What the heck is going on in grade school these days? I for one have no clue. I make a point of staying away from kids. They’re loud, overly inquisitive and slightly smelly. If I’m not related to a given child, I’d rather they just move along and harass someone else. That said, I’m deeply concerned about what happens to kids. I worry about education. I want Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes off the shelves at Safeway, I want Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in the Grade 10 curriculum, and I want everyone to please admit that the Scopes trial settled the issue of teaching evolution once and for all. This country — or, more broadly, this style of civilization — means a lot to me. For all its problems, humanist — dare I say social — democracy is a lot better than the other systems human beings have come up with in their short history. I like the idea that we’re supposed to get to say what we want to say and do what we want to do so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I like even more that we take care of one another and work together on collective endeavors grand and mundane. Maybe it’s because I like to think that humans are fundamentally decent social beings — or maybe it’s just because I worry about what’s going to happen to me when I’m old. Either way, kids are the lynchpin. At some point, I’m going to get tired and senile and need some help. In the meantime, I’m going to try to make things better — for me, for my elders and for the new people coming up. I think it’s in our genes to want to care for one another this way. But that’s another discussion. What’s at issue here relates more to another belief of mine, namely that crime and mendacity and betrayal and intolerance are all basically consequences of the confusion and ignorance and lack of perspective that come about as a result of bad design decisions.
Yes, I just said that all the evils of the world are there because of poorly thought-out design. And no, I’m not going to qualify that statement with any provisos or back away from it in any way. For the purposes of this text, you, the reader, can assume that I am going to keep on believing this theory until I’m old and grey and in need of the medical care that I’m probably not going to have. So settle in and run with it for a while — at the very least, it’ll be worth a chin-stroking laugh or two.
The theory goes like this. Back in the day when it was just caves and fires and ochre painting, “design” as we know it had a fairly minimal impact on human life in comparison to, say, saber-toothed tigers, disease, interspecies warfare, starvation and so on. At some point in our very early pre-human history, we made a kind of genetic deal with the devil. This deal stipulated that, in exchange for mitigating and even overcoming the often nightmarish realities of animal life on planet Earth via the use of larger forebrains and therefore tools and language and metaphor, we would spend eternity struggling (recursively(ad(infinitum))) to understand and mitigate and overcome the emergent anti-human effects of our technic. What we didn’t and couldn’t know was that we were and are and always will be a part of something larger, and that the dividends of peace and longevity and health we stood to receive as a result of our embrace of toolmaking were a pittance in comparison to the benefit that would be reaped by the tools themselves — namely that they came to exist at all and that their existence demanded the coming-into-being of more tools. Such is the material destiny of the Earth, the machine and the post-human. This is our inheritance. And this is why design is so fucking important.
Our present situation is one wherein we find ourselves at the mercy of a very different kind of ecosystem than the one our forebearers encountered when they descended from the trees. For us — and I mean all of us, not just the West or the “technologically-advanced” countries — we must contend daily with the emergent properties of a designed world that are just as mercurial and deadly as the snakes, tigers and disease of the “natural” world. That is: good intentions pave the road to hell. The aggregate of our design decisions, imbricated in time and space, give rise to all manner of horrors. Consider the canonical example of Christianity (and yes, I know this is broad and something of a cliche, but still–). Here we find many different designed systems interacting and overlapping: words designed to heal and comfort get repurposed and redesigned by agents who believe that order and control are moral imperatives in a world teetering on the brink of chaos; this repurposing — both by design and by accident — divides and antagonizes people along ethnic and religious lines; conflicts emerge wherein both sides feel they have the moral upper hand; and who among us well-meaning beings wants to stop a fight if we know that what we’re fighting for is right? Out of this feedback loop emerges Crusades and Inquisitions and witch-burnings and the vast unknowable network of misunderstandings and confusions and inherited ignorances that, within our increasingly elaborate design ecosystem, serve as the powder for so many terrible explosions.
Which brings me back to grade school. In places where such things exist, we must confront once again the fundamental paradox of our existence as designers: designing a curriculum enables us to mitigate some of the problems we face today (most of which are the result of earlier design decisions) by equipping children with the conceptual and practical tools they will need to prosper in the world; but in so doing, we will by necessity be creating new design artifacts — texts, systems of thought, problem-solving approaches, visions of the world — which will inevitably interact with the larger design ecosystem in unpredictable ways and will (equally inevitably) produce fresh and potentially more complex problem sets which we will have to face tomorrow. Hence my earlier suggestion that technology is a deal with the devil and we are already in Hell. So, what to do?
Let it be said that I’m not capable of answering this question. I don’t think anybody is. It’s turtles all the way down. But it’s not in my (or our) nature to give up (and what the hell else are we supposed to do anyway in our short time on this isolated outpost?). What I’m good at is reframing things, creating thought-games and provoking inquiry. I’ve tried to do that here, but it feels like it’s not enough. I need something tangible — a lattice on which to hang all this optimistic pessimism. So I’ve gone to the source. I’ve spoken to a child.
Lila is a bright, thoughtful and frankly hilarious 8 year-old attending Pine Hill Public School in Toronto. She’s also my god-daughter, meaning I think she’s none other than the smartest, coolest and most fun kid in the world. That said, I think Lila is having a pretty normal childhood for a girl of her generation, class and geographic provenance. Pine Hill is a typical urban school. Class size is large — Lila says that there are 32 kids in her class, making for a chaotic and often impersonal learning environment — and funding is limited. When I spoke to Lila last week, I asked her questions about her learning experiences at school and at home. I wanted to know about how different types of design affected her growth as a human being. In particular, I wanted to understand the roles various forms of technology — computers, interactive media, social media, and so on — play in her childhood. What I learned surprised me. I expected to find that Lila was living in a very different educational environment than the one I lived in during my childhood; instead, I discovered a few strong differences and a whole lot of similarities. After conducting the interview, I walked away realizing that school systems — even ones in supposedly progressive districts like Pine Hill — are still only at the very beginning of redesigning the way they work to adjust to the changes in the broader communications and technology landscape. This reinforces the sense of risk/opportunity that pervades much of the literature on this subject, and raises a few key questions that I will try to articulate below.
“This is great, I can get out of homework,” was Lila’s initial response when I asked her if she would be willing to answer a few questions about computers, school and games (ironically, the discussion we were about to have was homework, my homework, for Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies graduate seminar at USC). The first question I asked was about how Lila uses computers at school. Here’s what she said:
The only time we use computers at school is when we have computer class. We learn about how computers are made and, like, how to work computers, like how to turn it on and off, searching, Google. But it’s a bit boring because I already know about all this stuff. So we’ve haven’t really learned anything new. But we get to play games sometimes, so it’s okay.
I suppose it’s only natural that schools continue in their 80s/90s mentality of separate-classes-for-separate-activities, but the notion that schools still have a cordoned-off “Computers” class came as a surprise. As I hinted above, Lila is a smart kid; I would not hesistate to describe her as an exceptionally fast learner. That said, she is far from privileged. She is the only child of a working single parent, and while she definitely gets enough to eat and is lucky enough to have access to a computer at home, she can hardly be described as well-off. In the context of Pine Hill, a relatively affluent area in Toronto, Lila’s mom is probably at the low end of the scale when it comes to wages. If basic computer usage is a familiar thing to someone like Lila, I would suggest that most of the other kids in her class have also been exposed to the fundamentals of Google searching and turning computers on and off. Indeed, when I asked Lila about this, she said “everyone knows how to use computers already.”
Of course, Lila’s got a great mom who spends a lot of time with her teaching her how to safely and wisely use the Web. Not all kids are so lucky. After a certain point, money doesn’t matter nearly as much as attention. At home, Lila’s experience of computers is much different than what she encounters at school. Under the supervision of her mother, Lila gets to do a variety of things online. “I mostly like to go on Google Images and search for panda bears and cute little dogs,” she told me. “Sometimes if a friend comes over we’ll play a two-player game or look at things on YouTube.” But, significantly, it’s not a free-for-all: “My mom won’t let me use Facebook, and I can only watch things on YouTube if they’re appropriate.” (I asked her what she meant by appropriate and she said that “my mom decides what that is.”) Clearly (and much to my satisfaction as a godfather), this is an engaged parent. Equally as clearly, the contrast between Lila’s at-home computer usage and her school Computers class couldn’t be stronger.
When I asked Lila what she thought computers were good for, I got another little nugget of insight into how she navigates between the design ecologies of home and school. While the school-based “official” computer learning is very focused on the computers themselves — teaching technical info like how they work and how to make them do things — there is a lot of lateral/unintentionally-situated computer use in Lila’s educational experience that occurs as a kind of emergent property of her traditional classes.
[Computers] are really good for homework — if you have to search something, it’s like, easy. It tells you lots of facts and clues. Like my mom showed me Wikipedia and I once had this assignment about Ireland, and it gave me all these facts about potatoes and everything… And then I found some videos on YouTube to show. [The Web] really made it easy to do the research and make my project.
Here we see an exemplar of one of the reasons why many educators espouse an inter-/trans-/post-disciplinary approach to integrating new media literacies into school curricula. Lila’s Social Studies class assignment — to research a country and prepare a short report and poster about that country for presentation to the class — was something she probably could have done with books found in her school library. But because her mother had taken the time to show her how to use, reshape and, as it happens, critically evaluate the materials on Wikipedia, Lila developed/expanded some essential new media literacies such as appropriation (meaningfully sampling and remixing media content), transmedia navigation (the ability to follow stories/information across multiple modalities), and distributed cognition (the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities).
In Lila’s case, we see a student who is developing new media literacies through the tandem (but not necessarily coordinated) efforts of a school on the one hand and a parent on the other. Sadly, without the solid parenting that Lila is receiving, these literacies would probably remain underdeveloped, at least as far as the Third Grade goes. At Pine Hill, computers are kept off to the side rather than integrated in a meaningful way as augmentations to existing learning structures. Funding shortfalls, the limitations of teacher expertise and Toronto’s massive population probably account for a lot of this structural problem. As Lila herself notes:
Usually i’m frustrated because there’s like 32 kids in my class. I do better doing my work at home because my mom helps me a lot and we have the computer. It’s hard to get the teacher’s attention. I never get time to finish my work at school. I think i actually would get more work done even if my mom didn’t help me. There are less distractions, less talking, I can actually concentrate. It’s mental at school…
That said, I have trouble laying all the blame here on the economic and political situation within which Pine Hill Public School operates. I asked Lila if her teachers in Social Studies or Math or Science ever used computers in class. She said that they did, but that it was mostly to “show us stuff, like diagrams and things,” much like teachers in my day would use an overhead projector. She told me that there was little to no advice given about how to, say, use the Web to learn more about a science issue or evaluate the veracity of a Wikipedia article about Ireland. The fact that, according to Lila, not very much of that kind of teaching was taking place, suggests to me a fundamental design flaw in the curriculum at Pine Hill — and perhaps in the Greater Toronto Area school system in general. Not every kid has a generous and capable mom like Lila does. A system that relies on such moms does so at its own peril.
Without an integrated approach to new media literacies, schools run the risk of exacerbating the “participation gap” as certain students excel thanks to their parents’ efforts to instill in them basic new media literacies, while others fall behind and aside, lacking the tools necessary to function in the present technological ecosystem. Once again, we find ourselves in a moment where the design decisions of today contain the potential for both enormous reward and extreme danger. We must accept that whatever solutions we find to the perplexing and paradoxical question of “what to do?”, particular with regard to education, will always be provisional. But perhaps this is the larger message implicit in these kinds of discussions — ours is a dynamic self-reflexive world, one wherein everything we create in turn creates us; to resist this dynamism is to deny a fundamental fact of our existence — and denial, as we have seen time and again, has no place in the teaching of the young.