Lessons in Responsibility From Spider-Man, Part 1

Grow­ing up, my favorite super hero was Spider-​​Man. I could relate to him. Peter Parker was a lot like me, super pow­ers notwith­stand­ing. He was a lonely nerd, awk­ward around other peo­ple (espe­cially girls). Then he was handed incred­i­ble power and learned—the hard way—that no gift is free. It comes with the respon­si­bil­ity to use it well; the greater the power of the gift, the broader the scope of that responsibility.

I had a brief but inter­est­ing Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion last night with Steven Ander­son (@web20classroom) about the lay­ers of respon­si­bil­ity involved when stu­dents use tools like Twit­ter in the class­room. The dis­cus­sion was prompted by this blog post by Jim Gates, who says, essen­tially, that allow­ing stu­dents to use Twit­ter in the class­room is a waste because they wouldn’t use it for any­thing pro­duc­tive. A num­ber of ideas came up in my con­ver­sa­tion with Mr. Ander­son which I will explore here over the next few days.

Like Mr. Gates’s post, many of the reac­tions I hear about using tools like Twit­ter, blogs, or wikis in the class­room are ini­tially about fear: pri­mar­ily fear that stu­dents will abuse them. Are these fears legit­i­mate? Cer­tainly. There is a long his­tory of stu­dents mis­be­hav­ing in school, and that won’t be any dif­fer­ent with new meth­ods and tools.

What we must rec­og­nize is that these new tech­nolo­gies are just that: tools. They don’t have an inher­ent value–they only have a func­tion. The value comes from how the tool is used. A pen was used by Shake­speare to write son­nets…and by Hitler to write Mein Kampf. A ham­mer was used by car­pen­ters to build the bell tower on Inde­pen­dence Hall…and by Roman sol­diers to cru­cify Christ. We must judge not the imple­ment but the intention.

Some may think that bring­ing these tools into the class­room is like hand­ing stu­dents a loaded gun, and thus the response is either to ban the guns from the school alto­gether, or to allow strictly con­trolled access with close super­vi­sion and mul­ti­ple lay­ers of secu­rity. The flaw in this rea­son­ing of course is that the func­tion of the gun is explic­itly to cause harm to another person—it is not a tool, but a weapon.

Oth­ers argue that it is the stu­dents who are inher­ently prone to choos­ing wrong. I often hear this from teach­ers in my school, either directly or by impli­ca­tion. This may be, but lim­it­ing their access to the tools won’t elim­i­nate this propen­sity. Instead, we need to edu­cate. Teach stu­dents about the pos­si­bil­i­ties and the pit­falls. Give them free­dom within bound­aries, and let them know both the rewards that come from respon­si­ble use, and the con­se­quences (nat­ural and imposed) that can come from poor choices. I believe, though, that stu­dents aren’t by nature bad, sim­ply unwise. And the wis­dom they will need as adults to han­dle the ubiq­ui­tous tech­nol­ogy they will encounter can­not come by shel­ter­ing them from that tech­nol­ogy as students.

Wis­dom only comes through expe­ri­ence. Peter Parker learned about this when he declined to use his power to stop a bur­glar: he felt it wasn’t his prob­lem. That bur­glar later killed his own uncle, and Peter real­ized he had a choice to make—use his gifts to help oth­ers, or be self­ish and allow lives to be destroyed. The tools avail­able to stu­dents today are far more pow­er­ful than pen­cil and paper, both to build and to destroy. A note degrad­ing some­one else might be seen by a few peo­ple and can be destroyed before it spreads too far. A blog post degrad­ing some­one else might poten­tially be seen by mil­lions, and can never be com­pletely eliminated.

The thing is, we can do noth­ing to pre­vent our stu­dents from learn­ing about and hav­ing access to these tools. All things con­sid­ered, isn’t it bet­ter that they learn about them in the safe, struc­tured envi­ron­ment of the classroom?

Stu­dents may or may not learn respon­si­bil­ity on their own. As edu­ca­tors we also have a respon­si­bil­ity, how­ever, and it is this respon­si­bil­ity I will explore more tomorrow.