A
friend of mine was recently telling me about the spread of the use of online
degree programs to high school. This was
news to me. I had heard about the growth
of programs through institutions like the University of Phoenix that led to
online college degrees. I knew that you
can learn to do a lot of specific practical tasks through YouTube and other
online sources. And I knew that high schools used computer programs for
specific focused educational purposes. But I had never heard about the kind of far-reaching
educational programs for high school that my friend was talking about.
During
precisely those years when a human being is trying to develop the social
competencies that help him transition from being a child to being an adult, it
is important that an adolescent has ongoing interpersonal communication
practice. And I mean social practice
with three-dimensional human beings in the external world of primary
experience. Lacking opportunities for
such experience, and simply immersing oneself in educational cyberspace will
lead to certain unforeseen consequences.
To
understand the situation of high school online education a little better, we
must review the world of experience that is available on a computer
screen. The computer screen itself is an
empty vacuum of continuous imageless stimuli that would stretch into infinity
if the screen wasn’t contained by a frame.
There is no grounding in this screen.
What the screen does have floating on it are three levels of discrete
stimuli. There are the discrete stimuli
of digital points of light and color.
Together these digital points form configurations that make visual
images and that make words and numbers.
The words and numbers are a means of generating discrete digital data.
On a
basic visual level, there are the visual equivalent of digital ones and zeroes
on the screen. Points and
non-points. The points can cluster
together, but they can’t deep-bond or merge together with one another. They can appear to merge together in a movie
or a television program on the screen, but the images are all clusters of
digital points. There are no flowing,
blendable continual stimuli to bind things together. This is the basic visual experiential pattern
that online high school students have to deal with during the course of their
school day.
In
terms of subject matter, there is another pattern that corresponds to the basic
visual pattern. Online education lends
itself to excerpts of books, short discrete defined pieces of narrative or
expository writing that don’t go into anything in a deep grounded way. They are chunks of cognitive data floating
free of any meaningful grounded larger contexts. Students absorb facts, ideas and literary
images without spending time relating them to contexts that connect deeply to
their lives either in psychological or practical ways.
Yes, students do interact with
programs that get them to actively participate in their education. Students have to respond to questions and to
prompts. But these are defined discrete
responses to defined discrete problems and situations. This is not the way life always is. Life is filled with ambiguity and
contingencies. Many times solutions to
problems are not simple and are tenuous at best. Human teachers can bring this dimension to
class studies through class discussions and through one-on-one
conferences. Primary experience life
situations are filled with flowing blendable continual stimuli that have
ambiguous blurry definition. This can’t
be reproduced in the world of the computer screen. The computer screen deals with defined
discrete digital certainties.
Now from
what I understand, teachers do supervise these programs for their
students. Teachers are present in the
classroom. But the bulk of the daily
work that the students do is on the computer screen.
To
the extent that the computer screen does not contain stimuli – either visual or
cognitive – that reflect the ambiguities of life, students will not be properly
prepared for adult living. They will become
intolerant of the uncertainty and complexity of adult living in the primary
experience world, and feel safer with the certainty and greater clarity of the
cyber world. Their minds will become
molded to mirror the workings of the computer.
And as this happens, they will become less and less capable of
functioning as organic human beings.
Less and less capable of the bonded connections that lead to good solid
love relationships, good solid work relationships, good solid friendships and
good solid community participation.
Even
those modern students who are not in online classes, but who use consumer
technology a lot, are having difficulties forming solid human connections in
the external world. Such students end
up in an intolerable growing isolation in an experiential vacuum. Although some of their isolation is due
simply to withdrawal from the overstimulation of abrasive static stimuli as in
the crowding from overpopulation, noise pollution, air pollution, and, in
general, the accelerated pace of modern life, much of it is due to feeling
overwhelmed by simple bonded connections to other people. And as the students withdraw further into
numbness to escape what are for them the increasingly overstimulating human
situations in the external world, they try to fight that numbness at the same
time by doing self-destructive things like drugs, binge drinking, cutting their
wrists or carrying out attempted suicides.
In the case of the suicides, many of the young people hope that by
warning other people directly or indirectly, someone will save them before it’s
too late. But the sad truth is that an
attempted suicide – one that fails - actually temporarily brings many students
to life, pulls them out of the living death of their numbness.
Other
students just become more successfully robotic from their immersion in consumer
technology. Somehow they find a way to survive
the technological isolation in which they have immersed by taking on the traits
of their technology.
Students
need the massage of human contact. And
human teachers are going to be more successful in putting facts and ideas in
larger contexts, so that knowledge can be taught as a more coherent flow. This parallels the flow of organic life based
in primary experience. This is the way
life should be lived by mammalian human beings.
Having ongoing interactions with teachers and with other students teaches
students to engage the external world, to become active members of other social
groupings like families, clubs, and communities. Ongoing interactions in the primary
experiences of the classroom help students to develop coherent identities
within human structures outside of themselves.
On
still another level, our minds become indications of what we have become as
people. If what our students absorb is
digital points; defined discrete images, facts and ideas; excerpts of books;
random chunks of entities and events floating in an experiential vacuum, then
all this will act as a mirror and an implicit model for how our students will
develop, how their minds will configure.
Lack of coherence in their daily fields of experience, in their worlds
of experience in cyberspace, will lead to lack of coherence in their unfolding
senses of self. And a fragmented sense
of self is not conducive to long-term viability of an organic individual
human. In the long term, fragmented
senses of self pose a real danger to the human race. This is what we have to consider when
something as seemingly innocent as online high school degree programs are
introduced into the lives of many of the people we love dearly, people who look
to us for guidance and protection.
© 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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