FOR A RADICAL CHANGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Our research has emerged from a passion for higher education. We also feel an urge to radically change it for the better. An increasingly dense literature has documented the harmful effects of screens on concentration and learning. With the emergence of the Internet, early hopes of a universal knowledge-sharing community have been shattered by the greed of companies competing for attention in the cognitive market. The Internet only mirrors the true nature of a humanity that is more interested in distraction than self-development. In this context, youth is particularly vulnerable to the lure of entertainment for its own sake. Based on years of teaching experience and the observation that screens make people stupid, we have developed an experimental design that bans them from the classroom. Teaching relies on the oratory skills of the teacher and true (rather than virtual) communication with students. Interactivity and learning do not require advanced technical artefacts such as videos or games, but quality storytelling and rhetorics - an art of conversation teachers should return to. We have witnessed extraordinary results following this “old school” method which will hopefully become the school of tomorrow. Students were not passively staring at slides that emptied their minds, but developing thinking skills and a taste for imagination that made them masters of their own learning.