The Ethical Implications of the Overuse of Technology in Education

The overuse of technology permeates education. Underlying its appropriate use is the factor of trust. Trust is essential for ethical behavior in education. Anything that undermines that trust is arguably inimical to those endeavors. To be sure, technology is now embedded in every facet of our lives, and its many advances have proven beneficial; for example, technology has enabled remote instruction, work from home, and telemedicine, all beneficial to its users, particularly in these difficult times of a pandemic. That said, we would like to call attention to the overuse of technology in some instances, its undermining of trust, and the consequent adverse and unethical impact on education. Two kinds of trust need to be distinguished. The first, what we might call reliabilitybased trust, is “the reliance on the integrity, strength, truth, ability, surety, etc. of a person or thing” (Dictionary.com, 2020). We thus say, for example, “The teacher trusted that John would erase the white board every day last week as that was his assigned job”; or “I trust the New York Times to report the true and unadulterated news of the day because it is a newspaper that has integrity.” The second kind of trust is what Patrick Lencioni, in another context, refers to as vulnerability-based trust, and is what allows