I remember the first time I found myself seriously questioning the hyper rhetoric of a technology business. It was around 2001 and I was listening to the CEO of a company tell his audience that more knowledge was published online every day than Shakespeare had access to in his entire lifetime. I remember being genuinely shocked at the way this ridiculous statement went unchallenged because while I was wincing, the audience around me didn’t even appear to blink. Since then the alchemists who tell us they can turn silicon into knowledge, with a little jolt of electrical current, have had such a devastating impact on western culture they have created a through-the-looking-glass world where a word now means whatever you want it to mean, provided it’s retweeted often enough.

The tech entrepreneurs who promised to disrupt things have succeeded beyond even their limited imaginings.

In every aspect of business and culture, we have been seduced by the sleight of hand of hi-tech alchemists. We need to start pointing and jeering at how foolish their magical apparatus really is. More specifically, society needs its teachers to do the pointing and jeering. This is why.

Every day teachers demand the highest standards from those they teach, in their maths, in their prose, even in how they present their work. They make them rethink it, redo it, revise it, until they are finally satisfied the child has done all they can possibly do to gain that precious mark. Teachers are the high priests of high standards.

The alchemists have had it all their own way for decades now. It’s time teachers started to flex their intellectual muscles a little more in public. Where better to start than at the top?

It’s no accident that one of the alchemists’ favourite words - “transform” - is actually the word most widely used by technology companies and marketing professionals when it comes to describing the miracles that ed-tech can work.

Slide into confusion

What pushed me over the cutting edge about all this was recently seeing a single slide, created by someone right at the pointy end of international educational policy and reform, produced for a leading UK think tank. It was disseminated widely via social media to my professional network.

What normally happens when these things are shared online is that people read the few words that accompany them, believe them if they confirm their own ideas or prejudices and move on. A few, far too few it transpires, may actually click on the slide and study it.

In this case, when I clicked I found myself immediately struggling to understand the obviously important information embedded, one can only assume in some magical way, in the graphics. I mean, someone at this powerful organisation felt it was so vital we all knew about it, they had selected it out of seventy-one other professionally produced, colourful images and graphs.

I know that because I was so determined to grasp what priceless knowledge was being offered, I assumed it might make more sense in context, so I downloaded the whole presentation. I was wrong.

I am precisely the kind of professional this slide was intended to inform. Assuming that my shortcomings and my limited mathematical skill must be the problem, I turned to a handy maths and physics undergraduate for help in interpreting the slide. They responded exactly as I did. How come the y axis has duplicate numbers? Why is the use of coloured dots and triangles so inconsistent? Why are the triangles mixed up with the dots? I showed the slide to a maths teacher I know who has a professional interest in statistics. His brow furrowed, he shrugged his shoulders and gave up. I won’t tell you what the director of research at an educational research institute I admire said. I’ll save his blushes, but will admit that he was even more dogged than me and managed to track down the original graph that had been butchered.

Yet this slide wasn’t just online: it was being recommended, and not just by anyone. It was recommended by a powerful and influential organisation actively lobbying government for educational reform. This really isn’t funny any more.

How I wish I could say this was a one-off but I can’t, because it isn’t. Like hundreds of thousands of far less influential employees easily seduced by the alchemists’ magical equipment, it appears the producer of this one thought it acceptable to design a graphical image and stick it in front of an audience, regardless of whether or not it conveyed trustworthy, valuable knowledge.

We need information we can trust

Just because the technology encourages you to do something, it doesn’t mean it’s worth doing. There is no difference between this kind of software usage and playing Candy Crush on the Tube.

It happens all the time, in all kinds of decent businesses, and in other respects completely admirable professional organisations. It is so easy to manipulate data, combine figures and pictures together in one image and throw it up on a blank screen for all to see, that we have come to believe it is per se a meaningful, valuable, professional activity. It isn’t. For it to be valuable it has to add to our sum of knowledge, individually or collectively. Put as simply as I can: it needs to tell us something we did not know and that we can trust.

Because we have fallen for the magic lantern that the new alchemy calls an overhead projector, and the sleight of hand that comes with so much software, the act of presenting information has itself become authoritative. As recipients we suspend critical judgement far too easily, preferring the share button presumably because we weren’t offered one that says, “Think.”

On one occasion, I watched someone point out to the lead researcher of a mercifully now-defunct educational quango that the graph on one of her slides completely contradicted the words on the same slide. She agreed and giggled, “I don’t know how that happened” …then moved on.

I’ve done a lot of conference work and have had professional training in how to deliver high-impact presentations. All the emphasis is on images to replace words, precise statements you can count on the fingers of one hand and heavy-duty repetition. The technology is dimming our wits.

What I want to hear is intelligent thinking from knowledgeable, well-educated grown-ups. I don’t want some ingénue with an attitude and an iPad hectoring me about what they think I should be doing because their particular brand of magic will make them money. I want to hear credible ideas that are clearly connected to the physical, flesh and blood world I really do share with other people.

When extraordinarily high-profile, well-educated people make a living by creating nonsense that other well-educated people pass on thoughtlessly, it really is time we seriously reconsidered what it means to be well-educated. I would suggest calling out alchemy when you see it: who better to do that than teachers?

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and Instagram, and like Tes on Facebook