To laudatory odes to distance education, the world is moving towards the fact that the children of the rich will have a high-quality traditional education, while everyone else will have a standardized virtual surrogate.
Disciples are not vessels to be filled with knowledge. They are human beings who need communication with a teacher, with fellow students, and not technology for effective assimilation of knowledge. Knowledge can neither be transmitted nor perceived for real through the computer screen. Nuccio Ordine, a professor of Italian literature at the University of Calabria, says this in a video message posted on May 18 on the website of the Spanish edition of El Pais.
Alarmed by the spread of distance learning, Ordine argues that it is a cheap substitute for genuine education, unable to quench the thirst for knowledge and introduce it to culture.
Nuccio Ordine is an Italian philosopher, writer, a major specialist in the Italian Renaissance, in particular, in the biography and work of Giordano Bruno. Ordine became world famous for her work “The border of the shadow. Literature, Philosophy and Painting by Giordano Bruno”(2003), it was also translated into Russian. Ordine was born in Calabria in 1958. Teaches Italian literature at the University of Calabria (Rende). Visiting professor at universities in France, Great Britain, Germany, USA.
We present the text of Ordine's address with some abbreviations.
I want to convey my concern to you. The songs of praise for virtual learning and distance education that have been playing in recent weeks terrify me. It seems to me that distance education is a Trojan horse that, taking advantage of the pandemic, wants to break through the last bastions of our privacy and education. Of course, we are not talking about emergencies. Now we have to adapt to virtual learning to save the school year.
I am concerned about those who believe the coronavirus is an opportunity to make such a long-awaited leap forward. They argue that we will no longer be able to return to traditional education, that the most we can hope for is hybrid teaching: some classes will be full-time, some will be distance.
While the enthusiasm of the supporters of the didactics of the future is surging forward in waves, I feel uncomfortable living in a world that has become unrecognizable. Among so many uncertainties, I am sure of only one thing: contact with students in the classroom is the only thing that gives true meaning to education and even the life of a teacher. I've been teaching for 30 years, but I can't imagine running classes, exams, or tests through a cold screen. Therefore, I am terribly burdened by the thought that in the fall, perhaps, I will have to resume the course using digital learning.
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How can I teach without the rituals that have been the life and joy of my work for decades? How can I read a classic text without looking into my students' eyes, without being able to see expressions of disapproval or empathy on their faces? Without students and teachers, schools and universities will become spaces devoid of the breath of life! No digital platform - I have to emphasize this - no digital platform can change a student's life. Only a good teacher can do this!
Students are no longer asked to learn in order to become better, in order to turn knowledge into an instrument of freedom, criticism and civic responsibility. No, young people are required to get a specialty and earn money. The idea of a school and a university as a community that forms future citizens who can work in their profession with firm ethical principles and a deep sense of human solidarity and common good has been lost. We forget that without community life, without the rituals according to which students and teachers meet in classrooms, there can be no genuine transfer of knowledge or education.
Students are not reservoirs to be filled with concepts. These are human beings who, like teachers, need dialogue, communication, and life experience of joint learning. During these months of quarantine, we, more than ever, realize that relationships between people - not virtual, but real - are increasingly turning into a luxury item. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery predicted: "The only luxury I know of is the luxury of human communication."
Now we can clearly see the difference between a state of emergency and normalcy. During an epidemic (emergency), video calls, Facebook, WhatsApp and similar tools become the only form of maintaining our relationship for people locked in their homes. When normal days come, these same tools can lead to dangerous deception. (…) We need to make it clear to our students that a smartphone can be very useful when we use it correctly, but it becomes very dangerous when it uses us, turning us into slaves, unable to rebel against their tyrant.
(…) Relationships become genuine only with living, real, physical connections. (…) And behind constant online communication lies a new form of terrible loneliness. It is unimaginable, of course, to live without telephones, but technology, like, for example, drugs, can cure, or can poison. Depends on the dose.
The New York Times recently published a series of articles that stated that use of this type of app is decreasing in wealthy US households, and increasing in middle-class and poor households. Silicon Valley elites send their kids to college, where the focus is on people-to-people relationships, not technology! Then what kind of future can you imagine? One is that the children of the wealthy will have good teachers and full-time high-quality education, where the priority is given to human relations, while children from the less well-off classes will expect a standardized education through telematic and virtual channels.
That is why during a pandemic, we need to understand: it is enough to demand bread to feed the body, if at the same time we do not demand to feed our spirit. Why are supermarkets open and libraries closed? In 1931, five years before his death at the hands of the Francoists, Federico García Lorca opened a library in his native village of Fuente Vaqueros. Convinced of the importance of culture for fostering love for neighbor in readers, the great poet wrote an amazing praise for books. I would like to read it.
Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky. At the school door (fragment). 1897.