How America Made Its Children Crazy
February 4th, 2012“It’s not some sci-fi dystopic concern that’s always 20 years out. They’re gunning for your children’s minds with this right now.”
—Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
Via: Asia Times:
Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.
The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.
It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn’t worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ”The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data, ”Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ”And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”’
Related:
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education
Are Teenagers More Doomed Than Usual?
Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Research Credit: jb
I think about this a lot these days, probably because having a kid sometime in the near future is on my mind.
I also keep trying to make sense out of my own upbringing and times of exposure to various sets of technology, and how I’ve see-sawed back and forth from twitchy, interrupt-driven, and tech-obsessed to positively luddite in my perspective.
I’m old enough – I think a year or 2 older than Kevin – that my introduction to computers took place (barely) in late grade school. The computers and video games I encountered were very primitive by today’s standards, but I was destined to be a nerd, and took to them like a duck to water.
I now work as a sysad wrangling servers day-in and day-out. It pays well, but I’m mixed about how I spend my time.
I’m not up on the latest technology. I have a puny old cell phone. My ipod died a few years back and I haven’t replaced it. I don’t have an ipad – we bought a nook color and I find that I simply don’t give a hoot. I’d rather read paper, or do something besides focus on a screen during my limited time off. To be sure, we have plenty of gadgets floating around, but I begrudge the time I spend pandering to them.
It’s not that any of these things are hard to pick up when I spend the time fiddling with them. It’s more that I’ve spent 30 years learning the latest set of rituals to keep up with the techno-priesthood, and life seems too short to spend it re-learning how to turn the latest incarnation of $UNNECESSARY_GADGET on and off.
The conclusion I’ve coming to is that there really is no need for early exposure to buttons and touchscreens. Say, perhaps, age 10 is still plenty early to develop whatever feel is necessary to make computers seen ‘natural’.
We’ll see how well I manage this when there’s actually a kid in the picture.
Zeke