Gone are the days when we used to stand outside our middle school classroom 15 minutes early, discussing the superheroes on our backpacks or what we had in our lunchboxes for the day.
We were eager to walk into class and take off our heavy bags, which were over packed with books rather than technological gadgets. We impatiently waited for our teacher to arrive so we could sit down and talk to our classmates, rather than sending them a Facebook message.
As kids, we definitely weren’t scared of making eye contact with our classmates while debating grave matters of life and death, such as who is going to be on whose dodgeball team come sixth period. Raised eyebrows, hand gestures and all, we were not afraid of communicating with intentionality and emotion.
Those nostalgic middle school days are long gone.
I am currently a senior in college, and every time I find myself walking around campus in between classes, it feels like my generation of students have unlearned basic skills of interpersonal communication that we spent our entire childhood mastering. Instead, we have replaced them with technological savviness and expensive smartphones.
It is ironic that these contraptions have become the primary medium through which we communicate with others, because instead of reducing the distances between people, they only seem to drive them further away.
As a student journalist, I get to experience this first hand. Through my job as an editor for APU’s student newspaper, I have received numerous opportunities to talk to people on campus who I would have otherwise never met. From all the long and meaningful conversations that I have had with my interviewees, the following observation stood out the most: students are genuinely shy of maintaining eye contact when they answer my questions.
Because of this, one of my current professors requires my class to turn their tables inwards before the start of each lecture. This way, students face each other while participating in discussion. When the professor announced this classroom rule at the start of the semester, a few timid hands shot up in the air. Some confessed that having to face their peers rather than conforming to the standard classroom structure evoked a sense of discomfort.
Their darting eyes gave it away.
Their reaction made me wonder: at what point in history was it deemed awkward to maintain eye contact with a person for the duration of a conversation? What sparked the need for us to pretend to candidly glance at our toes, search for an invisible friend in the crowd and make the other party involved in dialogue feel our desire to return back to the safety of our online social spheres rather than listen to their words?
Jessica Wong, an assistant professor of systematic theology at Azusa Pacific, blames the system of education. She feels there has to be a leveling of the playing field so that the professor isn’t the only authoritative voice in the classroom.
Wong is an advocate for the theory of subversive pedagogy: the idea that teachers are not there to simply deposit knowledge into the “passive brains of students,” as The Harvard Gazette writes.
This teaching approach values the unique background, upbringing and belief system of every pupil in the classroom. It urges students to empathize with the diverse opinions their peers may have, in order to see beyond the limitations of their own personal biases.
So rather than taking a banking systems approach to learning where we consume every check that is fed to us, we use the emotional intelligence we have been gifted as a species to process each one of them with cognizance.
Although subversive pedagogy pertains to educational reform, its theoretical basis can be used to kill two birds with one stone. In the same way that it advocates for the replacement of habitual classroom practices, such as sitting in rows and interacting only with our professors, my generation needs to replace the desperate desire to stay hyper connected to our lit up screens in order to fix our social crisis. We have to do so if there is any hope for us to take back at least a little bit of what the age of technology has stolen from our generation.
With every data privacy scandal that has hit the news in the last couple of years, social media platforms have already served us, on a silver platter, the reason why we should stop sharing every detail of our lives on the internet. We know that our personal information is used in behavioral studies which help Facebook’s engineering teams develop a better understanding of how our behavior can be manipulated.
So rather than letting our expensive gadgets cloud our judgement, we need to make the intelligent decision of distancing ourselves from them. This idea of safety that has been marketed to us under the pretenses of an ethereal and almighty social network is false, and the sooner we realize how it has disrupted every-day modes of communication, the easier it will be for us to regain memory of the vitalness of human interaction.
Because we cannot co-exist in a world where we only listen to hear through the ear we are not wearing our airpod in, rather than to understand.