Students these days

 Yesterday I read Steven Hales' thought-provoking post about how students have changed (with thanks to Daily Nous for flagging it). Hales has noticed his students becoming significantly worse at reading, writing and basic maths over the course of his 30-year career. And he puts it down largely to smart-phone addiction.

It's an interesting read, and garnered a lot of diverse reactions. I personally don't find his claims particularly mean, unlike some commenters. Undoubtedly the world has changed in many ways over the last three decades, and I also see signs that something is negatively impacting students' willingness/ability to learn. 

I've also noticed students are really reluctant to read for any length of time, and it worries me enormously. Now, its worth me saying that when I was an undergrad, I for sure skipped the set reading as much as anyone. And I loved the subject! It's just that there were lots of other things vying for my attention, and some of the readings were intolerably boring/inaccessible/partially written in Ancient Greek. Mainly, I'm afraid, I was just too hungover.

But on the other hand I did sometimes do the reading, and fairly often loved it. And in general I love reading, I do it for pleasure all the time (especially scifi), and i'm really quick at it - I can speed read as long as I'm interested. And I think all this is at least partly down to how boring the world was when I was a kid. There was nothing to do, remember? On days-long car journeys while my dad listened to the cricket on the radio, and I had no ipad, I would read! On rainy days, outside the few hours of scheduled kids tv, I would read. In bed at night, too hyperactive to sleep, I would read and read and read. 

Now one of my two kids adores a good book, and reads almost every single night. But never during the day. The other kid, despite my efforts, would rather play make-believe and rarely picks up a book. Even I notice my attention span may have shrunk. And I certainly look at my phone too much, in a habit that fills vacant slots of time with a mindless carousel of brain-dead apps. Those slots of time that probably used to be filled with boredom that became a flash of insight, or a just-in-time remembered birthday. 

And I'm increasingly sold on the sense that this doom scrolling, which we think of as giving us a little break, a healthier alternative to nipping outside for a cigarette, is tiring us out. It's depleting our limited daily stock of concentration, of curiosity, of dopamine or whatever.

And even I don't know how to curb it.

But Hales doesn't say a great deal about AI or about covid. And they need to be part of this conversation too.

The students in university right now were about 12-16 during the UK school closures (these added up to around 9 months in total). During this time, some of them had their GCSEs and A-levels cancelled. Most of them will have had their classes moved online. All of them were put on lockdown and prevented from contact with the outside world, except online. Physical reality was replaced by their smartphones, at this point, for many. Their phones became their only conduit with the external world. And they had a formative experience in everything they thought was dependable changing. All their expectations, all the routines and rules suddenly evaporating. No wonder they struggle to take the idea of future consequences for bad grades seriously. No wonder they're naive about how knowledge works or who they can trust. No wonder they feel awkward talking to each other IRL.

An optimistic side of me hopes that these impacts are partly time-limited. That once the younger kids filter through to uni, who were less impacted by lockdowns, some things will go back to normal. But will the current cohort ever recover? Are we doing enough to support their life chances in this regard?

A recent student said to me in a seminar, that she wishes that my module involved more time of me talking, and less time of discussion, or of reading. She said, in all earnestness, that she feels she learns more when i'm talking. This was in response to me offering students the chance to decide how to run seminars by the way - whether in pair work or whole-class discussion. It's a fairly standard design - one hour of lecture per week, and one hour of small group discussion. She was a strong and diligent student. But she earnestly felt that the most productive way for her to learn was to listen to me and write down what she heard. And others agreed.

We had a fairly long discussion aferwards about this. I think some, maybe Hales, would point to this as another example of students being too lazy or anxious to want to put any real work in to learning. But what I realised, in talking it through, was that the students honestly had a bit of a defective understanding of what knowledge is, through no fault of their own. 

They'd come out of a school system in which teachers are tasked with giving them a curriculum - a nationwide sort of bible of truths - and helping them to ingest it as accurately as possible so they can pass exams. Sure, its not only regurgitation at A-level, or even GCSE, as far as i remember - they have to apply their learning to prove they understand it. But nonetheless, it is all taught on the assumption that there is some set body of wisdom that has been government-authorised, put in textbooks, that they need to absorb.

I tried to explain to the students that much knowledge isn't really the sort of thing where its ok to trust that there is a government-approved version that adults have agreed on, and their job is just to acquire it. This was a course in philosophy of race, incidentally. I tried to explain that most things are contested, and that if they rely on one person or organisation to act as a conduit for that knowledge, then they are disempowering themselves. They are handing over too much trust to that conduit. I'm not suggesting they shouldn't give epistemic authority to university lecturers, of course. Just that all perspectives are fallible, partial, incomplete. And that only by reading things for themselves, and comparing takes from multiple perspectives, can they truly hold on to their own autonomy.

Which brings me onto AI, of course. Much of the worry about AI in academia has been focussed on assessment - how to stop them all cheating, and grades becoming meaningless. But i have a slightly different worry, about what's its doing to  everyone's understanding of knowledge and its power.

I totally get that it seems inefficient and unpleasant to wade through lengthy readings when you can ask an increasingly sophisticated AI to give you a precis, even to read it out to you while you drive around. The problem is, if people lose the reading muscle, there be an ever-dwindling number of people who actually have the ability to check such a precis, or to contribute to the data sets from which they're drawn. We'll be increasingly outsourcing our cognitive faculties to machines, and to the small set of people who run them. 

Maybe that seems fine - I like outsourcing my sense of direction to googlemaps for example, it frees up valuable real estatate in my head, i think.  But when it comes to knowledge, to the ever-contested narratives about what reality is and what has happened, who did what and how to behave.........if we outsource this to machines, and lose our thinking-muscles in the process, then we increasingly hand control of that narrative over to an ever-smaller set of people. To decide which values to prioritise in constructing that narrative. We increasingly surrender our personal autonomy, our judgment, our ability to frame the world for ourselves.

In Fahrenheit 451 the government bans books and sets them on fire. A few brave rebels escape, and commit to saving books by memorising them, and sharing them around campfires. In our sad future world, instead, the books are all still there, its just that noone is bothering to read them anymore. Except i guess some people will still bother to read them. It's just that the democratising forces of literacy will be reversed, and we'll return to the times when only a small number of people know anything. In the Middle Ages, these were priests and monks, and they actively prevented other people from sharing their knowledge, by keeping it all in Latin etc.  Who will the literate minority be in the future? Will they be self-chosen rebels, or elected and controlled by the seats of power? 

I shudder. Please let's all keep reading, somehow!