since youngsters will grow up in what is inevitably referred to as an ‘increasingly digital world’, it is important for them to know how to navigate the technology in question. Hence iPads in the classroom; vast swathes of PCs cluttering open spaces at universities; homework performed on laptops.

This, however, is the ‘skills’ equivalent of substituting Ed Sheeran for Glenn Gould in music class. Look around you, at the young people you know, and the others you casually interact with. Does it seem to you that they have great difficulties interacting with digital technology? Are they strongly characterised by a lack of familiarity with gadgets and gizmos? Or would you agree with me in concluding that, if anything, they could probably do with spending a little bit less time hunched over and peering into a screen?

The truth, of course, is that the learning of ‘digital skills’ is - like knowledge of pop music - something that children nowadays pick up naturally. It’s not as though there is any incentive for manufacturers of digital technology to make their products difficult to interact with, and in any case most young people now marinade in the stuff so thoroughly they genuinely find it difficult to cope unless there is a screen of some kind close at hand. Our society, in other words, faces precisely the opposite of a digital skills deficit: vast swathes of young people growing up with no skills at all other than digital ones - no social skills, no verbal or written communication skills, no reading skills, no concentration skills, no practical skills. What should education therefore concern itself with? Reinforcing this trend? Or offering to pupils and students the opportunity to free themselves from the yoke of technology and interact with the world around them in purely physical, tangible ways?

We have become very used to thinking about education in instrumental terms - so much so that I think the ship of ‘education for its own sake’ has probably sailed. But granting that education is now primarily valued in terms of its practical usefulness, we should be thinking much harder about the type of usefulness which we want education to provide, and the types of things that we think it will be useful to learn. Teaching students about stuff which they will know about anyway in the fullness of time is to render the exercise redundant even in instrumental terms; if we’ve given up on trying to pass down our intellectual and cultural heritage to the young, the least we can do is provide them with ‘value added’ which they wouldn’t otherwise gain for themselves. I humbly suggest therefore that it’s time to chuck the PCs and tablets out of the window and blow the cobwebs off the stationary cupboard, so that we can provide our young people with the opportunity to think in ways that to them will seem utterly fresh and invigorating, being unmediated by the screens with which they otherwise spend almost every waking moment of their lives.