Is tech white bread?
In the daily diet of educational discourse there have been quite a lot of tech topics on everyone’s plates. Whether or not we should be using tech, adapting tech, integrating tech, refining tech and ultimately using tech within teaching have been the subject of multiple real life and online discussions – often with incredibly strongly held views, alongside others who are curious, unsure or yet to decide.
What is clear though, is that there is at the moment no universal agreement across and within education as to whether tech and its use has universal benefits or universally harmful effects. As with anything, when you are considering the multiple variables at play in any classroom, setting or context, it would be hard to say with confidence, “This is the silver bullet in all circumstances”. Tech is also potentially a broad umbrella term which incorporates everything from equipping all children with AI and internet enabled 1-1 devices through to the occasional showing of a video on a large digital screen by a teacher as part of a teacher led session. This umbrella nature can also be unhelpful, as colleagues can end up conflating elements or talking at cross purposes as tech itself has not been clearly defined.
What does exist though is a universal and sometimes almost visceral reaction to the idea of children using technology as part of their learning. Some colleagues see this as exciting, the future, a way of accessing previously untapped ideas and approaches. Others approach it with scepticism, fear, trepidation or uncertainty. What we know though is that tech, and its associated arguments, are not going away anytime soon. It has become part of our diet, our educational daily bread. And, just as our attitudes towards bread have evolved, I suspect too that so will our attitudes towards tech.
When we think of cheap, nutritionally insubstantial or somehow inferior bread, what is often brought to mind is the ultra-processed, sliced white loaf – packaged in plastic, often the cheapest loaf on the shelf, made from flour so stripped of its naturally occurring nutrients during processing that it must, by law, be fortified. There is also often a snobbery around its use or a perceived dietary naughtiness in choosing white bread as a “treat” because it is known to be so low in nutritional value. Our cheap ultra processed white bread is made in highly industrialised and mechanised processes and barely feels the touch of a human hand or the watch of a human eye during its creation. Its production is carried out by machines, and the human contribution has shifted from direct craftsmanship to designing, operating, monitoring and maintaining the machinery that makes it. The hand no longer kneads the dough or mixes the ingredients or shapes each loaf by eye or checks the oven door to see the gentle rise or goldening. What is interesting now is that what is often prized n our own daily diets is artisanal bread. Stroll through any farmers’ market or step into any artisanal bakery and you will see highly priced and prized artisanal loaves which are slipped into crisp brown paper bags with quiet reverie and an anticipation of often not only the deliciousness of the contents but also its nutritional value and the knowledge that a real person has been part of its creation. That row of loaves in the artisanal bakery is often not uniform or as predictable as the plastic packaged white bread; there may be a slightly charred twist on top or an extra crunchy crust or a funny little air bubble upon slicing, but the delight is in the balance of both its creation and its nutrition.
It does not require fortifying.
It has fewer ultra processed ingredients.
It is considered a luxury.
This is in contrast to its white bread counterpart who often can be found frequenting a flaccid and sad forecourt sandwich in the local garage or who stands in tightly packed triangles in budget buffets gripping wet ham and plastic cheese.
White bread has almost become synonymous with poor nutrition, and a nagging sense of slight disappointment. Even its consumption can feel physically gluey; indeed, latest nutritional and food standards in early years settings advise against its use, as when untoasted but chewed it can form a ball of congealed tacky dough that can increase a child’s chances of choking.
All in all, white bread hasn’t got the same universal endorsement or indeed social status it had upon its introduction. Early in the life of white bread in Medieval Britain, it was seen as high status due to the additional work it required to undertake the fine sifting needed to produce white flour. This continued through Tudor and Stuart Britain then into the 18th Century when it assumed a new status not only as aspirational but as somehow refined and pure which was associated with quality.
The 19th Century saw it become more widespread and throughout the industrial revolution and into the 20th Century the machinery and mechanism needed to produce it at scale continued to improve and therefore it became more widespread. By the early 20th Century, it was a household staple – then briefly disappearing during the Second World War, with the darker National Loaf causing white bread to become almost mythical in its status and longed for by most who had to grapple with the dense and arduous bite of the National Loaf.
By the 1950s, white bread was enjoying a surge in popularity, and the Chorleywood Bread Process of 1961 made it even more inexpensive, quick to mass produce and find its way onto the shelves of most households. The addition of fats, emulsifiers, oxidising agents and high-speed mixers meant that white bread could now be produced rapidly and for the masses in ways previously almost unimaginable.
It is only in more recent generations that white bread has been toppled from its dietary throne and become somewhat of a dietary pariah. As our understanding of nutrition, effects of foods on the body, and a deeper understanding of health and wellbeing have all evolved, so has our unease with the once almost universally celebrated and high-status white bread.
As our knowledge of the effects of the highly mechanised production of white bread on our bodies has increased, so has the inverse happened with its popularity, replaced instead by the want for a less mechanised product and a more artisanal and simplified approach to our diets. We are shunning the ultra-processed white loaf in favour of a return to those ways of producing and eating bread that were once considered somehow old fashioned or inferior due to their simplicity and human touch.
It is this that I think about when we rush to embrace tech.
Are we white breading our children’s learning?
Will we turn around in a few decades and realise, like with the highly processed white loaf that it is educationally nutritionally lacking or even void?
Will we long for a return to an artisanal educational diet led by human hand and eye not just one where the human is white coated and clipboarded as they are despatched to supervise the educational machinery?
In the future will we rue the lack of artisanal bakers available to pass on their knowledge and skills to the next generation of artisans?
Will we have to fortify a digital offer in the same way we have to fortify our white loaves now? Will we decide that serving up a digital diet to our youngest children is dull and doughy, a claggy cognitive experience that is hard to swallow?
All of this remains to be seen. There are emerging bodies of evidence that point to many potentially damaging effects, particularly for very young children on their use of screen time and tech. This is accompanied by a simultaneous explosion and an excitement in the tech space of the education equivalent of the Chorleywood Bread Process – we can suddenly make things faster, bigger, more efficient and completed in ways of which we could never have even imagined just a few years ago. In the rush to embrace this enthusiasm though, I would always pause. I would think about my diet, my daily bread, my child’s and every other child’s educational daily bread.
Do I want them taught by an artisan who understands the craft and ingredients at a human level? Or do I want a more mechanised Chorleywood bread process approach which can get things off the production line faster, more uniformly and in record time but has the person standing to the side with the clipboard and the hairnet, checking the machinery?
In the potential white breading of education, I also think that those children who are in the most vulnerable circumstances may be the ones to receive the most ultra processed, low nutritionally valuable diets. Just as ultra processed white bread is cheap, readily available and can be found pretty much everywhere, tech runs the risk of being the educational default for those children who for myriad reasons cannot have access to the equivalent of an artisanal baker.
This also has a potential early clarion call for wider teacher education.
If tech is cheap and training an artisan is time consuming and expensive, who is monitoring the balance of where investment in teacher development will go?
If we want to avoid white-breading education we need to invest in the artisan in training, retention, remuneration and development; otherwise the human element of teaching will become the expensive artisan loaf slipped into the crisp paper bag – a treat only once a week or for the few who can afford it.
Refining the tech is therefore not a benign endeavour; it has arguments for ensuring access and a developing an effectiveness within that access, but it also has far reaching consequences beyond those that are simply let’s make this tool better. The swing from the ultra-processed white loaf and back to the value and nutrition of simple ingredients and an artisanal approach could be a societal tech foreshock echoing from our kitchens and supermarket shelves.
We have seen how white bread has been championed for its ease and accessibility but have then, as we know more, stepped away.
I shall therefore be watching with interest as to how tech avoids becoming education’s white bread.
