The Case for Low-Tech Learning

There was a time – even five years ago, really – when the mood toward technology in the classroom was widely positive. Outside the walls of WCA there were two trending questions: “How are schools integrating the latest technology?”, and, “How can funds be raised to acquire that technology?”

But trends change just as quickly as do our devices. The mood has lately shifted, and in certain schools even the students are asking: Is all this screen-time actually good for learning? 

There are real reasons for which WCA has been largely tech-free since its opening in 1980. And while we can joke that we simply couldn’t afford the technology, that’s not the case. On the one hand, WCA has curtailed screen-time for instinctual reasons. Instinct tells us that family dinners, spring-time hikes, lakeside reading and neighborhood walks are all the more rewarding when we’re fully there and fully present, without technology’s unquitting distractions. That same instinct can be applied to classroom learning.

Yet there is more than instinct at play. Professional research points to the negative effects of screen-time in children. Acclaimed social phycologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively on those widespread effects. Haidt’s findings, echoed by many in his field, are both bi-partisan and profound.

At WCA, though, we have to ask a question to which even Haidt lacks the answer. The real driving question that gets at the heart of any tech or no-tech policy can be spun a few ways. First, we ask: What is education for? Or, re-spun, we wonder: Who do we want our children to become?

Thankfully, this is an old question with old answers. So while tech may change daily, our orientation toward tech need not. 

There are two formative academic habits, rooted in our time-honored classical Christian academic tradition, which frame something of a response to What is education for?, and which likewise underpin our approach to technology at WCA. The first habit is Attention and the second, which is not so much a habit as it is a way-of-life, is Imagination. 

The Habit of Attention

When we talk about the habit of attention it is easy to minimize it to a moment. We think, “When their teacher speaks, students must pay attention,” and we leave it at that.

But attention is the axle by which all present and future learning turns. How many of us sit to read a great book, only to become tired and distracted in short time? How many of us procrastinate in the face of an important task? Those are symptoms of poorly developed attention, which may be overcome, but only with diligent practice.

The diligent practice of attention builds fortitude. A certain degree of internal might is required to read challenging texts or compute complex word problems. In exercising her will the WCA student learns to persist in things – to bunker down and work. Over time, hard things grow less hard, and the student has the strength to wrestle with weighty ideas and algebraic concepts.

In the school setting, technology promises to do the heavy lifting for us, leaving us simply with the satisfying results of learning. There is a subtle paradigm shift in that promise. Intentionally or not, tech-filled classrooms emphasize information over formation. Finding answers becomes more important than forging fortitude. It is little wonder, then, that only 9.5% of teenagers read more than 20 minutes a day, or that most adults (84%) read less than 5. The typical American hasn’t cultivated the habit of attention.

At WCA we’ve opted to take the long road that leads to attentive, strong-minded young men and women who read well and think deeply. To that end learning attention is more important than learning facts or equations. Indeed, the first comes before the second, if those facts and equations are to be meaningful at all later on.

The Imaginative Life

It is a strong saying, yet true: The unimaginative life is not worth living.

The imagination is the birthplace of empathy. When the WCA student reads The Princess and The Goblin or Macbeth, she enters those worlds. She learns to put herself in another’s shoes, as the mantra goes. She experiences the highs and lows of a character, and she learns right from wrong along the way.

That is all because books require active minds. Screens, on the other hand, do not. We lament that movie adaptations never match the depth of the original because what takes place on the screen is outside of us. We’re spectators. Within the pages of a book, however, we become participants. We’re involved – we’re in the story. To be in the story is to be moved by it – and changed by it, for the better.

This is where WCA’s distinctive focus on who our children become comes into clear view. It’s also where our reading emphasis is most compelling. WCA makes the audacious claim that a good education is one of the heart and mind. A vivid moral imagination is pivotal in any holistic education such as ours.

Yet the imaginative life does one thing more – something that is likewise meant to stay with us into adulthood. It makes us alive to awe and wonder. 

Awe and wonder are rare in our disenchanted age. It has become a wide-felt problem that we no longer marvel at the Meadowlark’s spring song or the geometric harmony of the aspen’s quaking leaf. The digital world, where we spend more and more of our time, contributes to that colorless modern experience.

But God’s creation is beautiful whether we feel it so or not, and there is a deep place within us that yearns to live it that way. For that reason, through uniquely Montana programs like Nature Studies and Horsemanship, the WCA student’s imagination travels beyond the classroom. The abiding hope of those hands-on, in-person curricular initiatives is that our students encounter the beautiful with full hearts, in full measure – and that when they do, they’re moved to reflect that beauty in their everyday lives.

Concluding Thoughts

WCA exists to help parents raise wise and virtuous young men and women. In the world such men and women are exceptional, though, aren’t they? That hard reality tells us that this task our WCA community shares is a hard one, too. 

Technology in the classroom promises to make life easier, and that’s why it’s been attractive for as long as it has. Yet WCA will continue on the tried-and-true paths that have shaped thinkers and doers like Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglas, and Albert Einstein – all recipients of a classical, Christian education, and as you can imagine, without a screen in sight.