Why Facebook is the end of education

I’ve spent the morning reading education articles in the New York Times. The front page of Tuesday’s print edition carried an article titled “In PISA Test, Top Scores from Shanghai Stun Experts”. Of the 32 industrialized countries or localities tested, the United States ranked 23rd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in mathematics. In a world where science, reading, and mathematics abilities open doors, this is not a positive sign for the future of American students. I attended a town hall event Tuesday morning where the PISA results were released (yes, you’ll see me in the front row at 1:45) and was surprised to hear that American students predicted they’d score at the top of the pack. For our students, reality doesn’t match perception. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the results a wake-up call and reiterated President Obama’s statement earlier this year that the country that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow.

The New York Times ran another education article yesterday, “Parents Embrace ‘Race to Nowhere,’ on Pressures of School”. A low-budget documentary has parents, students, teachers, and principals talking about the sleeplessness, hopelessness, and mindlessness many high-performing students experience as they juggle school and homework with sports, community service, college entrance exams, and family. Many students feel they’ve had their childhood stolen from them. Schools across America are showing the film in gymnasiums and auditoriums, and then talking about ways teachers and parents can change students’ experiences.

In our low performing school systems, we hear that students aren’t working hard, that our teachers are untrained, that our programs are failing. But in our high performing systems, we hear that we’ve put so many demands on students that they’ve lost interest in learning. Our education leaders and policy makers tell us we need to improve the quality of instruction in the United States, that we must create a globally competitive workforce, but our top students, the ones who would perform best on international assessments, tell us they hate what school has become. Are we living in separate worlds?

Yes. But it’s more than that. This is systemic. This is a disconnect between the world of adults and the world of students. We adults, the ones setting policies and teaching classes and administering programs, have lost sight of who our students really are. We talk about changing populations, about how today’s students are different from the ones we had even five years ago, about attention spans and personal communication. Veteran teachers reminisce about the days when students used to sit still in a classroom for an entire hour, reading a book or writing an essay. Something has changed.

That something is Facebook. And students will never be the same.

Nearly all of my students are on Facebook. And they’re on it a lot. At midnight. At school. At home. On their computers. On their phones. We teachers say it’s just another piece of technology, like the blogs we never quite understood or the online attendance records we finally figured out how to use. Some of us have signed up for Facebook accounts, so that we can see what all the talk is about. We think the interface is slick, we like that we can connect with people across the country or across the world, and we like seeing and sharing pictures with our friends and family. But we think it’s just another website.

It’s not.

I didn’t understand this until I saw the way my students use Facebook. They broadcast everything about themselves. Here’s the record of one student’s Wednesday night: at 7:06pm, “Ice Cream”. At 7:25pm: “Might have just made my mistake”. More wall posts at 7:33pm, 9:12pm, 9:36pm, 10:51pm, 11:03pm, 12:07am, 12:18am, 12:20am, and 12:21am, along with many comment replies and postings to other people’s walls. This is on a school night; it’s another day at middle school tomorrow morning. And, by the way, all this information was posted publically, available to anyone browsing Facebook profiles. This is just one student among millions nationwide.

Facebook is so much bigger than any other technology. It’s not just transforming how students communicate. It’s transforming who students are. It’s changed the way students access and process information. Facebook provides students with near-immediate feedback. My student’s wall posting at 9:12pm, for example, had 21 comments from friends by 9:36pm. Over the span of a single evening, my student posted 11 different items to her Facebook wall, and most of these received comments. Other nights this week were similar: Tuesday had ten wall posts between 6:44pm and 12:31am; Monday had eight wall posts between 7:32pm and 12:12am; most postings had multiple, back-and-forth comments. Unlike school, where feedback on assignments and ideas comes days or weeks later, Facebook provides an immediate response, and not just from a teacher or mentor, but from an entire peer group.

To adults, Facebook is not a real conversation. When we were young, we learned how to speak to others using eye contact and body language and intonation and pacing, and Facebook can’t replace that. To kids, this is very much not the case. Facebook is real. Facebook is a conversation. Wall postings and comments have become the way our children communicate, and it’s as real to them as an in-person meeting. For the first time in human history, the youngest members of our society perceive online interactions to be authentic and true. It’s a tectonic shift.

But beyond instant feedback, and beyond digital conversation, Facebook has caused another, perhaps more important change in the world of education. Facebook has changed students’ attention spans. Facebook encourages users to move quickly from concept to concept. Postings are short; in the age of Twitter, Americans have grown accustomed to ideas presented in 140 characters or less. Facebook doesn’t present essays or articles, it doesn’t even present paragraphs or sentences. Indeed, it’s built to encourage users to travel constantly from profile to comment to game to photo, endlessly clicking to access new content and new information, always in tiny snippets. Facebook teaches kids to spend only seconds on an idea before seeking out something new. Neuroscience shows us that experiences during childhood and adolescence cause physical changes in the brain; Facebook is wiring students’ brains to best interact with a rapid succession of stimuli. This has major implications for education.

When we look out into our classrooms, we know something has changed. Our students are sleepy. They fall asleep at their desks; they fall asleep in their chairs. We present them with something to read, and they get fidgety within seconds. Their attention wanders after the first paragraph. We show them a video, trying to take advantage of their preference for visual media, and still, after a minute or two, they’ve turned their chair around to do something else…talk to a friend, re-tie a shoelace, or, yes, try to discreetly check the cell phone that we constantly tell them to leave in their locker. Is Facebook the cause? I believe it is. Facebook has rewired our students. Facebook keeps them up late at night, it keeps them focused on digital communication and instant feedback, and it teaches them to move quickly from one idea to the next. In the world of school, where students are often thought of as passive receptors of knowledge, expected to work diligently for long periods of time on a single task, this is not a good fit.

So, Facebook is the end of education. We can try all we like to banish Facebook from our schools, and we probably will succeed. We’ll lock down the web filters, get strict about cell phones, ban all iPads and Facebook apps. We can get Facebook out of school. But we can’t get Facebook out of our students. The change has already happened, and it’s happened where school can’t reach. It’s happened at home, and on the car ride to soccer practice, and at a neighbor’s house, and everywhere with an internet browser. We can say to our students, “Sit down! Study! Focus!” but we’re going to get frustrated, and they’re going to get bored.

We tell ourselves that this new generation is impulsive, obsessive, and inattentive. That they can’t be educated. But this generation is also creative, productive, and communicative. And they can be educated, but not the way we were taught to educate them. We teachers need to recognize that there’s been a shift in America’s children, and running schools the same way we always have is going to cause friction. We can’t walk into a classroom today and teach the students we used to have…they’re gone. We have to teach the people sitting in the chairs, and today’s students are, truly, not the same as those we used to teach.

Facebook is the end of education, but it’s also the beginning. We have an enormous opportunity here. Our students spend hours a day interacting with the world via text and media. Hours. Teachers have struggled for decades to get students to read outside of school. We set up contests, we set up rewards, and still students avoided reading. That’s changed. This generation reads a large amount of text, every day, by choice. They read, and they write. Their words may look silly to us, filled with misspellings and strange abbreviations, but our students are making a conscious choice to write and respond to others. Our students may be apathetic about school, or at least the version of school we present to them, but they are not apathetic about reading and writing. They make it a part of their everyday life.

We so rarely ask our students for their opinion about school and curricula and assignments. We tell ourselves that we know best. That we have the training, the experience, the expertise. But, do we? Do we really know this generation? Do we know how their brains work, how they perceive the world, or how to engage them in education? This group of students is perhaps the most vocal we’ve ever had. They share the minutiae of their life, willingly and with everyone. These students are experts at producing and presenting information. It’s time that we ask students what they want from school.

We call Facebook a distraction. And it is…to us. But we’re not the ones who need an education. Our instant response to the Facebook problem is to block all social media in our schools, to prohibit text messaging and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Yet these are concepts and tools that are built into students’ lives, things they use to communicate, to create, and to connect to others. Our students are active learners, but they’re active outside the classroom. We need to figure out a way to bring that activity into school. Like it or not, Facebook and everything that comes with it is a part of our students, and until we recognize who our students are, and what they need and want from their education, school isn’t going to be effective.

We’re told that we need to prepare students for careers and citizenship in an information-based economy. Why not be deliberate about it? Bringing Facebook and social media into the classroom, and teaching students to use these tools to communicate effectively and creatively, could transform America’s schools. Will we find success? Will we improve our standing on international tests? I don’t know. But we can’t pretend that we can continue to present students with textbooks, end-of-chapter questions, pen-and-paper tests, and the other traditional hallmarks of American education. Our students are telling us, in our low-performing schools and in our high-performing schools, that the current model of education isn’t what they want. It’s time to get a new perspective.