Local authorities are responsible for rolling out digital technology and equipment in schools from nursery to upper secondary. The commission notes that equipment is uneven from one area to another and rather behind that of our European neighbours. These initiatives are often carried out in collaboration with the academic authorities but too rarely with the schools themselves. Teachers therefore find themselves with tools that are sometimes imposed, with limited training in their practical use, and families see tools introduced into their homes whose purpose, benefits and expected risks they do not necessarily understand. Beyond equipment, the commission questions the way digital technology is conceived and taught in schools. In our meetings and studies on the subject we had already noted the three challenges that digital technology must meet in schools :
Digital technology in schools : a triple challenge
As a first challenge, digital technology is turning every field upside down, with considerable consequences for pupils’ state of mind: their relationship to knowledge, to learning, the construction of identity, sociability, and so on (Tisseron, 2024). These are all areas that require us to dwell on what shapes our young people, beyond prejudice and categorical representations.
Next, our education system was designed with the ambition of teaching children knowledge they can use throughout their lives, favouring hypothetico-deductive intelligence over all others (Tisseron, 2017). The second challenge will therefore be to integrate what we now know about the many forms of learning, including the body, the senses and all the other forms of intelligence. All the more so as we now know that learning, which takes place throughout life, is inseparable from emotions and socialisation (Johnson et al., 2017) ;
The third challenge, finally, will be that of tomorrow’s professional practices. The most in-demand jobs today did not exist 10 years ago, and nobody knows what those to come will be (Culié et al., 2021). So young people should not be trained for one particular job, but rather to be able to build their future jobs. To do this, they need to be taught to cooperate, collaborate, be creative, communicate with others, think within a supportive collective and think in a complex way.
Through the revolution it brings, digital technology propels us into a transformation at a pace we have never been used to before. And while it is not possible to envisage changes in schools at the speed of digital advances, we need to think of digital technology in a broader way than as a mere tool in perpetual transformation. Three lines of thinking help us think about the field of education and teaching practices: learning about digital technology, learning through digital technology and learning in the age of digital technology.
Learning about digital technology means of course understanding the tool one has, how the internet works, the commercial society it generates, but also how information is processed and how to search for it. The commission notes that currently, the Pix certification programme does not allow pupils to link what they learn with their personal digital practices, or even with the dangers they might encounter. As for MIL, media and information literacy, it remains structured in a conventional way and does not allow a real critical mind to develop. It is pointed out that the experiences of Media and Information Week are teaching examples that deserve to be extended further over time and across all areas.
Learning through digital technology means using these tools to enrich one’s teaching, to move beyond pen and paper and think differently. It also means allowing those who do not necessarily have the same capacity to access learning to compensate for their difficulties. Here again, the commission notes that digital solutions for pupils with special needs are still too hit-and-miss and insufficiently explored.
Finally, learning in the age of digital technology, which is undoubtedly the biggest undertaking, calls for reflection on how to teach in societies undergoing profound change : thinking differently about learning, social relationships and relationships to identity, thinking about collaboration to confront ideas, thinking about the flipped classroom to learn how to learn and, above all, cultivating and feeding one’s creativity. At a time when algorithms always serve us what we already know to reinforce our opinions, we need to teach our pupils/children to think for themselves, and therefore to think against themselves. Much more than a simple introduction of digital tools into schools, it seems obvious that it is their appropriation by teachers and pupils that must be encouraged. Moreover, an understanding of the various psychological and cognitive developments linked to screen culture seems to us essential, in order to understand how to adapt teaching practices and best prepare pupils for the society they belong to, and which will continue to evolve with them.
Teacher training therefore appears to be an absolute priority. Initial training, of course, but also and above all ongoing training in the form of support towards transformation and change. But the commission also notes the need for collective action with families and local authorities to find together a coherent, reasoned and reasonable use of digital technology in schools.
