Between Paranoia and Protest

My sister-in-law went to an info session at her son’s school recently to learn about online safety. By the end of the session, she was ready to destroy the home computer to save her two adolescents from the many dangers of cyberspace. The school should know better than to rattle off a litany of Things-To-Be-Afraid-Of. Let’s consider an analogy.

Imagine that a school calls an emergency meeting to warn parents of a new worry. Apparently, students are being exposed to media that models brutal attacks on others, comical raping of women, and adolescent suicide. As parents and teachers rally to expel such material from school, they are informed by a sheepish English teacher that the media in question are the Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, and Romeo & Juliet. In this imagined school, the school raises honest concerns and truthful points, but it does so with neglect of its role as a place of learning. A school must respond to the darkness of literature with pedagogy.  A school must be expose, interpret, and critique phenomena.  It must do the same for the new literacies students engage with online. To raise awareness without a curricular plan is negligent, or at least rash and alarmist.

Why are schools running away from these new literacies? To be fair, we have always run from them. Recall the disdain with which Socrates speaks of writing in the Republic.  Writing– the newest technology at time–rang for him the death of the mind.  Fortunately for western history, his student Plato didn’t share his technophobia.  But, there are still others–not just Socrates and schools–who fear the power of technology.  Consider Cairo.

Recently, the Egyptian government found itself in an unimaginable situation.  In response to the government’s efforts to stunt public protests, an underground group of thousands of technophilic young people orchestrated a series of dissident activities.  When the ringleader was caught and interrogated–or tortured, by some accounts–his interrogators demanded, of all things, his Facebook password.

The political resistance was created, discussed, planned, and fueled by a Facebook group.  This raises important questions about the role of schools here.  Do schools–and perhaps English teachers most of all–have a responsibility to teach into responsible and critical use of new literacies? Is the paranoia of some adults merited? Especially when we see how new literacies like Facebook can lead to subversive political action?  Whether you agree or not with the policies of the Egyptian government, at the end of the day Facebook helped a group of users break the law.

Somewhere between paranoia and protest are answers to these questions.  Democratic candidate Barack Obama might be on to something.  His campaign has walked the line by providing open source wiki-like capabilities for his supporters and still maintaining a top-down strategic structure.  All with programs that our students would be very comfortable on: social-networking, blogs, micro-blogs, and the list goes on. Schools must teach in to these new literacies because, as I’ve written before, school is not about school.  It’s about non-school, that is, what happens when students are out there in the world.  It’s not just about the worries of paranoid adults or the harnessed verve of youthful protesters.  It’s about pedagogy.

Related posts:

1. New School, Old Kind of Protest How not to protest in the 21st century: Do what...
2. Why Teachers Should Let Students Write Textbooks I came across this piece recently about the rise of...
3. Laptops in Classrooms Laptops aren’t magical. They don’t produce fuzzy bunnies out of...
4. Why Shift Didn’t Happen I recently attended the National Council of Teachers of English...
5. Online @ School If you are reading this on a computer at a...