As I write this on Tuesday evening, the day after Labour Day, I’m reflecting on the fact that today marked the first day back to school for my kids and millions of other parents’ children. Of course, some schools and programs start on slightly different dates, but speaking generally, this time of year generally stirs up mixed feelings among parents. On one hand, it’s sad to see the kids off for another year — another summer gone, another year closer to their eventually leaving home. It’s a time for reflection and a bit of melancholy. But for those of us who work, it’s also a time to get back to normal. Productivity will soar as we finally get to sit down and work without interruption. So, yes, mixed feelings abound.
But this year, along with the usual sadness and relief, there’s a new emotion — curiosity, perhaps tinged with bitterness. Over the years at TVO Today, I’ve often written about how the pandemic and labour disputes have disrupted the education my children, like so many others, have received in Ontario’s public-school system. My daughter was fortunate enough to experience a few years of normal schooling before strikes and COVID lockdowns intervened. She had a baseline of normalcy to eventually return to. But my son, a few years younger, didn’t have an uninterrupted school year until the third grade. Every previous year was disrupted by either strikes or public-health measures.
I’ve often wondered, and shared with my readers, both my concern and curiosity about the long-term effects these disruptions will have on thousands of kids who never had a chance to form normal memories of school, especially before COVID hit. For year after year, my son’s experience with school was that it was something unreliable, fleeting, inconsistent, and frustrating. I recognize that he may be young enough to escape any lasting harm. By the time he graduates from high school — and, gosh, that doesn’t seem as far away as it used to — maybe he’ll have had enough consistent schooling to erase whatever impact those early years had.
But maybe not. We won’t know for a generation. These are questions that only future sociologists will answer. Fifty years from now, they’ll be able to look back at the bulk data of an entire population and see what the chaotic years between 2019 and 2022 did to a generation of Ontarians. For now, we just have to hope and wait.
This year, however, there’s something else on my mind as the kids head back to school: the new reality of the provincial cellphone ban. Again, I know that some schools and programs already had different rules in place, but for the bulk of Ontario students, this year — this week, in fact — is the first time they’re entering a school environment with standardized, official rules largely forbidding the use of cellphones in the classroom.
I support this, with caveats. I’m sympathetic to the concerns of teachers and their unions about the added pressure this may place on educators, who already juggle many responsibilities. I don’t envy those tasked with being the tech police. I also understand that some students may have personal or family circumstances that make a cellphone or smart watch a great aid or even a necessity. And there’s also just the reality that, when properly used, these tools can be beneficial! My own son, after just his first day, mentioned a situation in which he missed easy access to technology. It was a reasonable one!
We’ll need to figure out a sensible resting place for these rules. The final status quo may look different from what we’re trying to establish today, and that’s okay.
As I thought about all this, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own childhood. In my line of work, you must always be on guard against rose-coloured glasses. They can blind you if you’re not careful. There are certainly things about my childhood in the 1980s that I could argue were objectively better than what kids today deal with, though you could make just as many arguments in the other direction. So I won’t waste time today debating which generation had it “better.” That always comes down to how you define it. But as a parent and a public commentator, I do feel a bit bitter, and even guilty, that my children’s generation is basically functioning as a living social experiment on so many fronts.
Whether it’s how social media affects developing adolescent brains; the predictable but still horrendous consequences of combining a high-definition camera with a global, lightning-fast data-distribution network in a small device that we then put in the hands of hormonal teenagers; or the bigger picture of what lockdowns and digital technology in general will do to education and social development, we’re sure to learn many fascinating things. But I genuinely feel bad for the kids today who, through no fault of their own, have become the experimental group.
When I started elementary school, the most advanced pieces of technology in the classroom were the intercom system and an overhead projector, maybe a microcomputer or two — and those were in a special room! When I left elementary school for high school, the computers had gotten a bit smaller and a bit more powerful, but only barely. I was able to come of age and get an education in a reasonably technologically stable environment.
My kids? Forget it. Their childhood has been marked, both in and out of the classroom, by unbelievably rapid technological change, plus a once-in-a-century global health crisis. Great.
I’m no Luddite. I’m a big believer in the power of technology to improve the human condition. But, gosh, did we ever jump headfirst into a dark pool with this stuff. Maybe we’ll get lucky and discover that the good outweighs the bad or at least that it all balances out. I just wish I didn’t feel so strongly that we’ve left an entire generation exposed to an uncontrolled, unplanned social experiment. If we could do it all over again, I’d like to think we’d do it differently.
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