Posted: December 26, 2023 By Dr. Nedal Alhasan
Insight on Why Sweden Has Recently Cancelled Digitization in Schools and Decided to Go Back to physical books and pens.
Swedish decision has been driven by the shocking data on kids’ levels of literacy and math skills.
Education development has always been the field of heated debate despite the fact that historically education is known to be the slowest domain when it comes to embracing change and adopting new initiatives and advancements. Historically speaking, education has always been affected by advancements in technology; however, the pace of interactions between education and technology has varied due to many factors and variables, such as: type of technology, culture, demographics, geographical location, and socioeconomic status.
Over the last two decades, the hectic race towards over-dumping education systems and schools with all types of emerging technologies, reaching to the full-scale digital transformation of educational practices and curricula, to the extent of transforming school kids and learners into machine-like or robotic learners.
I see the Swedish government decision to stop the digital transformation in their schools and go back to the use books, notebooks, and pens for students is a very brave decision that is like a slap in the face for educational institutions to wake up and reflect on the unprecedented hectic thrust into digital transformation. I would refer to two important factors that support the Swedish decision to reverse the direction of kids’ learning:
1- The Impact of Overusing Devices and Screens:
As has been proven in neuroscience studies for several decades, reading from books and papers activates 3-4 times the number of brain cells than reading from screens (the difference sits between around 10-12 billion brain cells when reading from screens vs around 32 billion brain cells when reading from books and papers). However, the furious race to adopt new digital technologies without conducting sufficient empirical studies to prove their efficacy in teaching and learning, coupled with the trend of bragging about the fancy of using such technologies as a way to show signals of social status, level of advancement, inter alia, almost blinded people from seeing any potential risks of uncalculated change risks in school education.
One key difference I would like to mention here is that reading from books helps kids develop their patience skills that are needed for longer attention, and without sufficient attention, no real learning, nor real mastery of learned concepts. Adversely, reading from screens reduces the kid’s attention span, reduces their focusing ability, and increases their distractibility and device addiction. Therefore, even with some learning happening, the possibility for real mastery of learned concepts is way limited, and this becomes worse as kids get more addicted to devices.
2- The Effect of Social Emotional Learning:
The key skills all kids need to learn and master in their early learning stage include: literacy (reading and writing) and math skills; these skills will affects kids’ learning performance throughout their entire lives. Thus, any deficiency at this stage will have serious consequences on the future of kids and countries. That was the alarming case underlying Swedish government decision to stop school digital transformation, or better say over dependence on technology, in their schools to provide a more conducive learning environment for children. Overdependence on technology and digital devices limits children’s social and emotional interactions with their peers, wiping away numerous learning opportunities for those children, especially that learners learn from their peers 4 times more than what they learn from their teachers (or metaphorically, from their devices). A simple comparison between a group activity using an application (MS teams, Zoom, etc.) in a digital device with a physical learning activity where children interact socially and emotionally with their peers may help us see from a different perspective and lens how physical movements and social interactions create an emotional value of the learning experience children get involved in.
Moreover, while socially interacting, children will have an array of possibilities to learn other things happening in the physical learning environment. This means that in a social emotional interactive learning environment, children will have a big opportunity for direct learning, indirect learning, social growth, as well as personal and emotional growth.
In conclusion, we need to be smart enough in what and how we use and apply smart applications and technologies in education to ensure better future for our kids and countries.
