Growing Up Online: Documentary Broadcast on PBS January 23, 2008

Available for viewing and discussion online at PBS.org. 

As with everything else on TV, while documentaries may educate, their first job is to entertain. That requires drama, heroes, villains, and a story with a beginning, middle and neatly-wrapped-up ending. Growing Up Online teases its audience with a number of ostensible villains – insolent teens, online predators and an immoral cyber culture that distracts teens from the straight and narrow of homework, family and community life. We are provided with lots of hand-wringing material as we learn about the interminable hours adolescents spend online in social networks, chat rooms, vanity web sites and playing online games. We hear about the threats of sexual predators online and about the dangers to personal privacy.

In the end, the villains, if not exactly defeated, are at least contained and understood: teens need respect before they’ll give it; children are not stupid about predators; and cyber culture is seen as a threat to morality mostly because it’s new to parents – like rock and roll to the grandparents of today’s kids.

Growing Up Online is definitely a valuable documentary but anyone invested in holistic education reform will be struck by its status quo conceits about child socialization, families, community and schools.

Once learners were divided from workers, the dynamics of group psychology came into play with adults rallying around the totem of stability – work, family, culture, etc – and adolescents adopting the totem of “whatever is new” – jazz, rock and roll and, today, communications technology. It’s an “us against them” conflict sustained with images and rituals. After a hundred years, it feels normal.

The second conceit of Growing Up Online is in the assumption that changing schools with technology will make schools more attractive to students and thus improve learning. Well, maybe, if e-learning is a way for people to learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it. But I am dubious of learning technology as long as it’s just delivering the same old stuff in new ways. The challenge isn’t to make the current curriculum more fun for students; it’s to support learning that is personally meaningful to each student. One size does not fit all. The current system fails too many students because it puts them all on an assembly line and, at each stop, tries to cram in knowledge whether they’re interested and ready or not. The currently envisioned use of technology in education is a red herring. It says we can deliver more of the same with more ruthless efficiency. The problem, however, is not with efficiency, the problem is with more of the same. We’ve created a perverted game of social engineering with too many so-called losers (children who dropout because they have learned to hate learning) and too many so-called winners (academically successful freaks who are emotionally and socially retarded.)  We’ve lived with this perversion for so long it’s now normal and it’s difficult for most people to consider that there might be alternative kinds of education.

From the holistic perspective, the best hope in technology is that it will allow children to choose what they want to learn when they want to learn it. Unfortunately, proponents of technology in schools seem to think that pimping the current curriculum with electronic whiteboards and podcasts will improve academic scores. Perhaps it will but grades are another conceit.

Academic scores, like any other score, are parts of a game, which is to say they’re not inherently or deeply meaningful to students. Since winning is more valuable than honesty in this game, it’s okay for students to cheat as long as they don’t get caught. We witnessed in the documentary new technologies appearing both to aid cheating and to catch it. As long as academic and financial scores are the most important goals, there is little incentive to help students learn ethics but lots of incentive to grow both sides of a new cheating technologies industry.

Aligned with the problems of cheating, are those connected with anonymity and assumed identities online. The documentary made the point that teens are able to try on new personalities in chat rooms or on their Facebook pages, presenting themselves with a daring normally absent in real life. Family and community tend to dampen outrageous behaviour. Online, though, you can always find a group that will mirror and support the most extreme behaviour. In many cases, that’s good. Gay and transgendered adolescents, for instance, can find support amongst peers they’d never find easily in real life. Unfortunately, white supremacists and jihadists can find support too.

What’s more important, so-called at risk teens can find vast numbers of their online peers to provide uncritical support for their most juvenile and self-destructive actions. In the documentary, a teen resented his mother for exposing to parents his friends’ rowdy and drunken behaviour caught in an online video.

The lesson teens learn from this is to invest their time in a culture of anonymity divorced from family and community. While protecting them from censure, it unfortunately also insulates them from beneficial cultural and life challenges. The teen-adult breach has been that way, of course, for a hundred years but the internet exacerbates the divide and the cultural inbreeding that follows. And, of course this behaviour carries on into adult life where adults conspire to hide their shameful activities from others, especially their children.

Supported by peers and unchallenged by mature or contrary thinking, adolescents gorge themselves on fast and easy amusements. We can see the results: sedentary lives, obese bodies, short attention spans and a need for immediate gratification. Even in their online games, we see evidence that any sense of work ethic is in danger. Game cheats (built-in commands that ensure the player never loses) are popular as are third world ringers (hired guns who will play for you and take your game to higher levels than you could reach alone.) The object isn’t so much to win by deception as it is to simply avoid all the learning that would normally have to be done the hard way.

Game producers and hungry young men in the third world might be justified in exploiting our youth but why expect it from schools and teachers? The rush is on though to adopt more technology in schools to make learning the same old meaningless crap more fun, faster, and to paraphrase one teacher in the film “that’s what students are accustomed to and that’s what they expect.”

Well, it’s certainly faster than building a strong, respectful mentoring relationship with each student and perhaps it’s easier than supporting self-directed learning. Based on my own innate biases, though, I have a suspicion that proponents of education technology are being seduced by the bells and whistles of instant gratification and by their own fears of the intense personal sharing required for real learning. By pushing the use of technology to support a dysfunctional learning system, they’re modelling - for students - behaviour that trivializes and commoditises learning and relationships.

Parents who condone technology as a crutch for a dying system are just adding to the distance between themselves and their children. The first step taken long ago was to meekly surrender their children to the care of strangers for eight hours a day. At least, with teachers, though, there was some hope the child would get emotional nurturing from a caring member of your community. Technology proponents say that teacher jobs are safe; the computers are just for support. With every fiscal crisis, though, you can be sure live teachers will be seen as increasingly redundant as long as computers seem to be keeping the grades scores up.

Losing teachers isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. The dream of holistic education is to foster self-directed learning. Teachers would still have a place but it would be radically redefined. Without an assembly line curriculum, their function would largely be to help children learn for themselves. Without separate institutions for learning, they might not even have a distinct title since everyone in a community would be responsible for nurturing learning. Instead, for instance, a factory worker or office manager might make time in their schedule to share his or her knowledge with a child or small group eager to learn about their business. Along the way these children would learn whatever arithmetic or other knowledge was critical to that job – perhaps by teaching themselves with e-learning tools or by finding a specialist coach.

With the perverted goals of the current dysfunctional system and parental bafflement over technology in schools, the common response is to surrender to expert opinion – those selling technology. Unfortunately, families and communities are surrendering before they even ask themselves “Is this a game we really want to play? Or “Are we really so out of touch that we are unqualified to say what kind of learning is important?”

Although their children may be thoroughly conversant with video games, chat rooms and social networking, we have to remember those are new languages, not necessarily better languages. Adolescent mastery of communication technology is a function of disposable income and time and the value placed on it in that subculture. It’s another conceit to think adults can’t learn new technologies because they’re somehow hardwired to old ways. In fact, they could if they had the desire to fritter time and money on such trivial pursuits. Although teens are proud of their techno mastery, they don’t understand what’s really going on – they’re being programmed. They don’t recognize that they’re dupes of social marketers profiting hugely from their herd instinct.

The skills and environments they are choosing to master are unlikely to serve them well in the future. Instead, their learning – no, make that their programming – will serve the needs of corporate predators. Like TV audiences, today’s teens are being lulled with electronic bells and whistles and packaged entertainment into a dazed stupor, making it easy for programmers to sell their eyeballs to big business. A few kids – the future producers, entrepreneurs and community builders - may be learning to build web sites and to program or to write for the web but the rest are just consumers in training.

The cost of this programming and the resulting behaviour? Off the top of my head, I can point to a few effects: sedentary and obese people, wanton consumption and environmental despoliation, demise of democracy and community participation, surrender of independent thinking, oil wars, etc. Popular entertainment and education conspire to create malleable, unreflective consumers.

The political impact of a programmed and herded populace is particularly frightening. Independent thinkers are ostracized in a monoculture. While we are learning from environmental studies that we need to protect biodiversity in our crops and in nature generally, we are not affording the same protection to the diversity of ideas in our community. Huge conglomerates are gobbling up media of all sorts to squeeze out inconvenient voices, ideas and truths. And when the overpowering voice of a monopoly says the sky is falling, no doubt many people will become frightened and compliant. They will buy the lie and the protection of whoever sounds strongest, they will surrender rights and they will rally with their timid fellows against any enemy their programmers point to just as they did after 9-11.

Current ideas about online technology, education and business as usual are all conspiring to keep things just the way they are for the benefit of the established social order. With so many environmental and social problems, we can’t afford to be manipulated like that anymore. It’s time for revolution.

There were a number of hopeful points in Growing Up Online. A teen recognizes the personal cost of life online and resolves to forsake it for real life. An anorexic girl finds help and support in an online community. Some parents learn to relax and trust their kids to regulate and protect themselves from online predators. These changes come about because both parents and teens learned to respect and listen closely to those who care about them.

But how did they learn to respect and listen like that?

It’s not clear in the doc where that wisdom came from but it is so hopeful that Growing Up Online pointed it out. Growing Up well – online or off - depends on time, energy and honest heart-to-heart communication with people you love. While you may enjoy the company of people in a social network, if they can’t make you cry they can’t help you change i.e. learn and grow. While a teacher may try to seduce students with reason or technology, students will not lower their guard to learn unless there is genuine mutual care. And how can anyone care enough to learn or teach well in a system that inherently means little to them – one that can motivate only with fear and electronic trinkets?