The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Distance learning is a disaster

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

When COVID-19 shut down schools around the world last March, it launched an unprecedented experiment in education with a billion students as participants. At the heart of this experiment is the home computer, the new conduit to teachers, classmates and learning. Supporters of digital education say that the pandemic offers a much-needed opportunity to rethink our approach to learning for the first time in over a century. They argue that digital learning is the wave of the future and that students in virtual classrooms connected through a computer and the internet will learn more quickly, retain more information, connect to an extraordinary library of resources, and arm themselves with the knowledge and skills needed to solve the problems of the 21st century. By contrast, critics of distant learning believe we should be concerned not only about the inequitable access to the digital tools that support online learning -  the real threat to education is the computer itself. Screen-based learning doesn't place the same cognitive demands on students as the physical classroom and negatively impacts the reading and reasoning abilities that foster lifelong critical thinking skills. They argue that if the global experiment in distant learning continues, we are going to witness a steep decline in the educational attainment of hundreds of millions of children the world over. Arguing for the motion is Mark Bauerlein, Emeritus Professor of English at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future. Arguing against the motion is Caitlin Fisher, Department Chair of Cinema and Media Arts at York University where she is also the Director of the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Sources: BBC, Arirang News, WJZ, NBC, CNBC, CBS, Ruby Rube The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   For detailed show notes on the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Producer: Marilyn Mazurek Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk debate. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind.

Today's debate, be it resolved, distance learning is a disaster. Good evening, all schools across Britain will close by the end of the week until further notice as the death talk. from coronavirus reached 104. And South Korea continues on with this new school year as planned. Some 4 million students nationwide will be sitting in front of their computers to take online classes all at the same time. And that's why the CEO of Schools here said they're going to start handing out about 15,000 Chromebooks to students.

Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, when COVID-19 shut down schools around the world last March, it launched an unprecedented experiment in education with a billion students as participants. The heart of this experiment is the home computer, the new conduit for teachers, classmates, and learning. Supporters of digital education say the pandemic offers a much-needed opportunity to rethink our traditional approach to learning for the first time in over a century. They argue that digital learning is the wave of the future, and students in virtual classrooms

connecting through a computer with the internet will learn more quickly, retain more information, and connect literally to a world of online resources. In short, online learning holds the promise of equipping a generation of young people with the knowledge and critical thinking skills needed to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. A lovely half of the young generation today, I expected to reach adulthood without the skills. they need to thrive in labor market and society. Online learning with cutting-edge edutect tools could be much better option compared to the traditional learning in offline classroom,

which has become rapidly educated. Critics of distance learning believe that we should be concerned not only about the inequitable access to digital tools that support online learning, the real threat to education is the computer itself. Screen-based learning does. doesn't make the same cognitive demands on students as the physical classroom and negatively affects the reading and reasoning abilities that foster lifelong learning skills. These same critics argue that if the global experiment in distance learning continues, we are going to witness a steep decline in educational attainment of hundreds of millions of children the world over.

We're definitely seeing some evidence that students have learned less since March than students would normally learn in a normal school year. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, distance learning is a disaster. Speaking for the motion is Mark Bowerline, Emeritus Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. He's the author of The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. He's the host of the Conversation Podcast. at first things.

Arguing against the motion is Caitlin Fisher, Department Chair of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto, where she's also the director of the immersive storytelling lab and the augmented reality lab. Mark, Caitlin, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hello there. Good morning. Thanks very much. Well, I'm really looking forward to our conversation and debate today

as the father of an eight and a 10-year-old, this whole issue around distance of learning, its impact on kids, the opportunity that this pandemic represents for us to possibly rethink education as we know it has been very personal for me over the last six to eight months. So the opportunity to connect with two big brains like both of yours and tease out the key issues and ideas behind the debate over distance and virtual learning. And is it something we should embrace or something we should run is a pleasure indeed. Our resolution today, it's short, it's be it resolved. Distance learning is a disaster. And Mark, you're speaking in favor of the motion, so you're going to go first.

I'm going to put two minutes on the clock and pass the proverbial microphone over to you. Very good. I'm on the front lines here myself. I have a 15-year-old. He's two days on site in school, two days off. I can compare what's going on every other day with him. And the way I look at this is the COVID situation, putting the kids in the rooms, running them through the laptop, the computer, the cell phone is really the acceleration of a longstanding shift that we see in young people for the last 20, 25 years now, away from books, magazines, print, and toward screens. Happening with kids and adolescents, the cell phones are going down the age ladder all the time. This is an immersion in youth culture and peer pressure like never before.

or in human history. Now, we want those screens in the school environment to be tools for learning. But the laptop isn't like a textbook. Just because there's a reading assignment on the screen doesn't mean that the laptop is functioning like the old-fashioned textbook. The textbook is only one thing.

It's academic content. The laptop is many, many other things at the same time. It's games, it's chats, it's photos, Instagram, all the social media that goes on. And those aspects, the meaning of the screen apart from the academics, doesn't just disappear because the youth is on Zoom with the teacher, the distraction, the diversion, the over-stimulation, the fast reading, not the slow reading.

Those things are still impinging upon the experience. And I think that this does have an intellectual cause. And I'll just close with a very strong correlation that we see very broad. The NAEP scores came out in the United States yesterday for 12th graders. Reading scores went down again. And the SAT scores have been going down for many years now. ACT scores have been going down in reading and writing for many years now. And the simple fact is, again, the correlation is that the more digital

tools have entered into kids' lives, the lower we see in intellectual development. Mark, thank you for that opening a statement. We're going to give Caitlin the same opportunity, two minutes on the clock. Speaking against our resolution, our motion, be it resolved, distance learning is a disaster. Caitlin, you're up. Thank you. It is not a disaster. And do not worry about your children's intellectual development. Being in the same physical space isn't a necessary or sufficient condition for good educational outcomes. Look, I know that this particular pivot under context of emergency where everybody is kind of gently negotiating this existential angst in their own home is these are not the ideal conditions for remote learning. I understand that people are

under distress. But the possibilities here are really thrilling. And I think they can be paradigm changing and they should. That we should be talking about mitigating risk and not holding onto these old models that are really out of step with this current moment and our children's futures. We've been at a crossroads around the future education for a long time. I agree about that. But rather than lamenting the loss of a model that's changed very little in the past century and was designed for an earlier industrial age, we need to welcome this moment of rupture

and acknowledge that the physical classrooms of the recent past really were not great models for the future anyway. The problem isn't remote learning. The problem is trying to reproduce. the old context in this new one. So if we translate our in-person expectations, we are going to make everyone miserable. I can not hear to champion an eight-hour Zoom meeting. We all hate that, but that isn't what the moment demands. If we let go of the expectations that were designed for physical spaces and your child's future work on the assembly line and focus on what

remote learning does brilliantly and the creativity supports, this will be a really positive moment. Online learning has been shown to increase retention of information and take less time, sometimes cutting the time it takes to learn in half and children are learning. And formal education can and should take less time now if we're doing it right. There are some equity benefits. And I think remote learning just in a larger sense activates collective activities. We could tap into a wealth of culturally diverse multimodal multilingual resources, simulations, immersive learning environments, games and media our children are already using. I'm a huge proponent of that. I think children are pioneering a number of media forms, and they all have their place here.

I think the communicative and expressive tools this generation has at its disposal are incredibly powerful, and that what they're already making, thinking, and sharing with these tools is inspiring. Caitlin, thank you. And thank you, Mark. I love it when a debate starts with two opening statements that leave me completely confused and perplexed as to where I now stand on this resolution. So you've both set this debate up exactly right.

Now we're going to move to rebuttal, so this is an opportunity, again, two minutes on the clock for each of you to react to each other's opening statement. Is there a key point you'd like to contend with? Mark, over to you first. Well, I would say if my son's education, if his interaction with the screen were in the hands of Caitlin, I would be overjoyed. She's just the kind of college teacher I want him to have when he does get to college. The problem is, as she puts it, we're in a time of rupture. And I'm not sure that the directions that the rupture will take are going to produce the kind of intellectual development. And I'll just give one quick example. The SAT test, it's for 12th grade, 11th and 12th graders going to college.

It added a writing component in 2006, an essay component to the test. it dropped the component last year, two years ago. One reason was every single year, writing scores went down, except two years when they were flat. We got steady deterioration of writing at the very same time that young people are doing more writing than ever before with the texting, the email, the messages, the chats, going on Reddit, and so on. They're writing more than ever, and yet they're doing it on. screens, this is not producing, certainly better academic writing of the kind that we see on

the tests. Thanks, Mark. Caitlin, same opportunity for you, a couple minutes on the clock just to react to Mark's opening statement or his comments right now. I mean, I think it's always interesting if we're going to be comparing something that's coming with the standards of the past. So, for example, I really do disagree that students' writing is somehow inferior to what it was when you were writing. I deal with students all the time and I think the coming of digital media also constitutes an epistemological shift. I would absolutely disagree that writing is not improving along multiple dimensions that are perhaps not being captured by the SATs and the ACTs. I'm not entirely sure of the statistics here in Canada, but I think our reading scores and writing

stores continue to be pretty high. But more to the point, you know, at this point online, You have, you know, 13-year-old girls working on serialized novels that unfold over like 53 weeks. You have people thinking about how to communicate really small, potent stories through cultural forms like TikTok. This is not irrelevant. These are not irrelevant skills. These are actually really, really critical to the kinds of ways that we are now able to communicate. This isn't to say that I'm not interested in long form. of the book. It actually really reminds me like 20 years ago. I won an international contest for

an electronic novella. And I was constantly pulled in debates around like, why do you hate the book? I absolutely don't. We are at a moment, though, where print literacy is going to coexist with a variety of literacies. And I think one of the things that's happening is we have not figured out how to capture this properly, at least not in an equitable way. One of the interesting things that people are finding, and I'm thinking of Matt Ruffalo's book on digital divisions, is that in elite private schools, there's really a critical sense that these elite children are going to be digital pioneers and they are working inside Minecraft, they're working inside game engines, they're creating socially distributed and networked stories, they're thinking, rethinking assignments. It's in

less resource schools where people are, where children are being told that the skills that they have now on social, working with media, working with editing and small aphoristic, pieces, pieces that move towards philosophy, but not along traditional lines, are irrelevant to their futures. And I think they're very relevant. Thanks, Caitlin. It's now an opportunity for us to move into a kind of freewheeling discussion about the big issues and ideas that animate this debate, our resolution today, be it resolved. Distance learning is a disaster. And Mark, let me come to you first with what I find is one of Caitlin's most compelling arguments, which is this idea that the future is not going to look like the past, and that the shift in education to virtual, to online, to the

screen reflects the reality of the world that we're living in now and will reflect the reality of that future world, 5, 10, 15, 20 years out when these children are trying to become productive members of society in a completely digitally immersive environment. So why isn't Caitlin Wright, that we should be taking advantage of COVID-19, the crisis this represents, to make this quicker, faster pivot to acknowledge that the old systems of education can and should go away to embrace this more transformative, potentially liberating digital future. The liberal digital future that you envision is precisely what frightens me. I'm with Lord Palmerston who said to Queen Victoria once, change, change, change.

all this talk about change, aren't things bad enough already? So the findings of many areas of learning and skills are very disappointing in the United States. A few years ago in what was called the academically adrift study, we find more and more kids getting college degrees, but we find less and less learning going on during their time in college. and the main measure there was what's called the collegiate learning assessment, which was the measures of critical thinking in some areas. In fact, students had negative learning from freshmen to senior year. When I look at the amount of money's businesses have to pay to writing coaches to come in and teach their workers' business communication, when you hear scientists talking about the difficulty it is to find young people do the literate.

review in a certain area and just have those old 19th century skills of read, summarize, and present, that those things aren't very strong. I mean, I hear a lot of negative taking place out there. And again, I think that they are backed by a lot of people who are thoroughly aware of how the tools work in the most popular ones. I mean, you know the point that in Silicon Valley, the most popular schools are those that are no technology, like the Waldorf schools. You know about Steve Jobs, not letting his kids do any technology. But things look very different at the private Sacramento-Waldorf School in California, where technology isn't used at all through eighth grade and is scarce even in high school.

The Silicon Valley people who are at the forefront of creating these programs and apps for kids, they understand the dangers of these. things. At the same time, they're not seriously advocating for a return to 19th century skills, you know, as we need 21st century skills. And I think what's really interesting there, you know, particularly we think about something like Waldorf or disconnection from technology, the argument is never that these children don't return to technology. The argument is to be able to make technology work for you and to understand digital technologies as a series of expressive tools, to think about children's imaginative capacity. And that has typically been a real

luxury position in our culture. I actually really agree with that. We don't want technology to be driving our schools and our children, but it is an opportunity through remote learning to do remote learning well where it actually returns making and thinking. It actually brings back the opportunity for people to be makers to theorize through doing. It's not true that remote learning would not have any hands-on possibilities. Come back on that, Mark. I think it'd be good for the audience to hear your response. Right. I mean, the device is a tool.

And the argument often is that the tool is what you do with it, what you make of it. And I don't see that cell phone as benign or as neutral as that. I think that the environment that you're in is one of a closer relationship with the objects, especially the objects that take on such profound personal meaning. I mean, what does it mean that you can walk around in your pocket when you're 17 years old with 250 pictures of yourself right there? But exactly, what does it mean? That's kind of thrilling.

Well, I worry about what it means. I mean, the tools, it's very easy, as Thoreau put it, for men to become the tools of their tools. Or Martin Heidegger with his. talk about technology and scientism in which we propose too much of a distanced relationship to those objects, those inert things out there. They have an impact on us. I'm naturally, I told you, I'm naturally disposed toward worry and concern. And I have a 15-year-old boy, which has only exaggerated that severely. But it's a worry that I'm just a skeptic. Because

As you say, we don't quite know what it means. We don't, but you know what? There have been so many studies. So one of the organizations I work with has had a close relationship over almost 15 years with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and they put $200 million to support research and design experiments into thinking about reimagining learning for the 21st century. So I'm sympathetic to the idea that change is difficult.

But I'm also, I'm not sympathetic to the idea that we're not sympathetic to the idea that we're we can somehow ignore it. We're in the middle of incredible change and we can't stop it. The location in which I work where we're thinking about machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, augmented environments, we're in the middle of something quite extraordinary. And I think in that sense it's important to understand what does it mean culturally for us to have 10,000 selfies on our phone, what does it mean for representation? What does it mean for making? How do people understand that? How are we communicating the self? We can decide that that might be trivial, but all of these things that our children are doing right now, it's important not to think

of them as being distractions from the main point of schooling, where we could actually be looking at them for clues about how to engage children now based on the literacies that they are already probably pioneering for us. The other substantive issue I want to touch on here is the effects of this technology on society at large, because as we've discussed, we're in a bit of an experiment right now. we're rolling out these digital learning tools across vast populations. And, you know, we're starting to see the pros and cons of that. So, Mark, maybe for you to just respond to the argument that, you know, there is a positive democratizing force here with these technologies, that they provide, when properly resourced

and supported, they provide a low-cost solution for a, you may dispute whether it's education, but access to information for students on a scale that they would never have had before. I think of the Khan Academy that has really emerged, you know, for a lot of parents during this crisis as a, you know, just this incredible free resource that provides their children with, you know, insights and information that you would get in an elite school. But you can access that from, you know, a housing project in downtown Philadelphia. The democracy, the democratizing question, I would look at not only in terms of the recipients, the access they provide, but let's remember, if you go back to the 1990s and you read Wired Magazine or Reason Magazine, the Libertarian streak, was speaking in wondrous terms about how what the digital age would do is break up the big, the monopoly. There's big media that we would have, as one book, put it, an army of David's, you know,

fighting back against Goliath. We have never, ever had so much consolidation. I mean, the old robber barons of the late 19th century would dream about the kind of control that Google, you know, that five companies have over the dissemination of information. I mean, when Wikipedia speaks as if. if it's, you know, coming from the ground up that people are contributing. But when everyone, when all the kids consult Wikipedia, they don't look at other things, then the access is there, but the control, the presentation of the access, I mean, it is so

oligarchic. Like, again, we've never seen in modern times. What happened to the Internet as the... a million journalists, a million filmmakers, everyone all over the place using this creative thing. Well, now, I mean, the monopolizers, it's amazing. Well, I don't disagree, but, you know, that's a great argument for thinking that we need to be thinking hard about the political economy of the information culture, and we need to be teaching digital literacy. But that's not an argument to throw out remote learning.

I am an agreement that if you have consolidation of tools, that's not going to be the best situation for learning. I do think that just one, you know, a turnkey solution for one classroom, we do understand if you get a little bit more in a chi and I, you know, our machines are working on our thoughts. I'm in agreement with that. But I think we also have this incredible opportunity where it is absolutely the case that people can make their own codes, people can make their own media in concert with these and could actually be finding out about media consolidation through different kinds of practices. We don't have to have this as a moment of confront. We don't have to have Facebook school. This is a moment where we can decide the tools that are important, the way that we could be connected. These are, you know, the phone in your pocket can connect you globally. You don't have to be stuck with that horrible grade four teacher. You didn't want your kid to be in their class anymore. There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously.

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Now back to our program. Let's talk a little bit about where we go from here in your respective views. I mean, Mark, do you think that there conceivably is an opportunity to course correct and to actually pull this pivot to digital online learning back? I mean, some people might say the horse has left the proverbial barner stable, and this is the future. We've got to embrace it, you know, whether we like it or not. It's coming. It's coming.

It's a tidal wave. There's no stopping it. What I do in my talks, when parents do say, what do we do? I say, just try to ensure a few hours a day disconnected, unplugged, off the grid with a book, a print book with a print newspaper, listening to intelligent radio, go on the internet, but find solid intellectual material. I mean, YouTube has wonderful things I show from the 1950s, talk shows and news shows that have great writers and thinkers, wonderful stuff. You've got to try to seize some of those leisure hours, pull them out. Do not let

the screen mindset, with, again, all this overstimulation and the multiple multitasking. We need single-tasking, print, ideas, high art focus. That's really the best thing that I can offer. And, Kailen, maybe you could kind of respond to the contention that as a species, we've been at learning for an awful long time, you know, millennia now. And more recently, with the investment. of the written word. We have learned for the better part of our modern history, dating back centuries.

We've learned collectively as individuals together in physical places. And one might say that that learning has, in that fashion, has produced some pretty darn incredible things over the course of the Enlightenment and into the 20th century. So do you have any reservations or any concerns about changing the world? way we learn by getting rid of space and place and the effects of that just on the hardwiring of our culture. I think my feeling about that is to the extent that you and I love the same things about those kinds of spaces and have been lucky to inhabit good ones is to take the best of what we like there into the new models. I could never come on here and argue against connectivity, against somebody

looking you in the eye, against the opportunity to have discussion. I think the number of these things we can easily say we value those, we bring those forward. I think the science around attention, around whether or not we are equipped as a species to inhabit this digital world and to learn this way is inconclusive. And I am far more optimistic on the idea that we can multitask. We don't have to value that as the greatest thing that we're, you know, as a goal. We can certainly do it. I think so many of the things that we love about in-place classrooms we can have and that we also need to think about how some of those learning opportunities can be amplified.

We can connect with more and different learners. When we move from the one space at the one time, you know, that's basically the factory. When we expand that, I'm not thinking that we spend all of our time with our hands on the keyboard at all. I'm with you, Mark, that we should actually be spending less time on formal learning. But those times that we are spending, we could be working on crowdsourced projects where children around the world could be looking up and being amateur astronomers and gathering data on the stars. We already have projects around the world where students are getting water samples from where they live, collectively pooling this.

We do have opportunities for both connection and collective experiences and for looking outside of our contexts to find new information, and that is an opportunity for real learning. Okay, Mark, let's hear your thoughts on that. I mean, that seems like an interesting argument that we can kind of have our cake and eat it too. The community and the very special sense of community that comes from physical spaces and places, that that's not on the chopping block here. Why do you disagree? Well, I would say that one of the hard things for teenagers is to be alone.

It's difficult. Actually, Mark Zuckerberg once said, we're trying to make it so you never, ever have to be alone ever again. Reid Hoffman says, the founder of LinkedIn says sort of the same thing. Now, it is crucial that young people learn how to be alone. It is spiritually and intellectually necessary for you to get away and to be by yourself. how much of the digital tools are means of coping or escaping, and we all need those things, but sometimes it can become escapist in the wrong ways. More teens than ever complain of severe loneliness. They've retreated to their rooms at home, spending less and less time out in the real world

while diving deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of their iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. So we want the community. We want people to find connections and they can do it online like never before. But we also want to say, stop, pull away. Sit there and listen to the opening 10 minutes of Tristan-Munisola or watch. Caitlin's a film scholar. Can the kids sit and focus, give the concentration to a brisson film like an en masse chape? I see an impatience that sets in, a loss of a certain kind of contemplative aesthetic experience.

And this, I think, is a terrible thing to happen. I do. I get the argument around, you know, what kind of granularity of information. How quickly do people move from one media property to another? Do people have attention? I think there are going to be new standards for what people enjoy and what they find beautiful, whether they're going to stand in front of a painting or not. Guys, today we're going to be watching the most creative TikToks on TikTok. And I'm going to have a mind-blowing meter on the screen from 1 to 10 to see how creative these TikToks actually are.

I don't know whether you're going to be able to look through an hour of TikTok and figure out what it's about and what it means and what it could tell you. I mean, these are ways in which we have to talk to each other across cultural differences all the time. I do think that even as cultural form changes, people pay attention to what they love. You know, again, back to the arguments of the way people write online. You know, by the time people are like 14 or 15, many of these fan sites have people writing novel-length works. It's not true that people are not interested in long form. I think short form receives more attention. I think both of these things will exist.

I am very much in agreement with you, though, that remote learning also has to exist with walking away from formal learning. I think that's also one of the crossroads we're at. I agree that parents should be, if you're in the kind of school system where your young child is in front of a screen for six hours being talked at, turn it off, find out about chemistry through baking,

walk in the woods, absolutely. But this is not an argument to throw out remote learning. Wow, guys, this has been a really fascinating conversation and just full of new insights for me. So let's move to closing statements now. This is an opportunity for both of you to sum up your argument and or score any last minute point. So we're going to have the closing statements in the opposite order of our opening remarks. So, Caitlin, you've got the podium first.

We'll put a couple of minutes on the clock. Let's have your concluding comments. Thanks very much. So I think there is incredible promise in this moment. I am very much optimistic that this could be a moment for a new vision of learning, where we shift from the idea that we're consuming information inside one specific location to creating information in many locations. I think this is a moment where we also, we haven't talked a lot about this, but a moment where we can think more about equity. I think the phone in people's pockets is an incredible opportunity. I think globally, remote education is looking still more like television and a one-to-money model.

but this will be changing. And I think that a lot of the regret or when people look back around, like I hate it that my school is changing, it's probably because you've had a pretty good school. We also should appreciate that remote learning offers different kinds of learners, potent spaces where they can actually reflect

before they're forced to immediately respond, where different people's talents and skills can really shine. We already know that children are learning in ways that are self-directed. and we should take advantage of that, not turn them away from their passions and interests and their skills and competencies online, but try to harness that.

And I also feel really strongly that as we enter the 21st century, that remote learning will also be able to increase the kinds of skills and competencies that allow full participation in democratic society. The issue, I think, is that we look at remote learning right now and try to think about how we can make the best of remote learning available in a more equitable way and to larger numbers of people in an equitable

way. Thanks, Caitlin, for those concluding remarks. Mark, you took on the task of arguing for our motion today, be it resolved, distance learning is a disaster. So we're going to give you the last word. Let's have your summing up. I have to agree with Caitlin on the value of remote learning that the possibilities of remote learning are remarkable.

And I've used a lot of the digital materials in my own classes. The problem is how do we disengage remote learning through the very same tools that the kids use for social media, for games, for fun, all the rest, which introduces, again, youth culture and peer pressure, all of which are anti-intellectual, anti-historical and anti-historical and anti-historical. eloquence, that the social media tools are more an instrument of conformity than of originality, and perhaps, worst of all, they undermine the authority of the past. This is my cultural bias here, toward respecting the authority of the high art, the great ideas, the great events, the momentous things that happened in the past, that you do not. You do not. look upon your own generation as somehow a revolutionary moment, that you realize that sometimes there's really nothing new under the sun and that you must immerse yourself in grown-up things

as much as you have immersed yourselves in adolescent things, that the kids must be told if you can look at a painting from the Italian Renaissance, a masterpiece, and you go, there's something wrong with you. You haven't acquired something. And these tools give kids too much confidence to ignore those things. This is the real challenge. How do we make the tools into? an educational intellectual resource,

and that means we've got to pull it away from the adolescent meaning of those tools. And I see that that is a very uphill battle. You just made an argument for conformity, really? Well, I would say that out of the critical engagement with the past is the way one avoids a mindless conformity. Okay, guys, this has been exactly what we like in the Monk Debates discussion full of big ideas, but informed by civility and a respect for

each other's point of view and a willingness to listen and engage. We live in a moment here right now where polarization defines our public square and far too much of our collective conversations. So both of you have been a lovely antidote to that today. And on behalf of the Monk Debates community, I want to thank you. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you both. While that wraps up today's debate, I want to thank our participants, Caitlin Fisher, and Mark Bowerline. They certainly gave us a lot to think about.

The Monk Debates is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find detailed show notes on today's debate. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Marilyn Missouri, and Christina Campbell are the producers.

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