It may well be that, beyond the biographical circumstances of the historical Socrates, his paradoxical figure played a crucial literary role in the work of his disciple. That would have allowed Plato to play with several Socrates (ephebe, adult, elder and in the trance of death) and reveal, through him, the nuances of theoretical issues whose echo is valuable to clarify current problems. One of them is the role of technologies in education, as institutional craftsmanship capable of guaranteeing the continuity and development of knowledge of civilized societies. Among them, there is a peculiar artifice, which compromises the notion of truth: writing. In Fedro, Socrates warns about the risk, perhaps inexorable, that writing ends up being the death of thought, whose support is memory (anamnesis), superfluous from now on thanks to that technique. The superb claim to fix the true in stone, tablet, paper ("today's newspaper wraps the fish of tomorrow"), computer disk or cloud can lead to fetishism of the written word, to reduce thinking , alive and tireless tension, something stiff, rigid, inert, mere repetition. And, above all, produce in young people the renunciation of thinking, that is, remembering, fixing everything to the technological support, which will think for them. Today Google, Wikipedia and, in general, the set of data accessible on the network, are used as a pretext against an alleged memorial teaching that, however, is the only one possible, because learning is to recognize (remember) similarities and differences according to common criteria, that precede the individual, and overflow it. The cacophonic amnesia of televisions and the instantaneous vertigo of social networks constitute the exasperation of Socratic fears.
But does the school have to be with its back to the world? The most tempting and obvious answer seems to be negative. What good progressive democrat would defend a school outside the problems of the society of his time? However, as is often the case with pressing convictions that do not consent to the patience of the analysis, something essential may be hidden. Academic education is the preparation for the understanding of complex realities and their administration, manipulation and modification in certain areas. If the world is noise and fury, stupidity and blindness, the school has the obligation to defend the students from that reality to which, without it, they would be condemned. Letting the chaotic brutality of the mundane contaminate the learning processes is a crime of high treason to that oasis of knowledge and study that a classroom would be and that, in most cases, is hardly any more. This requirement of a school open to the world demands indiscriminately introducing social networks in primary and secondary school classrooms. And, at this point, the catechisms of the dominant pedagogy resort to the usual topics, dazzling in their false novelty, but empty and aged in the very act of being enunciated. One of them is belligerently antisocratic: memory is unnecessary to learn; the contents are in the Network. And it is finished, as it will not be able to surprise at this point, with the corresponding anglicism. E-learning condenses recurring myths to which the leaders of social networks in education cling (or sell): collaborative learning (horizontality) and socialization, creativity promotion, learning by doing, non-boring information search, teaching based in the interests of the student (constructivism), self-learning, break with the unidirectional teaching ... It is also said that current students are digital natives so education must speak their language and train in the so-called digital competence.
So the teacher is obsolete, archaic fossil and digital foreigner that has to become (recycled) as a simple facilitator of the tools that the pubertals (all of them Leonardos or repressed Mozarts) will use for their liberating deployment. It has been said for a long time that a new paradigm is approaching in which the teacher is no longer the sole possessor of knowledge, which is available to everyone on the network. The claim of educational innovation feeds on the advertising effectiveness of new technologies and social networks and their emphatic formalism, because the scientific and academic content, on which it depends that what is connected is profitable, sterile or harmful to the learning, they are confined in irrelevance. How to learn is the key , no matter what, says dogma. Skills, competencies and procedures are the decisive, since the contents, data, references, facts, concepts are available to the user and consumer, who is no longer properly a student. And, in such an effective and attractive way, the ignorance and incompetence of subjects with less family, economic and cultural support, more exposed to the neon lights of the cheap pseudo-happiness of electronic devices and applications of immediate consumption, unarmed, are perpetuated. before the demands of the real world. Such educational policy does not imply giving them the opportunity to use new technologies to their advantage. It supposes, on the contrary, to take away the tradition, without which, from it and against it, knowledge is not possible and, therefore, a minimum of personal independence.
Social networks are tools. They offer possibilities of study and research of enormous power, technically abolished and virtually the obstacles of space and time. And, at the same time, it generates the temptation to send the verbalization of feelings, beliefs and opinions to the virtual world, without calm and disciplined reflection, where there is no room for knowledge. When the principles of logic and scientific and philosophical rigor are established and the authority of teachers recognized and accepted, these technologies enrich and promote learning and the dissemination of knowledge. When these principles fail or are weak and are exposed to the mists of the ideological and moral, transcripts of the theological, stoke the sacredness of indiscriminate opinion , a sort of doxolatry (what Lucien Morin calls opinionitis), and reinforce, in instead of calling into question, prejudices, in a noisy convulsion of childhood narcissism. Cognitive biases, which can only be noticed thanks to a relentless self-criticism, for which almost no one has time or strength, find their most shameless celebration in the networks. The banal is displayed without blush on accounts, profiles and walls. The feast of ignorance finds its seat in that undifferentiated and loud magma that venerates the most solemn occurrences of teenagers of all ages.
It would be possible to use new technologies at the service of learning that draws classic procedures and strengthens the timeless rudiments that enable students to learn if the public school enjoys an institutional firmness focused on scientific, academic and technical knowledge and is free of ideological interference and Pseudoscientific contamination. The omnipresence of new technologies is precisely the one that makes it urgent to reinforce those rudiments of study held in certain environments by surpassed and repressive: work habits, regulated repetition, reasoning training through attention and discussion, through writing and reading, systematic research.
The dry reality, impervious to the spectacular audiovisual montages, is that there is no teaching without reading. And it is reading, with all that that implies, that is in danger of extinction when students are exempted from the school itself. Why spend time and effort in reading The Odyssey , The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote if there are summaries, adaptations or tutorials on YouTube that can do it for one? The school no longer enriches in knowledge those who have no other means to prosper. They are deprived of access to the tops of intelligence and beauty. They are weakened happily. Without syntax, without spelling, without disciplined repetitive habits, patient, routine, that allow the understanding of what has been read, it is impossible not to be easy prey to the distortions of the media and the vain temptation to have too much faith in oneself.
Absorbed by the trivial use of mobile devices, the time of many students and young people shrinks and ends up dissipating in nothingness not because life is short, but because, as Seneca formulates, we make it short we accelerate its pace based on give value to the most insignificant and ephemeral.
José Sánchez Tortosa is a Doctor of Philosophy, professor and writer. Among others, he is the author of The Professor in the Trench (The Sphere of Books) and The Pedagogical Cult. Criticism of educational populism (Akal).
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Columnists
- Youtube
- Health
EditorialHigh blow to BBVA's reputation
The graphic aim
Nothing in writing Sister, they won't believe you anymore