Youth Ignored on IT agenda

By Patricia MacInnis
published here by special permission from Computing Canada

Though Justin Trudeau is no longer officially a teacher, he remains the unofficial spokesperson for youth in this country. In this capacity, he was invited to chair the youth and technology track of the World Computer Congress in Montreal in August. The 30-year old Trudeau worked as a teacher for the past five years in Vancouver, in both public and private schools. He is "intensely concerned about the lack of voice children have in shaping the technology agenda."

The following is an interview between Computing Canada editor Patricia MacInnis and Justin Trudeau:

Computing Canada: What sparked your interest in youth and technology?

Justin Trudeau: This is a question of empowering the youth properly. When we talk about the problems facing young people, the big one is a sense that they might not matter; they're not really allowed to participate in the creation of this world that they know they're going to inherit.

One of the areas they can really do a lot is within computing and information technology. They spend a lot of time using it and consuming it, but not looking at the values that are being propagated by it. They're not questioning the subcurrents. They're not looking at the powers of the monopolies such as Microsoft and how that is defining the world we're going to live in in 20 years.

The ones who can hack and it's an expression of "I'm so frustrated." If a lot more of them were empowered to participate in the process and have the skills and tools to be able to participate, we'd go a long way.

CC: The digital divide is growing, both in Canada and outside. What role does Canada play in closing that gap?

JT: We need to take the technology at its barest elements in terms of access to the Internet and give people within developing regions the tools to make it their own and to stay away from the idea that it has to be in English, it has to be on Microsoft, it has to be this big structure. Encourage them to pull together word processing programs for their own language. If (electronic information) is presented in a native language, then that culture begins to understand it does have power over the information world. That's not always coming through right now.

With the tremendous impact of western culture that's being disseminated through the Internet, we're building another Tower of Babel here and it's important to say that the scattering of languages in the biblical allegory was a very good thing; it allowed us to grow. One of the things that makes us so incredibly wealthy as a species is the incredible diversity that human civilizations have. If everyone starts speaking tech-talk in English, we will die as a culture, globally.

CC: The Computers for schools has met with a lot of criticism in that the schools are inheriting obsolete equipment, there's no budget for maintenance, and so on. If we can't empower the youth in our own country, how will we do it beyond our borders?

JT: The definition of obsolete in itself is interesting. The people who make these computers obsolete are the people who make these computers. The only thing that justifies having a personal computer with all the gigabytes and internal RAM is games. We get caught up in the gloss of it all and that's exactly where these companies want us to be. So, (we should) take these kids and teach them to think truly about what they need, what they want, and what they're being told to need. Critical thinking is such a clichý, but getting them to question some of the unspoken tenants of our capitalistic information age is something that is, first of all, highly subversive, but extremely important if we're going to have them play a role in creating tomorrow's society.

CC: If you drew a picture of a Utopian society where youth is empowered in all the ways you outlined, what would it look like?

JT: It all comes down to education. Teachers would be highly prized, highly praised professionals who could focus on the job of teaching and not worry about so many other things that they're having to worry about. Everyone's trying to streamline education in so many ways that the teacher is taking on more and more responsibility and they can't focus now as well as they could on their students because there's more students in every class and less and less support. We don't focus as much on curriculum, we spend very little time memorizing.

How do you teach a kid to distinguish between one Web site and another where one is full of legitimate information and the other is (not). How do they acquire these skills? This is a big challenge. It all starts with education. The whole point of school is to create productive members of society. What you have to look at is training them in the skills of lifelong learning, of challenging things and adapting themselves.

To be a productive member of society today is to be a consumer. That's the paradigm we've built our entire world on and that's filtering big time into information technology. We have to start changing mindsets from the very ground level in education.

CC: What price will we pay for disenfranchising the youth from the technology equation?

JT: We'll have an incredible split that will happen when the youth come of age in their 30s. There will be a power base that's centered around the technocrats; all the others will be drones and consumers. This has always happened to society, but the difference is within the information age, people know it shouldn't be like that. That's where we have WTO demonstrations, G8 demonstrations. People are angry because they're completely impotent, therefore, we have to look at bringing them in fast and hard. That means, for a lot of the big guys, taking some real chances. The young people with the ideas of peace and love, flies in the face of everything that's structured to control.

Napster was a perfect example of kids just doing it. Telling the record companies, "It's time for you guys to catch up." The reaction of shutting down Napster was having all kinds of other companies just like it spring up. There's an unwillingness to accept, by the big companies, that there's a real desire for change within the youth.

CC: What role should industry play in empowering youth with technology?

JT: They need to fundamentally change that nature of their goals and I don't know they can. The fundamental goal of a big company is to make money and its obligation is to it shareholders. They put on all sorts of nice public displays, and even if it's a purely philanthropic gesture, you can show that it helps the bottom line in the end.

Corporations are responsible to shareholders. But government is at least responsible to its citizens and that's where change has to begin. (Capitalism) has been our paradigm for so long, but it's just not working and you can see it in our youth. They either buy into this game in a very cynical way or they go off and be hippies.

CC: What role should the academic community play with respect to ensuring there's not too much infiltration of corporate values in the classroom?

JT: It's tough. With respect to technology, sometimes it's a case of 'take this or take nothing.' Fundamentally we're in a squeeze position because of the low priority society - in terms of financing - puts on educators and education in general.

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Reprinted by kind permission: Copyright (c) 2002 Transcontinental Media Inc. All rights reserved



Further information, links and other notes on the Youth Program initiative can be found on TeledyN