I wish my children a boring childhood. That’s why I want to tear apart the tablets that have taken over our home in recent years. How did we end up here? In an attempt to become wiser, I threw myself into the Ministry of Education’s “Strategy for digital competence and infrastructure in kindergartens and schools”. What I thought afterwards was: Will the rising generation manage this, even in adulthood? Because the numbers speak for themselves: at the same time as we have stepped up the use of tablets in primary schools, the children have stopped reading. The recent PIRLS reading survey shows that as many as 19 per cent of Norwegian 10-year-olds score “low” or “below the lowest” level in reading. It is serious, considering their abilities and opportunities to orientate themselves in society in the future. In 2016, only 10 percent were this far down. It is also bad that Norwegian children are completely behind all 65 countries when it comes to “enjoyment of reading” – although I am not surprised that I feel a certain aftertaste about that word. I think there has always been a distance between the real reading horse children. Most people probably read, like me, out of bored necessity. But eventually or occasionally we found joy in it. Now this boredom has almost disappeared from our digitized lives and homes, and it will cost parents a lot to try to force it back. Fortunately, reading is after all an essential task for the school system. But the Norwegian school fails. We have to take that seriously. I read in the strategy: “Choices to use digital devices must be knowledge-based”. Not to be snarky, but the introduction is hardly that, is it? During the reading of the government’s own strategy, I discovered something strange: It refers to research only once! Although the strategy is to “try to look into the crystal ball while at the same time relying on long traditions and research”, it did not refer to research. The one time, however, reads as follows: “Research shows that the use of digital devices and teaching aids has a moderately positive effect on pupils’ learning, and that this effect increases with age”. That’s why the coffee splashes when the first chapter is about digital competence in the kindergarten! But fear not, all of you with a “moral panic”: Digital tools in the kindergarten should “only be used to help strengthen the quality of the offer and the children’s and pupils’ learning”. Is this a need? Has anyone heard or read about a single parent expressing concern about their four-year-old’s lack of digital competence? Shouldn’t the government and municipalities instead build on the fact that nurseries must follow WHO’s and the Norwegian Directorate of Health’s advice on a maximum of one hour of screen time for children under 5 years of age? And for the one hour, I strictly think that parents can be allowed to save for children’s TV. The Swedish government’s turnaround came, among other things, after a letter from five professors at Karolinska University Hospital, who refer to a study that simply scares me: Schools that had introduced 1:1, meaning that all pupils each have their own digital device, had worse results both when it came to mathematics and the proportion of pupils who went on to upper secondary school. But that only applied to students with parents with low education. The argument that has been used in Norway, that tablets equalize social differences, does not agree with the research. The time has come to formulate: What is the goal? And are we heading towards it? Do the learning boards strengthen schooling from first to fourth grade? The answer must be yes, if we are to continue as we are doing, and as the strategy also lays out. But research shows that: The following is probably also shown by research, but come on, everyone knows or understands this anyway: You get a little mathematical understanding of why something is right and something else wrong through gamified apps, where you finally get a happy ” pling” when pressed correctly. Finding a “work mode” is demanding and must be trained throughout school time. Then it is unwise to make the curriculum resemble a gaming experience as much as possible. To learn something, one must concentrate. The mere presence of digital devices is disruptive in the classroom. Even if you don’t let yourself be seduced by your own screen, you quickly get busy sneaking a peek at someone else who does. And so the school days go. The questions I have are: Do learning boards deserve a place in the classroom at all? Shouldn’t we rather let the iPad and Chromebook as learning tools die a natural death, as the current licenses expire? And let them continue to be what they really are: overgrown smartphones that give us easy access to entertainment and news. Or – shall we bite them to pieces? We then introduce PCs or Macs a little later in the school year, with an actual focus on the tool you use – in other words, training in real digital competence. Perhaps you can also get teaching in ICT. And yes, it will probably be like the Dag Solstad figure, the teacher Elias Rukla: “not to avoid the boredom sinking over the classroom. This is how it had always been, it was embedded in the nature and aim of the teaching”. Amen.
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The children who stop reading – Speech
