H.E Alvaro Renedo Zalba, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain to Albania
It is a true pleasure to speak to you today on this rainy November morning. The dim light of today’s overcast Tirana sky seems just right for inspiring fruitful academic exchanges and soulful musings.
First and foremost, I would like to earnestly thank Jon Mudd, the Director of Tirana International School (TIS), for the opportunity to address you today. When he explained the significance of today’s gathering, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to engage directly with whom I consider leading educators in the Western Balkans.
I confer utmost importance to this regional conference, from a triple perspective: personal, diplomatic, academic.
From a personal viewpoint, my commitment to your community is directly associated to the fact that I have two daughters who are students at TIS. I also have the distinct pleasure of forming part of the TIS Advisory Board. I deeply appreciate QSI’s spirit of excellence, which contributes to what we designate in Spain florecimiento personal or personal blossoming. Moreover, I have benefitted not only vicariously but also directly from the stimulating experience at International Schools, as an alumnus of Marymount International School in Rome. Throughout my life, I have felt that my experience at an international school broadened my views on the world, as well as contributed positively to my academic mindset and my international sensitivity.
From a diplomatic perspective, I see today’s gathering as an important opportunity for me to emphasize one of the most precious treasures in this wonderful country: the extraordinary quality of its human capital. The talent of the Albanian people is not an independent phenomenon but is closely associated to Albania’s long and eventful history, and the capacity of the Albanian people to overcome the many obstacles they have faced throughout millennia. Since the very start of my mission in this country, I was struck by what Ismael Kadaré described as “the immense human energy present in Albania”. In my view, talent is one of the most significant sources of strategic added value that Albania is bringing to the European Union. And it could be arguably surmised that this logic could well be applied, in a similar degree, to the other countries of the Western Balkans —a strategic region, geopolitically, both for the European Union and the United States.
This underscores the high relevance of your work in and for a region that constitutes the future of the European Union in the making —as I have heuristically acknowledged in my day-to-day work in Albania.
From an academic and even moral perspective, I would like to highlight the paramount importance of the responsibility bestowed upon you as educators. Throughout the years —and especially in the light of my experience as a university lecturer— I have developed the firm conviction that your job as educators for children in the broad —and absolutely crucial— period before university is one of the most important duties in society. When people reach university, they have a significant degree of cognitive and academic maturity fruitful academic exchanges —at least in theory. By and large, university students are relatively formed, not only as scholars, but most importantly as citizens and human beings. Recurring to the terms employed by Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, they have transcended “non-age” and are mostly set to face the world. And this is thanks, in no small degree, to the knowledge, skillsets, values, and methodologies they have developed throughout the early stages of their education, hand in hand with you. By contrast, when they start their work with you in earlier stages of development, before college or university, they are mostly unformed or in the process of being formed, as scholars and citizens. A good education in these early years will harness their potential and allow them to thrive not only as intellectuals, but also as human beings. A bad education will not only hinder their development; it will cause psychosocial detriments and missed opportunities that are difficult if not impossible to repair in the long run. In a nutshell, the potential impact of education in early stages of development in absolutely massive, for the better and for the worse. Education is a vast, complex, and life-long process, which is not only determined by school, but also by family, friends, socioeconomic frameworks and experience in the broadest sense. In this sense, I’ve always seen education as a metamorphosis, in line with the great Spanish thinker Guillermo Puerto Rosselló, for whom it is foolish to measure the age of people only by the passing of time and not by their metamorphosis. Arguably, age is a metaphysical concept. It’s possible, according to this logic, to find a truly wise 30-year-old, and an 80-year-old fool. Go figure.
In any case, similarly to how stoic preceptors in Ancient Greece led their pupils toward and self-knowledge and enlightenment, modern educators are critical drivers of such metamorphosis.
I am fully cognizant of the high academic standards of QSI. I love this community, the values its cemented on, and the bright horizons it opens from academic and also vital standpoints.
I would like to congratulate you earnestly for your outstanding work and encourage you to continue striving to harness the full potential of your students and contribute to their formation as responsible, balanced, happy and free individuals, ready to face the challenges and complexities of today’s world.
I would also like to seize the opportunity to give you three pieces of advice. With deep respect and modesty, but also with the firm conviction that simply considering these pieces of advice will somehow benefit your crucial work in and for society.
The first piece of advice is based on my direct experience as an educator —and forever pupil in life. The second and third are also based on my experience and are surfacing in a particularly salient way through recent, cutting-edge scientific research.
Foster a thirst for knowledge
My first piece of advice: foster interest and, in possible, thirst and even passion for knowledge. I am sure that you all remember that special teacher in elementary, middle school, high school, perhaps even kindergarten, who really made a difference. Who ignited a flame of interest for the world. Who sparked a curiosity which maybe even ended up becoming an enduring passion for one of many scientific disciplines, arts, or humanities. My advice would be: try to become that teacher that kindles the miracle of deep, flourishing interest in a subject. Needless to say, this is not always possible. Some would rightly point out that it is seldom feasible. But, in my view, it is worth trying. While interest is a catalyzer for learning, tedium is a potent dissolver. And, if you somehow succeed, you will have provided one of the most valuable services to the student at hand, and perhaps even to society at large, in consideration of the incalculable repercussions for the world of thirst for knowledge, or love of art.
Minimize screen usage
Second piece of advice: minimize screen usage. Technology is a crucial tool but should be minimized in lecturing. When I was a Senior Fellow lecturing and researching at Harvard University, and I was academic director or the Kennedy School’s Workshop on Global Leadership, screens were usually not permitted in classrooms, except for students with special needs. And this was not because of a counterrevolutionary technophobia, but because it is scientifically proven that screens distract and undermine concentration. But this principle becomes especially serious with regard to children, and of grave importance in the case of children under seven. I recommend wholeheartedly the work of Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Harvard-educated neuroscientist who is possibly the world’s leading academic authority on the effects of screens on children’s reading cognitive abilities. She is currently the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice in the University of California. I had the opportunity of coming into contact with her work when I worked at Harvard, and I spoke to her over the phone last Monday in preparation for this conference. Please allow me to present some of her most compelling research findings, which are eloquently explained in her book Reader Come Home:
- Children’s frontal lobes stop developing at age seven.
- It is scientifically proven that prolonged exposure to modern screens inhibits the neuroplastic development of the frontal lobe —responsible for language, deep thinking, analysis, problem solving, judgement, emotions, personality, and much more. Dr. Wolf warns about the serious, possibly irreversible damage to the indicated frontal lobe functions, as a consequence of irresponsible screen usage by kids, especially under seven years old.
Ahead of this speech, I touched base with her on the use of electronic applications used for supporting reading, math and other skills in children, particularly under seven. Only 15 minutes per day, I told her. It can’t be that bad, right? The answer is: 15 minutes per day, or an hour and half per week, may be deceptively, invisibly insidious. Screens at that age must certainly not be used every day and must only be for prescribed exercises that supplement the work they do at school —for example, pattern recognition or, in the case of dyslexia, fluency work. But screens must never, ever be presented as a reward or, inversely, their deprivation as a punishment. If screens are used daily by kids that age, even for purposes of support or supplement, they will end up becoming a reward, from a neurological viewpoint, owing to the dopamine rush that they entail. Important recent studies have focused on the doses of screen usage and have concluded that: the more the digital, the worse the academic performance. Recurring to screens, especially for young kids, is a very potent tool for keeping them steady, as they tend to become completely absorbed. But the potential damage they entail, in the long run, is very significant. In short: use print when possible. Digital should not be a replacement for work with print, but an exceptional reinforcement or supplementation mechanism.
I am fully aware that we live in a world of tech. We need technology. I love technology. I’m all in for technology, which, in my view, has made our lives far better. As a diplomat and a researcher, I benefit enormously from the digital world. I wrote an academic article on the uses of social networks for the purposes of diplomatic negotiation, published in Harvard’s peer-reviewed Negotiation Journal, and which received an award for being one of the most cited and downloaded articles in the field. I connect with my family in the US and Europe daily. I can read the Financial Times or other European newspapers daily, even if the print versions are not available in this country. But that is the key, especially in education: screens are not functionally equivalent to paper.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf, in the aforementioned Reader, Come Home, presents compelling evidence regarding the impact of reading mediums on comprehension, retention, and overall cognitive engagement. In one particularly illuminating experiment, three groups of participants—each with identical profiles and conditions—were assigned to read the same material using different formats: an iPad, a Kindle, and a traditional printed book.
The findings were striking. Participants who read on the iPad performed the worst across multiple parameters, including reading comprehension, plot retention, memorization, immersion, and attention to detail. Conversely, those who read from a physical book achieved the highest scores, demonstrating superior engagement and recall. Interestingly, the Kindle group outperformed the iPad group but still lagged behind those who read from a printed book.
The explanation for the iPad’s poor performance appears relatively clear: its backlit screen, rich in colors and dynamic visual stimuli, activates a series of neural pathways associated with distraction, ultimately impeding deep reading processes. A surprising result, however, is the Kindle’s performance—while its e-ink technology is designed to mimic the experience of reading print, it still did not produce the same cognitive benefits as a physical book. A possible hypothesis for this discrepancy lies in the material tangibility of the reading experience. Unlike a printed book, where pages have weight, texture, and permanence, a Kindle’s digital pages vanish with the swipe of a finger. This lack of sensory engagement—the absence of the physical act of grasping, turning, and spatially navigating the text—may contribute to a diminished reading experience. It suggests that tangibility plays a crucial role in comprehension and retention, reinforcing the idea that the medium through which we read is not neutral but fundamentally shapes how we process and internalize information.
In sum: making everything digital is a major mistake. And this is a trap several institutions have fallen into. Three recent pieces of literature that elaborate what I just fleshed out:
- Maryan Wolf’s book Reader Come Home.
- Various academic articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which associate screen usage in young children with significant developmental and problem-solving delays.
- A meta-analysis involving more than 170.000 subjects in a seven-year timeframe, by Drs. Salmeron and Delgado, which also concluded that reading on screens scored much worse than paper in terms of plot comprehension and details retention.
Please take these data findings in consideration. Adequate tech use is one of our major generational challenges.
As Guillermo Puerto Rosselló once pointed out to me: technology truly serves humanity when it enhances cognition and contributes to our balance with nature.
What’s at stake here is our children’s cognitive functions to cope with reality and their deep thinking and analysis capacities. We must be fully cognizant that today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders. So it’s not an overstatement that your role of educators has a direct impact on tomorrow’s world.
Introduce more exercise to improve health and academic performance
My third and final piece of advice, also based on a growing body of scientific research. Kids should do more exercise as there is solid scientific proof that it enhances their cognitive capacities, their emotional wellbeing, and their academic performance.
Please look into the US national bestseller Spark, by Dr. Jon Ratey, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and clinical psychiatrist who has extensively researched the effects of exercise on the brain.
He analyses the ground-braking case study of Naperville, Illinois, which introduced a physical education program, usually as first period and before the most challenging subjects. The program transformed the student body of nineteen thousand into literally one of the fittest and smartest in the nation. Among one entire class of sophomores, only 3% were overweight, versus the national average of 30%. What’s more surprising -and stunning- is that the program also turned those students into some of the most proficient academically in the US: Naperville’s eighth-graders were among some 230.000 students from around the world who took the international standards test TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), which as you know, evaluates knowledge of math and science. In recent years, students from China and Singapore have outpaced American kids in these crucial subjects, but Naperville is the conspicuous exception: when its students took the TIMSS, they finished sixth in math and first in the world in science.
Judge for yourselves. You have the potential to foster, in a relatively easy way, major improvements in the academic performance, as well as the health and wellbeing, of your students.
It is concerning to be, for example, that students in early stages (preschool or kindergarten) commonly do PE only once per week. This is far from optimal, in my view, and entails significant missed opportunities not only with regard to health and psychomotor growth, but also in terms of cognitive development and academic performance.
I would like to conclude on a promising note, and with a message of appreciation. You have one of the most important jobs in society.
You have the privilege of working in a network of academic institutions with high-quality standards. Society at large, and the members of your communities, depend on your work to continue thriving in the most effective and balanced way.
As a parent, as a diplomat, as an academic, I wholeheartedly appreciate your crucial commitment to ensuring the best possible education for current and future generations. The world of tomorrow is in your students’ hands. And, today, they are in your hands.
Speech delivered at the Southern Europe Regional QSI Faculty Conference- Tirana International School, 15 November 2024
