Closing the barn door twenty years after the horse got out

My teaching career left port in 1995, when laptops were a novelty and cellphones where seldom seen, except amongst school board admin, who were the earliest of early adapters. That was always a head-scratcher. When some school board wanker was tooling around Grey-Bruce, they were never more than 15 minutes away from a school, where they could use the phone to their hearts content. But what if they had to call head office in between those 15 minutes? After all, as everyone knows, school board superintendents do a lot of really important stuff. Mainly, they are responsible for liaising with other school board superintendents, and also with the Ministry of Education! They are the very foundation of our education system! They obviously have a lot of high-end responsibilities that can’t wait 15 minutes before the Superintendent for Student Achievement or some equally redundant time-waster makes it to the nearest school. Once the top-level school board worthies embraced cellphones, the die was cast. There was no turning back. I began to notice the impact by the late nineties, mainly because teenage girls would erupt, mid-lesson, into sobs of grief because their boyfriend had just terminated their relationship via old-school flip-phone. Then, when smart-phones took over, things really went for a shit. That’s when every research question you ever assigned became Wikipedia copy-and-paste. And as smart-phones got smarter, things only got worse. To be fair, there was resistance to abdicating our responsibilities as educators in favour of big tech. But we were very much in the minority. Every time you brought the matter up at a staff meeting, you’d be drowned out by the kool-aid drinkers who would regale you with the many studies, inevitably funded by big tech, that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that more tech in classrooms was the future of learning. The template was established by the leadership of the school board. Fast forward to today. In the last few years before I retired, I could walk down any hall in my school, and see that many of the teachers and most of the students were on their cellphones. Of course it was all in the name of “learning.” Too bad reading and math scores have been dropping precipitously since we turned education over to big tech. Twenty years after I was calling bullshit on our rush into big tech-enabled imbecility, it’s become an “issue.” The government is going to “crack down” on cellphone use in classrooms. Good luck with that!