Under the shadow of the pandemic, online education has made a great leap forward, and overnight primary, secondary, and higher schools across the country all switched on cloud-based classes.
In the Internet age, online education may well be the inevitable trend, but a sudden leap made in haste will naturally bring many problems with it, especially since the ability to adapt to online education varies greatly from one region and one family to another.
For example, on February 29, a ninth-grade girl in Henan, because her family was impoverished and she had to fight with her siblings for the family’s phone in order to listen to online classes, may have missed lessons, or perhaps added family conflicts on top of that, and in the end swallowed pills and took her own life.
Fortunately, the little girl was rescued in time, but this tragedy is surely not an isolated case. I’m afraid there are many other children who, though not driven to seek death, still have suffering they cannot voice, bearing extra hardship.
A smartphone costs at least several hundred yuan, and if you want to watch live video classes, monthly data charges will be at least several tens of yuan. For a wealthy family, of course, that is nothing; but for a poor family whose annual income may only be in the thousands, this is undoubtedly a heavy burden. If a poor family has several children all needing to attend classes at once, the trouble becomes even greater.
Of course, schools and the government may provide some assistance, but in general, being able to issue a data-fee subsidy already is no easy matter. It is impossible to resolve the basic predicament that poor families are always less able to adapt to new technology. In a classroom, every student has a book and a desk; but in an online class, some people can sit at a big computer desk, with computer, tablet, and phone all running at once, wearing noise-canceling headphones and drinking iced Coke, far more comfortably than going to school. Others may have to climb to the top of a mountain or crouch under a neighbor’s wall just to get a signal, holding a small-screen phone to listen to the lesson. The gap is instantly widened.
More than a year ago, the media hyped the so-called “one screen changes destiny,” claiming that allowing students in underdeveloped regions to receive the same courses as students in key schools through distance teaching could promote educational equality. At the time, I also had some doubts about this blind optimism. But even if we grant that one screen really can promote equality, is this equality still one in which “some people are more equal than others”?
Clearly, one person watching three screens and three people fighting over one screen are vastly different things. Even if the “screen” itself provides equal access to lessons, even if the screen itself is the embodiment of equality, different people always differ in their distance from “equality”: some people enjoy “equality” more quickly, some people find it harder to buy “equality,” and this creates a new inequality.
New technology can either reinforce or alleviate existing inequalities, but in any case, any new technology is bound to bring new forms of inequality. The reason is simple: technology is not “natural.”
In the eighteenth century, Rousseau, in his two famous essay competitions, identified science and the arts (technology) as the causes of the corruption of human morals, and even as “the origin and foundation of human inequality.” He believed that primitive people lived in a simple and benevolent “state of nature,” and that the progress of science and technology, together with the attendant emergence of private property, would inevitably cause humanity to depart from “nature” and thus decay day by day.
I do not want to go into the details of Rousseau’s argument. I will only understand Rousseau’s logic in a very simplified way: first, “all men are born equal”; the “inborn,” primitive state is one of equality. If that is so, then anything “acquired later” will break the inborn state and thus lead to inequality.
And technology is the most典型 of such “acquired later” things. No technology is something human beings possess in the primitive state; technology always requires later invention, manufacture, equipment, and learning before it can be used. And in these processes, there must inevitably be differences of order, distance, and quantity.
The “state of nature” Rousseau posited is an abstract construction rather than reality. Human history and the history of technology are equally ancient, and human beings have never had a way of life entirely detached from technology. However, among primitive peoples, technological development was extremely slow: the technological environment a human community needed to adapt to did not change significantly over thousands or even tens of thousands of years, and thus human beings could compromise with the technological environment and form a relatively balanced state. Modern anthropology has indeed found that once certain new technologies or new objects are introduced into a relatively stable primitive society—such as bringing writing into a Druid community, or bringing a rifle into a hunting tribe—it is very likely to upset the balance and provoke new social conflicts.
Since the Industrial Age, technology has developed at an accelerating pace, and new technologies appear every day. And we must also realize that the “equality” problems brought by new technology are likewise coming too fast for us to take in.
Many times, people would rather talk about those technologies that have promoted “equality.” For example, Marx believed that gunpowder, the compass, and printing helped bring about the dissolution of feudal society. Why could gunpowder blast the knightly class to pieces? In terms of lethality, an early musketeer was not necessarily the match of a well-trained longbowman or armored knight, but the latter depended on more expensive equipment and longer training, whereas the former could be handled by a militia conscripted temporarily with only a bit of training. Thus, gunpowder in essence leveled the gap between knights and commoners on the battlefield through a military technology with a lower threshold, thereby dissolving the knightly class. Similarly, printing leveled the gap between clergy and laypeople in access to the Bible and other knowledge, thereby breaking the Church’s monopoly on knowledge and promoting the Protestant Reformation.
But the armor and castles of knights blasted apart by gunpowder, the parchment and handwritten books replaced by printed books—these too are technologies, are they not? Moreover, technologies that have one face of promoting equality often simultaneously have another face that promotes inequality. Gunpowder promoted the dissolution of feudalism, and at the same time promoted the rise of colonialism; printed books, while helping the decline of ecclesiastical power, also promoted witch trials… Marx believed these new technologies dissolved the knightly class, but at the same time promoted the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the relationship between capitalists and workers in turn constituted a new relationship of inequality.
Rather than saying that some technology can promote equality or inequality, it is better to say that technology is always replacing one inequality with a new inequality.
For example, if one’s parents are wealthy, then their children start from a higher starting line; this of course is a kind of inequality. But compared with children whose fate is determined by their parents’ bloodline or caste, this capitalist inequality is instead a kind of “liberation.” If we reject any inequality whatsoever and demand that every child’s fate after birth have nothing to do with their parents, that would be not only unrealistic, but also undesirable, and even less humane.
If what we pursue is not merely some abstract notion of “equal rights for all,” but the ongoing search for liberation in reality, then we are forced to face the actuality of technology: we can only use technology to replace technology, and use technology to balance technology.
I am not saying that we can only let technology develop and place no constraints on it at all. On the contrary, the word “use” itself already contains ethical considerations. We cannot regard technology as a wholly neutral tool—every technology is “unequal,” every technology has its own bias. When weighing how to apply a new technology, beyond its direct efficacy, we need more to consider how to place its “bias.”
But if every technology is biased, and if there is no absolutely equal state for human beings to begin with, then how are we to evaluate our wishes? If all are inequalities, what reason do we have to believe that printed books are better than manuscripts? Why should we think capitalism is better than the caste system? If there is no absolute standard of good and bad, then what exactly is it that we are supposed to consider when weighing a new technology?
We do not pursue absolute equality, but we can still speak of relative equality. It is much like how we cannot define an absolute “deliciousness,” yet we can still meaningfully say whether today’s dinner tastes good or bad. A cook cannot be certain exactly what a customer’s palate is like, but he can negotiate with the customer, strive to accommodate the tastes of as many customers as possible, and ensure that the few customers with unusual preferences are not too wronged. A good cook does not need to have the tongue of God; he simply needs to think more, communicate more, and care more. At the very least, asking one more question before cooking—“Any food restrictions?”—is already a kind deed.
The inventors and promoters of technology are the same. They do not have to possess the power of hearing and seeing all things, nor do they need to grasp an absolute standard of equality; but when promoting technology, thinking one layer further, asking a few more questions, and listening to the opinions of different groups is also a good thing.
Returning to the matter of online education: if we take into account the unequal situations certain groups are bound to encounter before new technology, should we therefore stop online education and forbid schools from “cloud-opening” the new semester? But if we did that, the children who lack access to the Internet and the ability to use it often have parents who do not understand education and do not know how to seek resources online either, and the children would have even less opportunity for self-study. And those wealthy families who are adept at Internet technology, able to find excellent online courses, and even easily able to find excellent teachers for online tutoring, would have even greater advantages.
When it comes to new technology, neither a one-size-fits-all ban nor a stampede of enthusiastic embrace is an appropriate attitude. There is simply no once-and-for-all solution to how new technology should be applied. All we can do is, while promoting technology, add a little more “human concern,” a little more ethical reflection, and at the very least ask one more question: “Are there any difficulties?”—which is already a good thing.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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