Tech-e-Teaching

I’m looking forward to helping Ray Bradbury exercise his dystopic demons again this year. I have been studying his Fahrenheit 451 with my students for the past six years and invariably he leaves them worrying and wondering, at least a little, about the state of our society.

This is the unit of work that our group of three Grade 8 English/Social Studies teachers has identified for enriching with technology to meet our Course 1 goals, and our teaching goals too, of course.

It amazes me, actually, that students engage at all with Bradbury’s metaphor-manic prose. As I explain to the students, whose eyes have just about rolled to the back of their heads by the end of page 2, this novel is really the author’s soapbox stand. It’s an urgent message he wants to get out to all of us about censorship and conformity, about misguided attempts to find happiness, about loss of humanity, about being entertained into mental oblivion … And about the impact of technology on society. He could have gone into politics, or the music industry, or taken to graffitiing important monuments with his message. But instead he wrote a book. I am pretty blunt – I don’t promise a compelling plot or rich characterization (after all, they have just been indulged with John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men). I tell them they will have to read Fahrenheit 451 as detectives. They need to wade through the clues of Bradbury’s literary puzzle, and take in the sprinkling of storyline on the side, to unearth the rich themes which are strikingly relevant today for a book that was written in the early 1950s about a future imagined in the 24^th century.

For much of the story we see technology perverted to the whims of a faceless, nameless all-powerful government/media monopoly that seeks to maintain control through a devious mix of censorship and entertainment. These “authorities” have taken advantage of the citizens’ increasing laziness about wanting to know what’s going in the world, about wanting to truly learn about life, warts and all. Instead, people are increasingly satisfied to be passive, unquestioning recipients of a wave of empty factoids that are steadily beamed at them through interactive big-screen TVs that have substituted for walls in people’s homes, and also through the radio earbuds (iPod precursors?!) which they wear constantly, plugging up their ears to the point that citizens have learned to lip-read so as to avoid the necessity of dividing their attention between the gripping infotainment streamed directly to their ears and the people they live and work amongst (but with which they don’t really engage). Not only has technology enabled mental laziness, it also facilitates physical laziness by taking over basic daily functions, such as passing the breakfast toast from toaster to plate. It also comes into play when it’s time to pick up the pieces of the citizens’ sad, empty lives. Drug overdoses are so frequent, that doctors no longer attend this kind of emergency; instead, a machine has been invented to do the stomach-pumping and blood transfusions, and it requires only a machine operator to plug it in and turn it on. Citizens are both willingly and unwittingly giving up their autonomy to technology.

Bradbury’s futuristic society seems to be a sad and sorry mix of George Orwell’s 1984, in which the citizens are oppressed by their government, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which citizens are oppressed through their addiction to amusement. It is all very oppressive!

Fortunately, the last stages of the book reveal an alternative future. One rebel has developed a two-way radio earbud so he can stay in contact with his new friend, the protagonist, and so together they can fight the forces of evil. And finally, at the end of the novel, our hero meets a group of outcasts who seem to have technology firmly in hand – quite literally, in the case of the televisions, which have been downsized into hand-held devices, handy for news updates but also easy to put down and walk away from.

This leads me to wonder how easy it is for us to walk away from technology these days. It is a question I put to our students and we have, for a number of years now, conducted our own social experiment with a voluntary technology fast – or, rather, e-media fast.

Every now and then, I read of other teachers and students pondering the same question. Just this month a high school in Portland, Oregon, attempted their own “fast” to prompt the same kind of self-reflection: “Students at Portland’s Lincoln High School unplug, experience life without technology”. Ironically, by switching off, kids are prompted to switch on their consciousness: “You don’t have to go live in the woods, but you have to be conscious about how you use these electronics,” one student reported in the article. “When people are educated about what they’re doing, that’s when they can make a personal decision to change.”

My own students have recounted widely varying personal responses. (We have tried to do it over a holiday period, because some level of laptop use would be required on a typical school day.) Some highly active kids just get on with their physical activity – no big deal. Highly social kids organize get-togethers in real time and space, instead of cyberspace – they plan sleepovers, bake cookies, and hang out together. For some, it takes organization and effort to stave off the boredom and disconnection they feel without technology. For others, it is surprisingly tough and they quit early. A small group invariably reports that they know they couldn’t get on with life without technology, and so what? They don’t have to contemplate a life without technology, anyway, so what’s the point? They are self-confessed addicts, but the addiction seems pretty harmless. Or is it?