Did you know that new calendars, appointment books, and planners had increased sales of nearly 10 percent over 2014-2015 amounting to nearly a half-billion dollars?
Did you know that over a half-billion print books were sold in 2015, nearly four percent more than the previous year while e-book sales fell?
Did you know that the sale of vinyl records, board games, film photography and paper journals have increased annually over past few years?
The resurgence of analog products in the midst of a digital revolution in how we now live is a marker, an early sign of millions of people (and I include myself) figuring out what's important in living a life fully in a world that has become increasingly digital.
Feeling the pages of a book, having a watch with numbers and a sweep second hand, playing Monopoly and chess on an actual board with others, taking family photos with an actual camera-- while easy to dismiss as whiny nostalgia--are signs of many people figuring out pathways to a life that mixes the analog and digital.
The persistence of the analog also means that interacting with people at work, at Costco, in a hospital and home care, in churches, playgrounds, in bars and at home matters a great deal. Face-to-face relationships are analog. They are the bonds that bind each of us to one another in families, among intimate friends, neighborhoods, and workplaces. They matter far more than Facebook "friends."
Consider the helping professions (e.g., doctors, therapists, nurses, ministers, social workers, teachers). Doctors and nurses have patients; therapists and social workers have clients; ministers, rabbis and imams have congregants, and teachers have students. Each of these professionals is immensely aided by new technologies they use daily yet their work depends upon human interaction and unfolding relationships. And in these relationship-bound professions is where the analog and digital intertwine. Not either/or, one or the other--analog and digital easily mix in these helping professions. And it is in schools especially where face-to-face contacts occur daily, where relationships begin and mature, where the analog and digital world come together.
Because schools are relationship-driven, where adults interact daily with children and youth, they are basically analog institutions in democratic, market-driven societies. They won't go away. Bricks and mortar schools will be around for the rest of the century because communities need them to convey to children and youth knowledge, values, skills and attitudes essential to that society and becoming adults who will contribute to their communities. Schooling is as much about the head as it is about the heart. A fact often forgotten by those avid reformers (and parents) who see schools as efficient escalators to the workplace, who see children and youth as brains on a stick.
The head and heart come together in schooling through adults interacting daily with children and youth in and out of classrooms. Digital tools, hyped as they are, have surely entered teachers' repertoires to reduce administrative work, increase efficiency while enriching instructional preparation. But the digital will not (and cannot) replace teachers with online schools, robots, virtual reality goggles or similar fantasies. Those schools that work best socialize the next generation into thinking, feeling, and acting beings who work in communities, thrive in workplaces, and learn to live fully in a digital world.
How can I be so confident of schools as analog places where relationships are central and not be replaced by the brave new digital world?
My half-century of experience in schools, awareness of the central role of schooling in a democratic, market-oriented society, and awareness of classrooms across the nation but especially in Silicon Valley have convinced me that schools as analog institutions will persevere and outlast the magical thinking that technologically-driven reformers peddle.
In the past year, I have observed scores of teachers integrate new technologies in their classrooms in the heart of Silicon Valley. These teachers and the schools in which they work have blended the analog and digital into a mix of activities and personal interactions that are both familiar and new.
Familiar in that teachers work in age-graded schools--a two-century old institution--where daily lessons, teacher/student relationships, and classroom situations echo school practices from earlier generations. Yet overlaid with the familiar is the new, the device-driven activities during the school day, the mix of digital and analog. In a first-grade room, students work in whole groups, small groups, and individually over the course of a six-hour day. For part of the day, they move to different learning stations (e.g., math, reading, science, art), some of which are device-driven while other children settle into independent work, and even other stations where pairs of six year-olds figure out a task together. And the teacher? She would be working one-on-one with students who were plowing ahead of the lesson, falling behind, or just keeping up with the work. The digital and analog come together easily such classrooms.
No one observing these first-graders during a school day would say that schooling has become a digital institution.
With the current resurgence of analog devices and activities noted above, adults also are learning to combine the analog with the digital to live their lives fully.
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