Richard Hogan: Our outmoded schooling system is redundant to teenagers
Teenagers now are digital natives, and creating video content comes naturally to them. The curriculum for schools ought to reflect young people's interests and skillset.
If you really observe a teenager for more than five minutes, you will see how they consume information. It is instantaneous, abbreviated, and devoid of extraneous detail. Teenagers know what they want and they know how to get it. I have observed how they even find ads challenging to tolerate, hence the popularity of platforms like Netflix and TikTok. In short, the teenage world has irrevocably changed since the arrival of the smartphone in 2007. Teenagers today have never lived without such technologies.
They are digital natives, teachers are digital immigrants, and those in charge of educational pedagogy might even be described as digital aliens, with little to no experience of this new world. A couple of years ago, as I was going over the previous year's Leaving Cert English paper with the class, laughter broke out as I read over the questions — one was asking the students to write a blog. When I inquired about the source of the laughter one student proclaimed; "Blogs? Who writes them anymore?" It seemed that the department’s efforts to be hip and relevant missed the mark by about 5 years. It was vlogs, I was told they do now, in other words, short personal video logs.
