Australia's Social Media Ban Shows How Extreme The Technology Debate Has Become There's A Better Way

(MENAFN- The Conversation) The recent decision by the Australian government to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s has been received with both praise and condemnation .

Those who approve of the proposal tend to consider that children are being exploited by egregious levels of exposure to this technology. Opponents of the ban argue that it is not proportionate to the potential harms of denying young people appropriate access to what have become integral features of everyday existence.

This somewhat adversarial situation falls prey to the twin perils of fatalism and disasterism. It characterises the wider conversation about how we engage with the digital world. Here, fatalism signifies a weary resignation and disasterism suggests that we are all going to hell in a handcart. More specifically, these impulses impinge directly on school policy making and practice.

In our Economic and Social Research Council funded research project, Teaching for Digital Citizenship , my colleagues and I have sought to uncover more nuanced accounts of how young people engage with technology by collaborating with them .

The students in our study pointed us away from an adversarial framing of the issue and towards the need to foster more traditional forms of democratic thought. These practices draw on a robust tradition of what's known as education for citizenship. That is, teaching students how to be active, thoughtful and informed citizens in a democratic society.

Such a robust notion of education for citizenship has been championed by a range of thinkers. Most notably, the British political theorist Bernard Crick in the 1990s and the educational thinker Lawrence Stenhouse in the 1970s. They both offered ideas about educational practices that rely not on the technology, nor on corporations, but on older“analogue” traditions of critical thought and engagement in subjects.

The students in our project expressed anxiety and sometimes guilt that they had spent too much time on their apps. By their own estimation, they were using apps for about eight hours a day. They told us that they were working on self discipline, but struggled to maintain these habits.

Proactively, the students' response to their own growing awareness of the grip that their apps had over their time was to try to engage in more analogue study activities, such as reading books. But they were concerned to discover that their capacity for reading was limited. Some observed that they found it challenging to read more than five pages.

This is not to suggest that there are only downsides to being immersed in digital life. Many students suggested that there were also huge benefits. For example, they reported that gaming helped them acquire new skills and perspective.

These examples illustrate the ambiguities of social media apps and their effect on those of school age.

In many countries, schools are required to provide remedies for a whole range of social ills – and often in a manner that is of questionable relevance to the purpose of education.

In his Ruskin Speech in 1976 , former British prime minister James Callaghan asked whether education should be more aligned with the needs of industry, especially in providing the skills for employment. Since then, education in the UK, as elsewhere, has slowly moved away from how we should live, and towards how we are to make our living.

Today, educators accept that young people, along with the rest of us, will spend their lives entangled in a complex digital world. The task of education should therefore primarily be to act as a productive space in which students can critically reflect upon, and form judgments about that world.

Our research project engaged representatives from a variety of different sectors, including big tech companies, policymakers, teachers and ethicists. We also carried out an extensive survey, which highlighted that online safety and harm prevention should be prioritised within schools.

Our insights underscore the importance of recognising and reinforcing education as a way of reflecting on the way we live – and an opportunity for providing critical distance from the dilemmas of our everyday lives. The ban on social media in Australia, or indeed on any technology, therefore misses a key consideration about the purpose of education.

As has been seen under governments that have restricted the internet , banning technology rather than securing students' safety may only serve to heighten the allure of that technology. Indeed, in our discussions with the students, they frequently reported their ability to deploy virtual private networks to circumvent their schools' firewalls.

In November, Australian communications minister, Michelle Rowland , claimed that“there is wide acknowledgment that something must be done in the immediate term to help prevent young teens and children from being exposed to streams of content, unfiltered and infinite”.

I believe that this misunderstands both the problem and the solution. The actual problem is not that the content is“unfiltered and infinite”. It's that it is highly curated to serve the profit-making objectives of tech corporations, and not the interests of children.

The solution, then, is not to banish the problem but to address it. Education in the digital age needs to be re-imagined as a vibrant way to reflect and critique the ways we live our lives.

MENAFN30012025000199003603ID1109149431