"Cure Them With The Cause Of Their Own Disease"

I have been working as a university lecturer for a few years and I have noticed during this time a distressing major change in the attitude and behavior of students inside and outside the classrooms. I know it sounds like I am an older generation person saying “my time was much better than today”, but I do believe that people working in the field of education have a common problem: students’ careless attitude and their high dependence on technology. 

Recently, during one of my lectures, I have noticed one of my student using his smart phone. When I asked him not to do so, he looked at me as if he wants to say, "your information is available to me on this device, why should I just listen to you". My reaction to him was: "I know that you can google-it but you need to know that it exists first. My job here is to teach you the basics, give you some hints so that you can go and search for the details at your pace". 

Today's youth are a far cry from our generation who grew up technology-naive, with no Internet or computer games. Now a lifetime of reality TV shows, the Internet, and dawn-till-dusk computer gaming has created a generation so used to being bombarded with fast-turnover information, they filter it instantly without paying much attention to its meaning. Hardly any effort is made to read a book, to solve a problem, or even to do a very simple calculation mentally. This generation is not willing to decipher any complicated messages; it just wants simple things. It is looking for an “instant” education.

     Isn't it time to stop being too dependent on the technology we have invented? Already many people are going back to more basic lifestyles. They are limiting their access to television to weekends only and restricting their usage of the Internet to one hour daily. Although a moderate use of the Internet is very important for learning and sharing information, however, an excessive use of it hardly gives us any extra benefit. To the contrary, our computational logic diminishes and physically speaking we become unhealthy.

Now how can we face this problem? We should start by asking ourselves these simple questions: Is technology dominating our lives and killing family conversation? Have we thought about what it would be like to put aside (even for a little while) all the gadgets of our hectic modern lives and go back to a simpler life and see how we would get on? Probably we could trade the TV for a few books, the Internet for some family discussions, and computer games for some real sports and physical activities.

The job of educators is quite important to handle this problem. They must know how to provide the right message to the students at the right time, and in the right way. Since youngsters’ patience and concentration thresholds are lower than what they were 20 or even 10 years ago, taught subjects have to be as obvious and practical as possible to get their messages across. Young people locate information very quickly. But in terms of what they take in, it has to have instant impact because they are so easily bored.

Also, instead of being just passive consumers of the latest technology, we should let them use it in a productive way. As a child I used to turn to my older brother for a help to solve my difficult homework.  He had a very clever way to make me do the work myself by telling me: "I only can give you some hints, you go and try to solve it yourself and then comeback to me for correction". This trick worked very well for me and I guess we could apply it with our students: Teach the basics, give some hints, let them do their tricks by "googling it" or using other tools that we may don't know to learn more about it, and  finish by correcting and discussing their findings. 

Finally, I believe, or at least I sincerely hope, in this way, our youngsters will stop wasting their time on indefinite computer gaming or surfing the Web aimlessly. I will close by stating an old local saying, “we shall cure them with the cause of their own disease”.

[ Drawing by  Hoda Maalouf  ( @MaaHoda ) ]

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