Stop and ask what technology is doing to Maine students
Maine just might have the best Latin motto. Dirigo, “I lead,” contains much that is true of this state and much of which to be proud.
There are the seafaring associations, but Dirigo’s unique status as a single word and singular verb especially seems to fit Maine’s leaders, whether it’s Rep. Jared Golden going against Democrats, Gov. Janet Mills against President Trump, or Margaret Chase Smith versus Joseph McCarthy. And Maine is first in the nation to greet the sunrise.
Some of its other firsts, however, impress less.
Google’s “AI Overview” tells us that Maine was first to pass a Prohibition statute and the first to implement statewide 1-to-1 computing in schools. As a language teacher, this second instance of leadership concerns me. Maine also leads the nation in plummeting reading scores.
Importantly, Dirigo can also mean “set straight.” Such leadership requires knowing where one’s been; we must start by going back.
It was the early 2000s, before this year’s graduates were born, the floruit of the Nokia Brick. I was in a Vermont middle school in zip-offs, trying to write in complete sentences. Legislation was enacted to implement the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) and, in 2002, Maine public schools started handing out laptops. MLTI is, even now, the country’s largest 1-to-1 program and ever expanding. Should it be?
I’ll admit I am arriving late to the debate about computers in school in Maine. I only began teaching here in 2017. That year, Maine Public ran a series about MLTI that raised concerns, but aside from this and a few pieces in the wake of then-Gov. Paul LePage’s budget-driven attacks, only the rarest worry about 1-to-1 bubbled up to the surface.
The Maine Education Policy Research Institute has not formally reviewed 1-to-1 in 10 years. This UMaine- and Legislature-backed institute once served as MLTI’s evidence-based oversight, but its most recent laptop studies date back to 2015. Incredibly, while AI was taking off like a Falcon 9 rocket and Google was establishing itself as the sine qua non of teaching and learning, Maine educators got 10 years of deafening silence.
MLTI does still work with external evaluators. When MLTI 2.0 trundled out in the midst of COVID, the DOE began working with the American Institutes for Research (AIR), since which time AIR has been dutifully producing MLTI’s annual reports. Does this count as “watching the watchmen”? Interested readers can read the reports for themselves. They’ll just have to request them from the DOE.
General concerns, of course, have been mounting about tech use in schools, particularly around phones and regarding COVID-19, but research interests rarely extend beyond student attention or mental health. These are not unimportant topics, and if the alternative is whistling and drumming on desks then I am grateful we are discussing them. But recent classroom experience urges me to wonder whether they don’t distract us from technology’s deepest hooks in young learners.
To really get at this, we must turn to a source of insight often shunned by an establishment that’s dazzled by survey data and books with “brain” in the title. We need philosophy. Charles Taylor writes recently and beautifully about the relationship between language and human consciousness, and it is when we have in our grasp his notion of language’s “constitutive” function that we start getting a handle on the problem with educational technology today.
In “The Language Animal,” Taylor argues for a holistic view of language that is bound to our meanings and purposes so intimately that we cannot understand any aspect of human cognition without reference to it. Pushing against the tendency to conceive of thought as the email and language as pressing “send,” Taylor shows how language is far more integral and essential to human mental life — what he calls “constitutive.” Language does not merely shape thought. It’s more like the shape of thought. It’s implicated in the email, the software and the whole operating system.
Taylor also explores how the human language capacity puts us on an entirely different plane of existence relative to other mammalian sign-learners. With language, we conjure whole new worlds. New questions and problems appear only in the light of acquired speech; new vocabularies open up alien terrains and distant conceptual horizons where we find our footing and bearings.
Language, to summarize Taylor, is the realization, both the occasion and the basis, for mental life as we know it and really, all human possibility. Without it we lose what distinguishes and ennobles us as a species.
It is from here that the relentless inertia behind classroom tech integration begins to look strange.
What has been happening in ed tech since Augusta went on autopilot and stopped asking the only question that matters? In that 2017 Maine Public series about MLTI, we glimpse even then the contours of an emerging situation any bibliophile would have a hard time calling “news.” A teacher worries about academic misconduct. A ninth-grader can’t imagine school without his device. Without it, he would have “dropped English.”
To what threat was the student responding by clutching his laptop so dearly? It should be remembered that technology has advanced since 2017. Those nodding off at the helm should wake up to investigate just what exactly it is that’s compromised when a developing mind is cut off from the machine that’s been eagerly auto-filling search queries, and suggesting predicates to subjects, and not simply fixing spelling but reworking writing at the sentence and paragraph level, with considerations made for tone and voice and audience.
Student computers are infested with plug-ins and extensions and workarounds that hoard learners’ communicative burdens and habituate them to consider these incursions indigenous to the creative process. Somehow, though, every pronouncement about learning technology from Augusta sounds like it’s been cribbed from a vendor brochure at an ed tech trade show.
If Taylor is right, however, the situation is dire. Language’s entanglement in the development of agency and selfhood calls for the utmost caution, not “all ahead full.”
Here’s an important question we couldn’t have asked in the Palm Pilot era, when this was all decided.
What remains of a learner when their language capacity has been usurped?
Set aside the implicit usurper lurking darkly on the back-end like an anglerfish, dangling cheap email in front of district leaders. What is it Maine children stand to lose here? What is it they’ve already lost?
The Maine DOE is uniquely positioned to lead the nation and revisit these basic philosophical and empirical questions. They would be leading simply by asking publicly. In a perfect world, answers and evidence would precede the distribution of MacBooks and Chromebooks and iPads, but I get it.
I saw “Titanic.” Turning a big ship is hard at full speed. In lieu of that, I humbly submit an update to the state motto. “I lead” in the passive voice is dirigor.
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