Never would so much be owed by so many to so few

Why do kids only get a say in their futures once they’re no longer kids?

In my day, it was hair. Bell-bottoms. Flares. High waistbands. And a tie tied so short that it was barely visible beneath the collar, whilst still technically being worn. Oh, how we pushed the school rules to the limit, where there was a limit that could discernibly be pushed. But that was all when the sole source of rule-breaking was essentially fashion. Nowadays, they have the smartphone, and, boy, is that an issue.

I read a piece yesterday on the Substack that homes in, not on secondary school pupils but on college students, and it is well written, if you care to take a look at an overview of the problems a modern university professor has in getting his students to actually study anything. Increasingly, the writer concludes, colleges and universities admit students for the sole purpose of going through the motions of performing course work and passing assessments in order for them then to be released into the world of middle-class comfort, where nothing special is expected of them as graduates and they aspire to nothing much more than scrolling their screens. Even without Mr Trump, Mrs Meloni and Mr Farage, dystopia is at the doorstep, because these young graduates are destined to become the people who govern and rule us, whether in commerce or in parliament. Or are Oxbridge and Ivy League students immune from the temptations of screen-scrolling, and thus present themselves as the sole obvious choice for leadership positions?

The appropriate age for exposing youngsters to smartphone technology is debated as being somewhere between the age of eight and the age of eighteen (and then they can bloody well buy their own, as one hears in some quarters). Some schools need you to have a smartphone in order to take part in classes, some schools forbid them in classes, and some schools whip them out of your hand upon entering the premises. I happily existed without a smartphone until I was just short of my fortieth birthday, and that possibly explains why I sniff indignantly when LinkedIn asks me if I wouldn’t prefer to rephrase a post by getting artificial intelligence to do it for me. I would if I were on the smaller of the two screens, but at my computer keyboard, even my sausages can type something akin to grammatical sense, even if you do occasionally disagree with it.

When I was at Edinburgh, from 1980 to 1985, there was an undistinguished little doorway on Forrest Road, just off the end of George IV Bridge before Lauriston Place is reached, not far from that faithful hound Greyfriars Bobby, which bore the standard university plaque in dark maroon, with gold-blocked lettering: DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Nobody in those days had much of a clue about what went on behind that portal, other than perhaps building robots. A pal of mine who was doing Business Studies with German told me one year that he would go there twice a week for an optional course that he’d reckoned could be interesting. He’s probably the one who’s now asking me to rephrase everything I put on LinkedIn, Scheißkerl.

Even before I was at uni, a controversy erupted at school as to whether (a) pocket calculators should be allowed in mathematics classes and (b) whether they would be allowed in mathematics examinations. My recollection—if it serves me correctly—was that they were not allowed at school leavers’ level (ordinary level) but they had been accepted by the time I did the advanced level, two years later, prior to university entry. That may seem bonkers, but it was so. The obvious dispute circled around whether a student should be necessarily penalised if they get a decimal point in the wrong place. The answer was clearly yes, if they didn’t use a calculator, and yes if they did. All the calculator did was speed up the process of arriving at the wrong answer.

Therefore, if AI is systematically resorted to by students in order to drum up answers to assignments they haven’t studied for, the question has to be, does AI help them avoid getting the wrong answer? I suppose the only way to test that is to have those who submit replies to assignments sit in the classroom and rewrite their essays without using any of the words appearing in the version as initially submitted (in a given sentence, for instance). That would then be the reverse discipline of LinkedIn: would you care to rephrase your essay by getting artificial intelligence not to do it for you? I think that would be a dainty dish to set before the kings and queens of our universities, but waste 50 per cent of all class time. Since the professor in question, as referred to above, divined that pretty much all of his class time was a waste, with students virtually being passed through to the next year or to graduation on the nod, regardless of their performance, this would at least concentrate minds for the 50 per cent of class time that wasn’t thereby wasted and would perhaps gen the kids up on what they had actually been meant to be studying for their assignments.

But, I am old-fashioned. I never look at my phone. When it rings, for instance, because somebody telephones me, it goes unanswered: my LAN line has a cable that goes into the wall and, when that phone rings, I can hear it from the end of the garden. It will generally ring for long enough for me to reach it and answer and, most importantly, I actually know—even from the end of the garden—where the damned thing is located—i.e., at the end of said cable. If I’m at home, people know from the fact that the answering machine, with its little tape recorder, doesn’t click in that I am somewhere around and will eventually answer; otherwise, it does click in after about two rings. Is that not astonishingly simple?

The smartphone, on the other hand, rings off after so many rings, something I cannot regulate—it’s decided by the service provider. Hm—service. If it’s at the bottom of my rucksack, it takes five rings to locate, and two to grasp before trying about eight times to swipe the knob upwards to answer. By that time, it is way too late to have even bothered. (Screens don’t work if you have bacon fat on your fingertip.)

But the youth of today surely do have a point. First of all, the pandemic taught them, at an impressionable stage in their lives, that life can quite happily continue with everyone on-screen. It taught them that society and friends are unimportant to survival. Even if it didn’t teach them whether that’s right or not. It taught that inspiration and leadership is as likely to be found on a misogynist’s website as in a college lecture theatre. That AI will eventually take over the world anyway, and we are defenceless to stop it, regardless of what claptrap it comes out with in elegantly phrased and immaculately spelled prose.

The banning of smartphones in schools and colleges may be focusing students’ attention more pointedly at the core curriculum syllabus, but it is doing something else to them at the same time: it is telling them that old fogey adults who first encountered smart technology when they were twice the age of these youngsters know better than the youngsters do what kind of future world is desirable. Nobody is asking the youngsters. Everyone is telling youngsters what to do and, if they don’t, what punishment they will receive for their recalcitrance.

We are raising the perfect generation: to obey without question and never ask why?

On 16 November 2021, Cambridge University don David Runciman wrote a persuasive piece in The Guardian pleading for extension of the right of suffrage to persons aged six and over. Not sixteen, but six.

It is an article worthy of your attention, because it does in fact focus on the reasons cited why many rights get refused to others that are enjoyed by the few. The Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command was commended during the Second World War by the British prime minister, Winston S. Churchill, with the immortal words Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed, by so many, to so few. Voting is all about our futures, and politics is all about fighting for our own vision of our futures over and above the visions of others. But futures are not restricted to the length of a presidency or a parliament. Futures stretch for many decades, and they start at birth.

We cosset and protect children, we forbid them from engaging in practices that we know harm them, these undesirable things: from smoking, from pornography, from sniffing glue, from drugs, from weapons, from delinquency. We do this out of love, and in fulfilment of our commitments to them as young persons. But on what rationale do we prohibit them from the purported harm of voting? That is a harder question to answer: for prohibiting the young from voting does not protect them; it shields precisely the people who can already vote. It shields adults who selfishly want to control others, absent input from those who are controlled, because politics today is viewed as a means of control, more of others than of one’s own destiny. It doesn’t matter whether the controlled are Marx’s industrial slaves, the destitute, the homeless, the indebted, the Global South, the criminally convicted, those cowed under authoritarianism, or children. For purposes of control, they are all in the same barrel.

And now, with bans of smartphones, children are to be tramlined into studying as they are told, and learning without question, from institutions whose libraries have been denuded of the very tomes that broaden the outook and horizons of youth; they are told not to view the very instruments people give to them that allow them to access many of these undesirable things. Perhaps it is time for adults to back off from kids and tell them outright: your future is in your hands, and if what is in your hands is a smartphone, then that will be your future. Think about that and meanwhile cast a vote that will secure your future for you, and ours for us.

Adults are already proving that excluding the young from universal suffrage does not mean that good election results result. You can inculcate responsible behaviour, even from kids, by conferring responsibility. If the few who make the decisions were to extend the power of decision to the few who have no vote at present, then a future prime minister might well have cause to repeat to today’s many on behalf of today’s few the words that Churchill spoke to the RAF.