Banning YouTube removes tools from schools

It’s been a long time since the norm for audio-visual presentations in classrooms took the form of a slide projector, or a TV cart with a VHS player and a small cathode-ray tube set.

But Manitoba’s premier is asking himself something lately: are the modern equivalents good for schools?

Premier Wab Kinew said during a recent CBC interview that he does not think YouTube, the popular video-streaming site, should be used in classrooms. He made the comment during a discussion on his broader effort to keep kids aged 15 and younger from accessing YouTube and other social media apps.

The comments have caused some consternation among educators who, while recognizing YouTube in general is not a great source of information for young people, believe it nevertheless offers access to a solid repository of educational video content provided by reputable sources.

“Don’t take away the tools we need to work if you’re not going to be funding (replacements),” said Manitoba Teachers’ Society president Lillian Klausen in an interview with the Free Press. She added that YouTube has replaced the VHS and DVD libraries of bygone days.

(In fairness to Kinew, the thought to keep YouTube out of schools amounts to a “proposal” not a hard-and-fast element of his social media vision. He said he was a “no” on YouTube in class “right now,” suggesting he may change his mind.)

Some of Kinew’s concerns about YouTube miss the mark. He has issues with the platform’s autoplay feature, it’s algorithm-driven recommendations and the way it encourages doomscrolling through short-form video.

YouTube definitely has a content problem which makes it a nuisance for parents and educators alike: a report by The Guardian in December of last year noted more than 20 per cent of the videos on YouTube at the time were artificial-intelligence-generated slop (a video-editing company, Kapwing, found that 278 channels among the 15,000 most popular in the world contained only AI content).

But those are issues the platform presents to individual users.

A teacher in a classroom who is presenting a video to students is not going to be flipping over to YouTube Shorts and flipping through random video clutter. A teacher would, presumably, be working through a single video or pre-determined, self-curated list of them.

It is hard, however, to blame Kinew’s instinct to make the ban on YouTube holistic. Making one exception in his plans for a social media ban will likely lead to yet more exceptions, complicating the endeavour.

It’s easiest to just enforce a total ban.

But Klausen has a point. Alternatives to YouTube for video-based educational content may carry subscription fees which school divisions may not be able to afford. If Kinew wants schools to leave YouTube behind, the province’s education department will have to prepare to fund other materials.

There can also be a concerted effort to encourage the use of more traditional materials.

Charlie Marks, president of the Manitoba Association of Education Technology Leaders, says YouTube has become a “key resource” for teachers as physical textbooks fall out of favour. That seems unnecessarily reactive.

Physical textbooks may well be falling out of favour but we should not quite so easily allow physical materials to fall by the wayside just because students and/or teachers don’t seem to want to deal with them so much.

Let us boldly submit that a textbook has rarely ever been a student’s favourite object; that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to just not have or consult them.

Returning to the use of such materials at the level of past generations might be worthwhile if it means putting less power over education into the hands of Big Tech.