Albert Einstein once said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” Myself and many others agree that that day is now upon us. Over the last 50 years or so, technology has evolved in such a drastic way that it has completely changed the way we learn and how we view education. I hear stories from my parents of how they didn’t have calculators until they were in high school. This make me think how much more difficult learning would be for us today. Contemporary youth have access to really great tools that only came to be in the last generation. We have Internet access, electronic books, educational videos and interactive activities that I’m sure that students in the 60s and early 70s would have thought were miraculous.
For someone who uses technology and modern educational resources less than many other teenagers, I can confidently say that although technology is a great resource for students, we don’t need to work as hard or take the time that past generations had to. Heck, how many of us are still going to the library to do research? Instead of talking face-to-face, we send texts and emails, which in my opinion has greatly delayed or reduced the socio-psychological development of young people. Not to say that technology is all to blame, but it has certainly enabled these problems to develop in a relatively short time period.
I’m certainly not implying that we have all fallen victim to this plague that seems to be sweeping over much of the developed world, but it appears that a lot of our generation has. Our learning styles have changed so that instead of using technology as a tool to facilitate learning, we have developed a dependancy on it. Nomophobia is the fear of losing one’s mobile phone and most of us have that fear because we’ve developed such a reliance on our phones to keep our lives in order. Some of us don’t even know what to do if we ever lose access to it (I’m proud to say I’m not one of those people). Schools, including my own, have started to implement policies with regard such devices so that they can be used as a classroom tool.
But as convenient as it is to have my iPod to quickly Google information I may need on the spot, all it’s doing is contributing to the laziness of my generation.
