Last Saturday I attended a NSW/ACT Independent Education Union Council meeting. Council meetings are usually filled with the things you would expect — industrial issues, education policy, reports, motions and plenty of discussion about what is happening in our schools. This one, however, included a guest presentation that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
The presenter was Kirra Pendergast, and I was quite simply blown away by what she had to say.
If you haven’t heard of Pendergast, she is worth looking up. She has worked at the forefront of technology, cybersecurity and digital risk for more than 30 years and is the founder of Safe on Social, an independent digital safety education and governance organisation working with schools and organisations around the world. She advises governments, regulators, education systems and businesses on social media, artificial intelligence and online safety and has contributed to public policy discussions about how we protect children in an increasingly digital world.
What makes her particularly compelling is that she isn’t anti-technology. Nor is she another adult telling us everything was better before children had phones. Her argument is much more challenging than that.
Technology isn’t simply something our children use anymore. Increasingly, it is an environment in which they live, socialise, learn, form relationships and develop their sense of who they are. And the adults charged with protecting them often understand that environment far less well than the children themselves — or, more importantly, than the corporations that designed it.
I have spent most of my working life in and around education, and I can remember when putting computers into classrooms was considered terribly exciting. Then came the internet, interactive whiteboards, laptops, tablets, smartphones, social media, learning platforms and now artificial intelligence. At virtually every stage, the conversation has been about what the technology could enable us to do.
Perhaps we haven’t spent nearly enough time asking what it might stop us doing.
Take artificial intelligence. AI can already write the paragraph, summarise the novel, solve the equation, formulate the argument and improve the assignment. Used intelligently, it is an extraordinary tool. I, like many, use AI myself and would be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise.
But Pendergast’s work raises an important question: at what point does a tool that assists learning begin replacing the very processes through which learning occurs?
Every teacher understands the importance of productive struggle. A student wrestles with the maths problem, stares at the blank page, writes a dreadful first paragraph, gets something wrong, has another go and eventually works it out. That process doesn’t simply produce an answer. It develops persistence, confidence, judgement, creativity and the ability to think independently.
If technology can remove the struggle, we need to be very careful that it doesn’t remove the learning along with it.
But it was when Pendergast showed us examples of deepfakes that the presentation really hit home for me.
I knew, of course, what deepfakes were. I had read about them, seen stories about them and understood in theory what artificial intelligence could now do with someone’s image and voice. But knowing about something and seeing it demonstrated in front of you are two very different things.
The examples she showed us were astonishingly convincing. These weren’t the slightly odd-looking manipulated videos we might once have spotted because the mouth didn’t quite match the words or something about the face didn’t look right. They looked real. People appeared to be saying and doing things they had never said or done, and I found myself looking for the giveaway — the little clue that would tell me this wasn’t genuine.
In some cases, I couldn’t find one.
That was probably the moment in Pendergast’s presentation that disturbed me most, because it raises a question much bigger than online safety:
What happens when seeing is no longer believing?
For generations we have taught children to question what they read and hear. Now we have to teach them to question what they can see with their own eyes.
And that completely changes the equation for schools.
For years schools have proudly filled websites and Facebook pages with photographs of smiling students receiving awards, performing in concerts, playing sport and heading off on excursions. It has generally been done with the best of intentions — celebrating students and sharing school life with families and communities.
But in an AI world, a photograph placed online is no longer necessarily just a photograph. It is digital material that can be copied, manipulated and repurposed. A child’s face can potentially be placed into an image or video depicting something that never happened. So can a teacher.
Schools are already confronting students using readily available technology to create fake and sometimes sexualised images of classmates and teachers. That raises enormous questions about consent, privacy, safeguarding and responsibility.
And think for a moment about what that means for a teacher. Imagine arriving at work knowing that a completely fabricated but utterly convincing sexualised image or video of you is circulating among students. You know it isn’t real. Your colleagues know it isn’t real. Perhaps most of the students know it isn’t real.
But it still looks like you.
That cannot simply be dismissed as another behaviour-management problem. It is potentially a serious workplace health and safety issue involving humiliation, harassment, reputation and psychological harm.
Pendergast also challenged the way we think about children’s relationship with social media. For years adults have asked fairly basic questions: How much screen time are they having? What are they watching? Who are they talking to?
Those questions are no longer enough.
Today’s online stranger doesn’t necessarily arrive announcing themselves as a stranger. They may appear every afternoon on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. A child can know what their favourite influencer had for breakfast, what their bedroom looks like, the name of their dog, who they are dating and whether they’ve had a bad day. The child can feel as though they know that person intimately.
The influencer, of course, knows absolutely nothing about the child.
Behind all this apparent intimacy sits an uncomfortable commercial reality. Children’s attention is valuable. Their clicks are valuable. Their viewing habits are valuable. Their personal information is valuable. Keeping them watching, clicking, reacting and returning is valuable.
This is why one of Pendergast’s arguments about Australia’s social-media minimum age particularly struck me. We tend to describe it as “banning children from social media”.
Look at it the other way around.
We are restricting social-media companies’ access to children.
That is a very different proposition.
We already accept that children require particular protection from powerful commercial interests. We regulate tobacco and alcohol advertising and impose safety standards on toys, medicines, cars and countless other products. Yet for years we have effectively given some of the largest and most technologically sophisticated corporations on Earth extraordinary access to children and then placed much of the responsibility for managing the consequences on parents and teachers.
Monitor their screen time. Check their privacy settings. Know which apps they’re using. Talk to them about cyberbullying. Watch for changes in behaviour.
All perfectly sensible advice.
But there is something slightly absurd about expecting an individual parent in Tamworth or Armidale to defend their twelve-year-old against multinational technology companies employing extraordinarily clever people whose job is to understand human behaviour and keep users engaged.
Mum and Dad have a PIN number and a conversation over dinner.
I’m not convinced that’s a fair fight.
None of this means technology is evil, and that certainly wasn’t what I took from Pendergast’s presentation. Technology connects isolated communities, provides extraordinary educational opportunities and allows a child sitting in a country town to access knowledge from virtually anywhere in the world. AI will undoubtedly bring enormous benefits, just as social media has connected families, created communities and given ordinary people a public voice.
The answer isn’t to smash the machines. It is to remember who is supposed to be serving whom.
Technology should serve human beings. Education technology should serve learning. Social media should serve communication. Artificial intelligence should extend human capability rather than replace human thought. And when technology begins undermining the very thing it was supposed to improve, adults need to have sufficient confidence to draw some boundaries.
I walked out of that IEU Council meeting thinking that I understood this issue reasonably well.
I realised I didn’t.
And perhaps that is the most important thing Kirra Pendergast left me with. The digital world our children inhabit is changing so quickly that none of us — parents, grandparents, teachers, schools or governments — can afford to assume we understand it simply because we know how to use a smartphone.
If I could sit in that room knowing beforehand that the examples Pendergast was showing us were fake and still find them extraordinarily convincing, how confident should any of us be about recognising the next one that arrives on our Facebook feed?
We have spent years telling children not to believe everything they read on the internet.
Perhaps it is time we added something considerably more confronting.
Don’t automatically believe everything you see either.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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