Is digital literacy killing critical consciousness?

These students have been betrayed. This is a prime example of how a university system has failed them. Clearly, they have not been schooled rigorously in first year units where essay writing and referencing should be a visible part of the curriculum. They had moved into second year without these fundamental knowledges and without a modality to lift themselves into investigative tropes to interrogate the unfamiliar. The failure to teach these students core writing skills and methodologies for inquiry has serious consequences for them when they leave ill-equipped for work, and unable to question and critique this world.

These young people have been taught by our social system and post-work society that ideas, criticism and consciousness do not matter - employment is the end-game. In a world of underemployment, the unspoken panic experienced by the students and the teachers who bear the responsibility for preparing them for this disheartening world, has resulted in an education steeped in compliance and mediocrity.

The manner in which new technologies are being mobilised in the service of education, entertainment and economic rationalism is serving to distract us from the beauty in the minutiae, grace in the well articulated phrase, a startling idea in the digitisation. Being able to identify and access the moment where thinking and being shifts is important. But it is often a skill that must be taught and activated through the struggle over prose, poetry and performance - in a book, on television or online.

Books are not fundamentally better than bytes, but to dismiss the analogue world as inadequate to the demands of a modern society is to lose much of our ability to move through different literacies and to access multiple resources. Revolution and revelation come in many guises and are activated through contradictory literacies. Education at its best allows access - not to technology, a screen or a program - but to ideas and a critical consciousness.