More books and less screens. The Swedish conservative government has stepped on the brakes on the digitization of education. It adheres to the theses defended until recently by a multitude of solvent but silent –and silenced– voices, which warned of the uncritical enthusiasm with which politics and pedagogy have succumbed to the fascination for screens and for everything that bears the last name digital. The promised land was not such, so we better rectify. So says the Nordic country’s education minister, Lotta Edholm, after concluding that her country faces a serious risk of turning today’s schoolchildren into tomorrow’s functional illiterates. The recipe to avoid it: more reading by turning pages of paper with your fingers instead of using the mouse.
The decision of the Swedes is as disruptive as the warning of the young man who in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes expressed, in the middle of the crowd, what everyone pretended to ignore: that the monarch walked around naked. Sweden qualifies a minor EU text, but followed closely by the educational community, amending in a practical way part of the pompous and predictable literature that accompanies the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027).
Pressing the stop button also distances Sweden from the bet that countries like Spain are currently making. Sheltered from European funds, the Spanish government and the autonomous regions are injecting one billion euros into digital classrooms, computers and training for students and teachers to improve their skills in these matters, according to information from the National Institute of Educational Technologies and Training of the Faculty.
To this amount, naturally, we must add the ordinary resources that each administration previously dedicated to these issues, in addition to the effort coming from private pockets. Compared with the 60,000 million non-reimbursable from the EU to avoid the risk of structural crisis after the covid – the other 80,000 are credits – it does not seem outrageous. But the question that the Swedes put on the table is whether that substantial amount of money should not be spent in another way, if what is intended is to improve the performance and level of training of our students and also that of teachers.
At the moment, as far as teachers are concerned, the enthusiasm for the courses supported by these funds that they are carrying out to improve and accredit their digital competence is more than limited. Those consulted to write these lines consider them to be between a waste of time and a joke. Although this could be due to a friendship bias and an excess of iconoclasts in my agenda.
Beyond what each government decides, what happened in Sweden has an indisputable virtue: the breach of formal unanimity so that schools continue running like hares after the digital carrot. We already knew that tech moguls decided long ago that their children should study with books instead of screens – excellent companions for other people’s children, but not for their own! – and that in Silicon Valley the top schools flee from tablets and computers. But that warning was not enough for our head educators and rulers. Eccentricities of millionaires!
Hence the importance of a government now getting up from the table. Not so that others must necessarily follow him, but so that they at least stop acting in the way that the famous Vicente did, that man of the popular proverb who, when asked where he is going, always answers “where the people go”.
In the book La Fábrica de cretinos digitales (Peninsula, 2020) –read it, parents and teachers, if you haven’t already done so–, the doctor in neuroscience Michel Desmurget does a wonderful job of approaching the general public of the existing scientific literature , not interested opinions, which warns about the dangers of screens, including those in educational centers. In the text, the author confesses that he cannot explain how so much proven evidence warning about the risks of digitization could be canceled by the crude charlatanism that, in many cases, involves private interests. Perhaps the Swedish government has read Desmurget. Or he may have simply looked up from the screen to see that he doesn’t like the tangible reality behind it.
