Banks: Tools, schools and rules: The risk of squelching curiosity

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When I was in fourth grade, I had a sudden interest in learning Spanish and German. This was because I’d found pocket translation dictionaries at a bookstore at the Apache Mall in Rochester — I think it was a B. Dalton? — and had persuaded my parents to buy them for me.

Being a nerd, I took them to school with me. And being a person who likes to put knowledge to work, I looked for ways to apply my new words.

And being a fourth-grader, I didn’t do this in an entirely constructive way. For starters, there’s more to a language than vocabulary. Pronunciation and sentence structure. Colloquialisms. Conjugations! I certainly wasn’t focused on these things at the time.

More important to me then, I’d figured out a few reasonably clean insults to gleefully direct at a classmate. And so the teacher took my dictionaries away. I got them back after school with instructions to leave them at home, where I leafed through them occasionally, but less enthusiastically.

Now, I was fond of this teacher at the time and still am in retrospect, but if I’m recalling events precisely nearly 50 years later — it’s harder than you might think — I believe she made a mistake. Instead of figuring out a way to redirect my curiosity, she killed it. Spanish would’ve been useful.

It’s true that I never sought out or took advantage of more formal opportunities to learn, and that’s on me. But not entirely. The moment of curiosity is the moment of leverage.

I’ve revisited this periodically while reading about cellphones in schools. I did so again recently when we published the Sept. 6 commentary “Glad I don’t have to come up with that school smartphone policy” by Doug Johnson, a retired school technology director. Johnson was writing about a new Minnesota law that requires schools to have a student phone policy in place by March, and his main argument was to avoid making rules you can’t enforce. I liked that. But it was a secondary point that made me do a silent fist pump in my mind: “I know that my phone gives me access to information that makes me a more informed thinker.” Students, you see, don’t seem to use the smartphones that way. But they could.

Here I must admit that I was not a typical child. Think the “Wells for Boys” skit on “Saturday Night Live” and you start to get the idea. (“Some kids like to play; others just sort of wait for adulthood.”)

But my 1976 World Book Encyclopedia was one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me. Those reference volumes are now dinosaurs, just like the B. Dalton Bookseller chain (founded in Minnesota, 1966; liquidated, 2013; one vestigial location recreated in Florida, 2022). But they’ve been replaced by a living encyclopedia that can go with us anywhere. I use that tool profusely. I can only imagine how much I would have loved having it as a child and what directions it might have sent me in.

Today, we think smartphones are driving kids to distraction and even to depression, and it’s probably all true. Every tool you could possibly dream up will be misused by somebody. Misused en masse? That sounds like an opportunity.

I’m not arguing against schools setting smartphone policies nor against some degree of restriction. Teachers and parents and administrators are in the thick of things and I’m not. But I am asking all of us to maintain an understanding of the nature of tools and to look for ways to leverage their benefits — to believe it our collective and individual responsibility to do so — and to redirect misuses, not squelch interest, whenever possible. God help us if we simply give up on the ideal.

I believe this is true also of other innovations, like artificial intelligence.

AI has many applications, but most people, focused on large language models, see it as a thought-replacer. I see it as a thought-prompter-and-flesher-outer. It offers a way to flit about looking for something that intrigues you, and when you’ve found that, to dive deep. Don’t repeat what it tells you or let it crystallize your thoughts without corroboration, and you’ll be fine. There’s always more than one tool in the box.

I used AI recently to try to figure out how I could have structured my postsecondary education had I known then what I know now. It would have somehow combined behavioral and cognitive science with ethics and public policy. It might not have spared all of you from experiencing me as a navel-gazing journalist — such is my very nature — but it would have given my work a unique foundation.

And given the evolutions we face in society, such a course of study certainly would seem relevant across the board in the coming decades. (Wouldn’t employers agree?) It’s too late for me, but interested high school juniors and seniors should get out their smartphones and poke around.