Carte blanche RTL from February 21, 2020: Are screens making our children stupid?

At a time when the iPad is becoming the standard tool for teaching, the voice of its opponents is also increasing. At the end of 2015, the OECD-PISA consortium published a very critical report entitled “Connected for learning?” with the main statement: "The more children use software, the Internet and educational programs, the more their academic performance declines." Prominent neuroscience researchers, including Manfred Spitzer, have consistently warned of “digital dementia” and therefore want to completely ban technology from schools. Recently, Michel Desmurget, director of the CNRS, the National Center for Scientific Research in France, supported the thesis with his book “The factory of the digital moron, the dangers of screens for children”.
However, alarmist discourse prevents us from asking the right questions. The name “screen” now hides a myriad of interfaces and applications: television, smartphones, social networks, video games as well as educational software. The subject therefore concerns very diverse issues.

A nuanced discourse is required: there are times when the use is useful and important, there are others when this is not the case. We are quickly led to ask ourselves the question of reasonable use and a maximum duration per day. Reasonable use is that which has no impact on daily life, learning or the organization of work.
Note that, among all the experts who express themselves so differently on this subject, there is a minimal consensus: a child under 12 should in principle not be left alone in front of a screen.

Today, our duty is to prepare young people for the digital world, and therefore to transmit digital skills to them. For this, the iPad at school is a good tool: it not only supports learning, it also allows us to show how the Internet and its algorithms want to influence us, how the business model of collecting our private data works.
My response to the theme is this: screens do not make children stupid, they are a wonderful resource on one condition: that we support young people! This is why the next initiative of our Minister of Education “Screens in the family, manage, educate and support” is entirely appropriate. Hopefully this will have an impact and become a topic of conversation, both in the family and at school.

Carte blanche – RTL November 18, 2019: About the fragmentation of the educational landscape

 

About the fragmentation of the educational landscape

seen Gaston TERNES

 

The fragmentation of the educational landscape is not specifically “Luxembourgish”. This is a general phenomenon! According to researchers Anne Barrère and Bernard Delvaux (University of Paris-Descartes and Namur), there are three major reasons for this in the context of globalization: the increasing heterogeneity of the population, the desire to be able to continue one's studies with like-minded people and an individual design of the learning path.

Fragmentation itself is reflected in Luxembourg by the creation of international or European schools, Montessori schools, to name just a few.

Three years after the launch of this idea of fragmentation of the educational landscape in Luxembourg, we must now ask ourselves where we want to go: do we want an ever greater division of the educational landscape in order, like the government program, to be more able to satisfy the needs of each learner? Or, on the contrary, does this fragmentation contribute to even more inequalities? The differences “expensive schools” versus “free schools” or “unconstrained teacher recruitment” versus “state-regulated recruitment” support the latter idea.

The most likely scenario for the years to come will be an ever-increasing fragmentation of the educational landscape, with private and public actors. In this scenario, it is young people and their parents who decide what they choose in the diverse “marketplace” of the school landscape. It seems obvious to me that the scale of inequalities will widen.

Fragmentation poses a second problem: if a young person can, to a certain extent, choose their school system "à la carte", is there not a great danger that they will choose the easiest path for themselves? ? It may well be that the full intellectual potential of certain young people is no longer being exploited.

Sweden is today, after more than 30 years of an increasingly fragmented school landscape, finding its way towards a more unified school landscape. Indeed, inequalities have increased massively and the overall performance of Swedish education provision has fallen from the leading pack to below average.

For us, this does not mean that we should not wait for the reforms to take effect, but that we must support them now!