Dear Headteacher. About technology...

Dear headteacher,

Your newsletter article last week about technology was particularly interesting and topical. I've been concerned for some time that our education system treats the subject of technology in a superficial way, while the world that our children will inhabit is being transformed somewhat more profoundly. We teach technology as a subject, or at best as a facilitator, but we don’t focus on the impact it will have on our children's adulthood and the skills they'll need in order to both survive and thrive in a dynamic world increasingly shaped by rapidly accelerating technology change.

There are a number of factors that make their world radically different from ours. The availability of information, as you highlighted, is one, though it is a double-edged sword. The opportunity is the ease with which information is accessible. But the challenge is to discern objective truth (whatever that means, but that’s a separate discussion) from intentional or simply misinformed content.

For instance, faced with a research issue, my boys will often do a Google search and use the first result that comes back. This is not entirely through laziness. It is mostly because they find it hard to conceive that what has been published may be in some way incorrect, and therefore don't see the need to look for more than the first couple of results. Likewise, content on Wikipedia is viewed as factual without reference or analysis of sources. It is a continual topic of discussion that I have with them, but it would be great if the school took a more proactive approach to help educate them in applying critical thinking to what they find online.

You're right in your assertion that the wealth of information available to them wasn't available even 20 years ago to prime ministers and presidents. But to limit the discussion to this is to lightly touch on the tip of the iceberg in terms of how their world is already changing.

Permanent connectivity (which is very different from connection), and its most insidious trait of constant distraction, makes focus much harder, while at the same time the ability to focus becomes a rare and prized asset. Intentional resistance of the continual dopamine hit of an incoming email, or Facebook update, or WhatsApp or Snapchat message, or Tweet, or any of the countless notification-fuelled apps or mechanisms of contact, is lacking in most adults, let alone children. If we’re not careful, they will be neurologically wired to this from an early age.

Likewise, rapidly developing computational ability is being applied today even to areas we thought too intellectually challenging for computers, such as the law, which means that the type of demands on tomorrow’s adult will be very different from those on today’s. Our education should be arming them for the skills of that world rather than those of ours if they are to achieve to their capabilities.

Some of these necessary skills are ones that I believe our school is already working hard at equipping them with, simply because they are perennial skills worth cultivating. For example, our adoption, with many other liberally-minded schools, of meditative practices, if transferred into all areas of their lives should serve them well against constant interruption.

Likewise, contemplation and self-awareness will be in greater demand as reliance on technology increases, and as children (and adults) are increasingly encouraged to measure their worth by social media triggers (likes etc.). That said, it is a fine line between self-awareness and narcissism. I'm pleased to see we haven't adopted some of the practices that would breed the latter, such as every child winning a prize until prizes mean both everything and nothing.

In addition, the attention the school pays to communication skills and the ability to be articulate are very human requirements which are in visible recession in young adults. It is refreshing, though not surprising, to see the likes of Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, talk of empathy being one of the most critical human skills he looks for in new recruits. Those who grow their skills through practice of empathy, communication and connection will become rarer as technology media, stripped of nuance, diverts talk-time away to type-time.

Clarity on the practical implications of values and ethical thinking will play a key role as we move to a more automated world. For instance, you may be aware of the oft cited example that as we move to autonomous vehicles, we will be called upon to codify ethical decisions regarding the probabilities that attach to various potential outcomes of car accidents - who would it be least bad to injure or kill in an unavoidable accident? Or in the field of biotechnology and genomics, we are already facing hard ethical choices with regards to what are the boundaries within which we can alter life. These are questions that scrape the surface of the decisions our children will need to build into the machines of their generation.

There are many areas where I wonder whether there is a strategy in place at the school to help develop our children's skills. Some are about thinking processes, others about attitudes, and others about deepening their humanity. For instance:

• the very skill of learning, and supporting each child to identify their best way of doing this effectively, as the relative importance of continual learning rather than fact retention increases;
• critical thinking to help with discerning information from the flood that is too readily available;
• logical thinking, and the construction of arguments, to help not only with shaping what they do, but also to deepen their facility to understand technology;
• creativity and innovation, which may be the start of processes that could then be handed over to technology for the more predictable processes of delivering the innovations;
• empathy with other humans, many of whom they will only ever interact with via technology, and displaying this in their communications;
• the processes for getting things done in a world where the gap between thinking and creating is shrinking - the art of rapidly planning, executing, inspecting and adapting;
• the human trait of curiosity to see what positive outcomes can be created from the rapid evolution of technology so that it is increasingly a force for good.

It’s a long list. Where some in our generation developed some of these skills, it was usually as a by-product of doing something else, rather than through intentional practice and education. These skills are becoming even more critical, but our education systems still doesn’t focus on them sufficiently.

I don’t write this email as a technological luddite - far from it, I’ve made my career with technology, and am a fan of its capabilities. However, I am also concerned with it developing a momentum whose impact occurs without conscious thought on our side. We need to enable our children to collectively address this so that they remain masters of its direction rather than allowing momentum to make it their master.

A long email - apologies - but it is a topic which is dear to my heart, especially with regards to the futures of our children.

Kind regards,

Iyas AlQasem

Lightly amended, this was an email I wrote to the head of one of my children's schools about 3 years ago after he'd written about the school's approach to technology in a newsletter. He posted my letter in full in a subsequent newsletter for all parents to consider. Just posting here as it's something I feel strongly about, and perhaps other parents should be thinking about.

If it resonates, feel free to copy / paste / amend to your children's head teacher - the more schools actively and deeply think about this, the better. Or share it to other parents you know.