On February 6th I took part in a panel at Södertörn University discussing ‘the digital backlash’ in education – the growing trend to ban smartphones from schools, prioritise traditional books over screens, and generally roll-back the digitisation strategies of the 2010s. Here is a summary of my opening remarks.

**

There are certainly many good reasons to curb the digitisation of schools. For example, the past ten years have seen schools subjected to an onslaught of digitisation – becoming locked into digital platforms, services, subscriptions and infrastructures that weaken an individual school’s autonomy and ability to deliver on their core public education mission. There are also undeniably a range of harms for some young people associated with excessive use of digital devices and social media. The current mode of digital excess is also wholly problematic for a bunch of less obvious reasons – including the disproportionate power of tech corporations to determine what goes on in classrooms, as well as the environmental harms arising from hyperscale data centres.

As such, there might well be a need for a digital backlash … but not the one that we are currently seeing in many countries around banning smartphones, banning social media, från-skärm-till-pärm and similar reactionary moves. Indeed, the digital backlash currently being pushed is inherently conservative in nature – appealing to base concerns over ‘getting back to basics’ and making tech a scapegoat for all sorts of wider structural problems. In many countries the current digital backlash plays into broader educational ‘culture wars’ and wider moves against largely imaginary bogeymen. We are living in times when there is popular support for getting ‘woke’ identity politics out of classrooms, banning books and establishing a cultural canon, stopping drag queens reading to children in libraries and so on. Thus, popular support for banning devices and social media is often expressed through reassuring emotive strains of needing to ‘do this for our children’ and an underpinning desire to get back to simpler times

So, my own personal stance is that the driving values and ideologies of the current digital backlash mean that I am immediately suspicious of its intent and good faith. In contrast, some critical, left-leaning, progressive voices are openly embracing the digital backlash as a welcome development – an opportunity to get Big Tech, surveillance capitalism and other such ills out of schools by any means necessary. However, I would argue that progressive sympathies with this digital backlash are misguided. This backlash is clearly not concerned with any of the critical issues that one might raise over surveillance capitalism or Big Tech hegemony. Instead, this backlash is wholly  focused on maintaining the status quo – playing into an individualising ‘blame’ discourse and doing nothing to get rid of some of the most problematic technologies in education (institutional surveillance, monitoring, control, ‘cop tech’ and so on).

Indeed, the primary focus on curtailing students’ personal access to technologies means that these moves are likely to have a range of disadvantaging impacts. For example, this backlash makes the prospect of developing  forms of ‘critical digital literacy’ in schools even more difficult. There are many examples from the field of media education of how schools can be places where young people can collectively learn to engage with smartphones, social media and other potentially problematic media along responsible, reflective and resistant lines. This is much more difficult to achieve when these technologies have been explicitly removed from the classroom. 

In the longer term, we also know that bans on devices are likely to have a disproportionate impact on the already disadvantaged and marginalised students. The city-wide phone ban in NYC schools during the 2000s were subsequently rescinded partly on grounds of equity. It turned out that middle-class, well-resourced schools were enacting the ban in lenient ways, often turning a blind eye to transgressions. In contrast,  working-class, poorly-resourced schools were more rigid and punitive in their enforcement. It also transpired that having access to a device during the school day was a crucial means for some groups to navigate their way around education – students who might be dis/abled, neuro-diverse, CALD, or simply needing to manage non-traditional and complex home lives. The NYC experience showed how digital devices can be an important enabler for some young people to actually engage in schooling. 

So, if not the current digital backlash then what do I want? I would like (perhaps idealistically) to hope that me might take current enthusiasms for a ‘techlash’ as a chance to collectively reimagine digital technology – not get rid of it altogether. While we have been relentlessly conditioned to accept that ‘there is no alternative’ to the current dominance of Big Tech firms, platforms, AI and other features of the current digital landscape, there is a growing appetite to reimagine digital technology in different forms and with different values. In short, my ideal backlash would be to think of alternate ways to design future forms of educational technology that explicitly support the values of public education … that are designed to empower the most excluded … that support creativity, collaboration, communication, criticality and other desirable characteristics.

The most effective way to imagine and enact this sort of genuinely progressive digital rethinking is to make it a collective endeavour. We need to start ongoing conversations around the sorts of education that we might want as a society, and the forms of digital technology use that might support this. We need to make the question of what digital technologies we want to see in our schools the focus of collective reflection and discussion. Crucially, these are conversations that need to be genuinely inclusive – that engage with the voices of those who are apathetic, alienated or stubbornly ambivalent, as well as those voices who already are heavily invested in having/not having tech in classrooms. Above all, these are conversations that need to properly include young people themselves. It is notable to that the current digital backlash pays little sustained attention to the voices of young people – especially the most vulnerable and most marginalised.

That said, it is important not to wholly dismiss the current push for what I have characterised a conservative backlash. These current moves to ban, block and lock-down young people’s digital practices are consistently popular with parents (and therefore popular with politicians). They are also looked on favourably by some teachers and even some students, who are also receptive to some sort of digital curtailment in schools. Such reactions need to be taken seriously. We need to work to understand why there is popular support for current bans and then work over better ways of actually addressing the underpinning needs and reasons. However strongly one disagrees with the digital backlash, we cannot simply dismiss this as another wrong-headed ‘moral panic’. Instead, we need to take seriously the pain points that people are reacting to.

So, I would certainly support a collective, considered reflection on what relationships we want to see between technology and education. However, this needs to be something that is not driven by fears of what we don’t want, but more hopeful expressions of what we do want. These are changes that need to be worked out and socialised ‘on the ground’ rather than dictated from above. This will involve listening more to young people. This will involve educators speaking up about the benefits of having devices in their classrooms. This will require thinking of ways to deal with the tech companies that design, sell and profit from these problematic products – how do we think that Big Tech and ed-tech industries need to be regulated? If there are genuine concerns over the mental health impacts of excessive screen-time then what role should parents, families and care-givers play in taking responsibility for their children’s exposure to the harms of device and social media use? There is a lot to talk about there, and there are no easy answers and quick fix responses. The backlash starts here!