In the comments to a previous post I wrote about educational technology, people jokingly suggested that I should be hired as a consultant for schools. I thought it might be fun to write up what I would say if I were tasked with redesigning the systems used in schools.

I think I would start with trust. For the most part, outside the tech space, teachers trust that students aren’t cheating on examinations or other assignments. But with technology, schools assume that students are using tech tools for ill purposes. While this may be true for a small subset of students, it holds back the vast majority by not allowing them to express themselves on the Web, or do creative things.

Why do we trust that students won’t cheat, but we don’t trust that they won’t do bad things with technology? Schools blocking things on the Web is something they do for the most part because they can. Schools can’t restrict what students write with a pencil, because there isn’t a way to fix that at the root of the issue. If there was, would schools censor what the kids could create? Schools can’t really stop students from doing “inappropriate” things on anything except the Internet. And yet, being able to do so—to put in blockers, etc.—gives them a false sense of security; that they’re protecting the students. But if you look at this in the context of all the other actions students are doing in the world that can’t be stopped—writing, talking, drawing, not to mention all kinds of other verbs—the schools really aren’t doing that much.

Yes: the Internet does allow for lots of bad things to occur, but so does anything. No system can really be 100% locked down so that students can’t do anything bad with it. Students are always going to find something bad to do if they want to. Maybe it won’t be on their school-monitored computer, but it’ll be somewhere So, the schools should either admit that they are sort of powerless, and turn their attention to teaching the kids how to be good people instead of stopping them when they do bad things, or they should focus energy on disallowing students from speaking or writing “bad things” in an analog universe, or anything else that can’t be surveilled, so that they can make sure that everything the students do is completely monitored.

The truth is, only the former approach can ever work. No school can stop students from speaking, short of duct-taping their mouths shut, which would lead to a whole other set of consequences. What schools can, and should, do is teach their students to do good things—and then the school should actually trust the students.

So much of the discussion is about stopping students from doing things, but that doesn’t work. If you have to stop them from doing something in the first place, it means that it’s already something that they’re inclined to do. The focus needs to be on them not having the intent in the first place—and not in some sort of dystopian constant-surveillance way. What schools need is education on treating others nicely, on what not to do in life, and what to do, because if students are doing bad things with technology, what’s stopping them from doing similar things in real life?

The system now is like if schools sent all of the students preemptively to jail, even if they have done nothing wrong—and made sure the cells were locked up tight and they wouldn’t be able to escape. Contrast this with instead explaining to kids why committing crimes is bad.

Everything is preventative, and schools don’t foster trust. That just leads to a moral disconnect between the students and the school. Is that what we want in an educational system?

How I would see a different approach playing out in practice: the Internet is just like anything else—if a student injures another student, they get punished. I don’t think people should be allowed to do bad things on the Internet. The punishment shouldn’t happen before the deed, however; just as the government generally can’t stop a newspaper from printing something illegal before it’s printed.