PU #239 - MAKING LINKS - The Skills Atrophy We Haven't Noticed
Skills atrophy is the term used for the slow loss, or diminishment, of previously existing skills due to continued outsourcing of those skills to automation or AI.
For example — once upon a time I might write notes on a book I am reading for research, to organise my thoughts and highlight key ideas. Perhaps I scribble down questions and objections too. If, however, I instead plug the book title into AI and ask it to produce the same sort of thing, and I keep on doing this, eventually I might lose the personal skill of condensing ideas appropriately for myself. I grow dependent on the technology to do it for me for so long that the muscle of my previous skills wither and die.
That’s the idea, and it’s pretty well accepted as a significant issue arising from growing dependency on AI, especially in young people who perhaps haven’t yet even developed the original skills to be atrophied. But, of course, there are varying views about how much we should worry. After all — history has a litany of obsolete skills it can show us that have happily atrophied and died off because they are simply no longer needed as things have advanced. Maybe certain cognitive skills can be offloaded onto our technology so we can better use our minds for higher things? Consider, for example, how much we really need to use mental arithmetic in the age of calculators?
But as eyes turn worriedly towards the future, and how the impact of new technology might affect certain generations, I’d like to call our attention to quite an old technology that I believe has already had a significant impact on children, leading to a hidden skills atrophy, or even the lack of the development of those skills at all. I offer for your perusal the impact of the humble link.
This week my school took a year group to The National Holocaust Museum in Nottinghamshire and something happened that, though minor compared to Nazi atrocities, was almost as chilling as the many harrowing tales of suffering we heard from the powerful testimony of our Holocaust survivor. The Museum has a fabulous exhibition downstairs, detailing the history of antisemitism, the lead up to the Holocaust, what happened, and the legacy of the Nazi’s attempted genocide. And as our students — 13 to 14 years old — entered the exhibit I saw them racing through the different rooms, glancing briefly at images and objects, and completely ignoring the copious amount of text displayed next to them.
“Why is this here?” one student asked. “What’s this?” asked another. And I waited a beat before asking them why they hadn’t read the information right next to the image or object which caused their confusion, where what it was, or why it was there, was clearly explained.
They had no answer. It simply hadn’t occurred to them to read it. To search out connected information to the more immediate object in front of them. To make that link that the nearby writing might be related to the thing it was next to.
The cognitive failure displayed was not the first time I had been disappointed in students’ ability to move logically from A to B. I have always been surprised by how little my students know about me, for example. After all, I am not a very private person, as anyone who reads Philosophy Unleashed will know. I talk frequently about my own personal opinions on a range of issues, have even written an entire memoir about my life, and released scores of songs detailing all manner of personal points of view about the world. I blog, I have been interviewed many times for podcasts and websites. It’s all out there to be found. But so few of them do. It’s one of the things we are warned about as teachers — to ensure we are not searchable online — but is something I am unable to do if I still want people to be able to find and buy my music and writing (which I do). Yet in my entire career it is only the very rare occasion that a student seems to have bothered to do the search. And when they have, it has been extremely cursory.
My first year of teaching after training, I remember being impressed that my sixth form class had managed to find a copy of my old band’s last album online. They even purchased it and brought the CD in for me to sign. Their savvy sourcing and curious digging had led to success. Embarrassed, I signed the disc, and assumed things like this might happen a lot over the years. I worried about my searchability — especially as some of my older punk lyrics are not exactly “school friendly”. But, nearly twenty years on, and they remain the only group to have done that.
That said, when my book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, came out in 2023, I noticed kids around the new school I was working in saying the phrase to me a lot, suggesting they had heard about it somehow. Some were even singing the song of the same name that I had written and used in promotional videos to help plug the book. Oh god — I thought. Now it’s happening. They’d found the videos on YouTube — “I’ve subscribed to your channel sir!” — and one thing would lead to another…
…Except it didn’t. I started to notice that the “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher” kids didn’t seem to realise that the song they were singing was about a book I had written. Even though the video with the song had text advertising the impending publication of the book, and another saw me unboxing my first copies of it, the connection from A to B didn’t seem to be happening. Nor did they seem to twig that I had written other songs too. Nearly one hundred of them. All easily available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music. None of these students had been curious enough to actually buy the book and find out more about me than they saw in the brief promotional videos they’d found. All they knew was that, for some bizarre reason, I’d written a song and fancied myself as an “anarchist atheist punk rock teacher”. Hahaha. None had done the deep dive that was so easily at their fingertips and that, frankly, I am 100% sure I would have done as a teenager if I found out a way of knowing more about my teachers. (I am speaking as a person who went to watch my French teacher perform in an amateur dramatic production of The Odd Couple the moment I found out he was in it, and once tried to track down (pre-internet) my Headteacher’s PhD thesis.)
The experience began to make me reflect on similar absences of curiosity or connection making in my students over the years. In lessons — where more and more over the years students seem to ask questions about things for which the answers are literally in front of them, in worksheets or on the whiteboard; or where it seems to be getting rarer for students to make connections for themselves to previous topics, or different subjects within the school, without you spelling it out to them explicitly — and in their own lives, as their cultural tastes seem guided more by algorithms than personal choices and media is consumed without context or history.
My whole life has been about making those sorts of inquisitive leaps. Why am I a philosophy teacher today? Because when I was a kid I found punk rock. Green Day. And Green Day covered songs by Operation Ivy and were on Lookout! Records, so I explored other Lookout! Bands and Op Ivy, who became Rancid, which led me to Epitaph Records and Bad Religion. My search for all things punk led to me watching this special “punk” episode of Alternative Nation on MTV, which is where I first saw Dead Kennedys. That led to exploring the Dead Kennedys back catalogue, plus other bands on their singer’s label, Alternative Tentacles (such as NoMeansNo, my all-time favourite band). Exploring Dead Kennedys led to a political awakening as I wanted to understand their lyrics, so started paying attention to the news and reading books about politics. All of it made me start asking questions, especially about religion. That curiosity extended to finding out which of my teachers were religious and bothering them with questions which, at some point, they described as “philosophical”. My friend, equally curious, discovered our local sixth form taught a course called “philosophy”, so we decided to sign up. The rest is history.
Maybe myself and my friends were unique cases, but I don’t think so. What I do know, however, is that we lived in a time primarily before the internet. And when the internet arrived in those years we were studying philosophy in the sixth form, it remained slow and clunky. We had to really think about what we wanted to use it for. Hyperlinks existed, but each click took a long time to load. Click too many and you would overload your primitive computer’s poor little brain.
Cut to today. Links open in an instant. Everything is online and, wherever one thing connects to another, a link will show you how. Just click from link to link and fall into a rabbit hole of information you may never come back from.
But the links are doing all the cognitive work — not you. You no longer have to think things such as: this is like X, I need to check out X. Instead, the connection to X is handed to you without effort.
And then there are the algorithms. If you liked X we think you’ll like Y. The old cognitive labour of making those discoveries yourself through trial, error and reflection has been taken out of your hands and the computer does it for you. Watch a movie and before the credits even roll there are five more movies you might like being suggested without having to leave your chair. Listen to a song and the shuffle feature will give you a new artist to try without you lifting a finger. Our social media feeds shove things into our attention their algorithms think we might like and, often, they are right, so we no longer have to go hunt them out.
We accept all this as normal. It has become the way of the world very quickly since those clunky dial-up modem days of the early 1990s internet. And very little is discussed about the impact of now living in a world where cognitive connecting is done for you. But we know that skills atrophy is a real thing, and if making cognitive links from A to B is a skill (which we know it is, a higher order intellectual skill), and that skill has largely been outsourced to our computers (or, in the classroom, to teachers doing everything for you, including providing scaffolds and essay structures so you don’t have to think about how to order and organise your own thoughts to write an essay), then we shouldn’t be surprised to find young people not properly developing the basic cognitive abilities needed to be intellectually curious and make their own connections and discoveries. Why search for something to read about the subject you’re interested in when a reading list will be provided? Why hunt for things that go beyond what is taught in the classroom when a pre-planned extension task will be set? And why waste energy trying to see for ourselves what might be connected to the current focus of our attention when the computer will do it all for us?
People don’t even choose their partner for themselves these days — they are happy for an app to whittle down the possibilities and reduce personal connection to a series of photographs and bios to passively swipe either right or left on.
My suspicion is that, in a world where connections we used to have to work for ourselves have been repeatedly handed to us for so long (and without any resistance) by pre-loaded links and algorithms, adults raised in the previous paradigm will have seen a serious skills atrophy in their cognitive abilities to make such links for themselves, and children, who have never needed to develop those initial skills to atrophy, will be raised with a serious deficit in such skills. They may well never atrophy because they are not even there to begin with.
Again — whether this is a problem or not is for you to decide. Are these skills we might be losing important ones, or is it OK that we are making them obsolete and outsourcing this particular cognitive capacity to our machines?
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My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.
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Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.
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