It's Important To Ask "Why?"

If you are a parent or have been with a 5 year old for any period of time, at some point the child will ask you the question "Why?" In response you try your best to answer the question in a way that a 5 year old can hopefully understand. Inevitably the follow up question will come, "Why?" It's quite easy to get caught up in this repetitive questioning until you get to the limits of your knowledge and have to admit that you just don't know. Why, is a great question. One that young children are quite happy to ask, but one that as you get older, you probably use less and less. Too often it's easier for us not to ask why something is like it is and to accept that it just is. 

Which leads me onto the reason for writing this. In my last post I wrote that I recently met with a group of primary school digital leads. I gave a presentation about the need for critical AI literacy and then had some time to chat to a couple of them and observe some work from primary school pupils that included the use of generative AI. When I was looking through the learner's work, the question "Why?" kept occurring. Why are the pupils doing this? There were lots of other question too, such as "What are they learning by using this technology?, "What is the aim?", etc. But, the question why always seems to start my internal thoughts off. In fact, my presentation began with me explaining to everyone what critical AI literacy is and that as well as probably being the original 'digital native' and a tech geek, I also look at digital technologies critically, especially when it comes to edtech and now generative AI. Therefore asking questions like "Why?" I believe is really important. I want the best for learners, teachers and schools. Therefore, questioning the marketing hype that edtech companies push is important, especially when you consider the financial costs to a school can be considerable and also considering the potential positive or negative impact of a particular technology can have on our learners and school. 

This has now led me back to the question I've been regularly asking myself and others over the last 25 years of being a curriculum edtech advisor, "Why are learners using digital technologies in the primary classroom?" It's a big question, and one I'm going to spend some time exploring and writing about here. The school edtech ecosystem I first experienced when I started teaching in 1996 is a very different one, and our learners experiences of using digital technologies would be utterly unrecognisable to learners from the late 90s. So much has changed. If so much has changed are the reasons we gave for putting digital technologies into the hands of primary school learners still relevant 30 years later in 2026? Why are we doing this or are we just accepting that it "just is"?