Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”
For lack of a better term, there is a deeply Orwellian aspect to all of this. Through digitization, we’ve managed to make all of the learning materials completely ephemeral. Textbooks (if you could still even call them that) can be revised on a day to day basis. Controversial subject matter removed or reframed on a day’s notice. You used to need to replace an entire fleet of hard-bound textbooks to do this kind of revisionism, but now you can simply pass a law like New Hampsire outlawing “the dialectical method” and have the changes implemented throughout the entire public education system within a week. And it’s not even a matter of skipping a couple chapters of the textbook in the lesson planning, it simply ceases to exist.
For lack of a better term, there is a deeply Orwellian aspect to all of this. Through digitization, we’ve managed to make all of the learning materials completely ephemeral. Textbooks (if you could still even call them that) can be revised on a day to day basis. Controversial subject matter removed or reframed on a day’s notice. You used to need to replace an entire fleet of hard-bound textbooks to do this kind of revisionism, but now you can simply pass a law like New Hampsire outlawing “the dialectical method” and have the changes implemented throughout the entire public education system within a week. And it’s not even a matter of skipping a couple chapters of the textbook in the lesson planning, it simply ceases to exist.