Screens are designed to distract, not educate. A screen is a great place to learn if you are not in a classroom or if you are trying to avoid class. It's a terrible way to be "in class".
I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
So, you learned it before moocs were invented? The internet was a very different place 15 yrs ago.
I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays.
It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available.
Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
Agreed. The difficulty is in the details here. Arguably TV was largely, almost entirely entertainment in days of old. Yet, the internet screens are a step back from that, offering both more entertainment potential and far more education potential. It's a dangerous and powerful tool, but one that we need a certain resolve to use productively.
I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals.
Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
> Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement.
I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
i notice better retention when i add content to an Anki[0] deck as cloze type question and actually repeat the content a few times.
just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you.
Note-taking is a learned skill. When I was in school, they actually taught us several different techniques for taking notes and I am not sure that is a universal part of education. They told us that studies showed people typing notes just write down verbatim what was being said because they can type so fast, which then is useless information as far as later reference is concerned. Writing notes properly actually forces one to distill the important information and take note of particularly confusing parts so that when you come back to the notes they are a helpful recall mechanism for important information.
I find this to be true when observing how friends with children raise their kids. People with more education seem to have severe limits on screens and lower education folks seem to let screens entertain their kids all day everyday.
This strikes me as some weird virtue signaling, as part of the package of well-to-do enlightened whiteness. Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad; you have to think about what content you're delivering. I spent most days watching old-school History Channel while playing with Legos or army men. Likewise, almost all of my knowledge of geography and a significant chunk of history comes from playing strategy games on the PC. If I was watching the Disney Channel and playing Fortnite, then that would be less productively used time, I suppose.
I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.
Loot boxes, mostly. Gacha games and the like pioneered it and now it's in everything. The slot-machine pull does something to people, and I'm more worried about what it does to brains that haven't completely set yet.
Fortnite doesn't have loot boxes. There's skins and dances, but you buy them all directly, there's no RNG. At least that I've found in my ~30 hours of playing the game.
It's just like golden eye, but now you've got to pay to play as odjob.
Sorry, you're right, I shouldn't have used the example of Fortnite when I personally play PUBG. And Overwatch. Both of which do. ;) My reach exceeded my grasp.
Although Fortnite doesn't have explicit lootboxes, there's certainly a related addictive effect to simply opening chests, stumbling across a Llama, etc. Have you not heard a younger player squeal 'scaaarrr'?
Using 'enlightened whiteness' is mildly insulting both to people who happen to be white and those who are non-white who share the same beliefs and behaviour.
i'm white and i don't find it personally offensive. there is a certain set of risk-averse behaviors that seem ubiquitous among the white (upper) middle class. and maybe this is uncharitable of me, but i do actually think these people feel more virtuous because they do these things, or at least do them to signal virtue. when someone uses a phrase like "enlightened whiteness" or "SWPL", it seems there's a high chance that we both instantly picture the same loosely related set of things that would be hard to describe otherwise.
Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.
We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.
Screens are cheap. Sure a tablet is a few hundred dollars, but figure it's a hand me down from a relative, and it can entertain a kid for thousands of hours with minimal effort.
Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.
The main concern is that it hurts socialization, which is actually a really important skill. I don't think there's anything wrong with screen time, especially if it's productive time for the person using the screen (adult or kid). The issue is like anything - when that screen time is so great it chokes out other activities like socializing or fitness.
> keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
Some 30 years ago, in my country the parent instructions to their kid, for the afternoon, would be: "go outside, play with other kids, I don't want to see you inside before supper".
> Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.
Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
Throwing an anecdote into the bucket: my 2.5 year old gets _very_ cranky when it's time to turn off Masha and the Bear, and it seems to be - without running any objective numbers - that she's crankier in general and less willing to be patient and wait if she watches too much of it on any given day or weekend.
We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
Yup; I know they've shown them a few Youtube videos, mostly a few funny songs. I'm fine with that; she's very happy to try and sing along, and they don't just plop them down in front of a TV for hours at a time.
We bordered on a large plot of forest. So we'd pay attention if it was hunting season (wear orange/yellow if it was), and go traipsing through the forest. We would routinely be gone for hours. Some times, we'd go from sunrise to sunset.
We'd also build a tiny fire, and have cookouts. One of us had a rifle, so we'd go for small game. First time I had squirrel was doing that. We put out the fires like they told us to do in cub scouts.
(Tl;Dr. Kids with guns, fire, basic camping gear, out for hours)
There's no way in hell anything remotely like this would be "allowed" today.
It was partially a rhetorical question as I do not have too much experience in it.
But yes it was critical asked. Im a software engineer but with quite a negative view on mobile phones.
I close my lit or put my phone away at conferences and try to focus. Still so many people around me doing everything but concentrating on the topic is strange.
If our generation is already like this, how will be a generation growing up without?
You also had - well, have - the option to just drop the kid in a high-chair or a playpen with a couple of distracting objects in the corner of the room. Sometimes the kid gets unhappy about being in a playpen with nothing to do and just screams for an hour while you prepare dinner.
Then you either have the option of stopping to sooth the baby or power through, and everyone wonders why either dinner is late/burnt or why you're in such a foul mood after listening to a screaming infant for an hour.
It was just the same about 23 years ago. My cousin was raised by TV/PC screen, drunk dad and overprotective mother that would do anything to keep him quiet (screen worked the best).
He was kind of ADHD person, never confirmed by anyone, but he was jumping in place everytime something exciting was on the screen, always wanted to move around, hit other people. And most noticeable - he was furious when somebody told him to turn off tv/pc.
I've seen many not behaving kids of course, this one had uncontrolled access to technology even then.
And now we're alarmed? We had a lot of time to notice. Don't forget that TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones (without internet of course, just SMS) even 10 years ago.
> TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones even 10 years ago
It used to be rare to see teenagers with cell phones, let alone toddlers. The iPhone is ~11 years old, and in that time it has become common for me to see people of all ages, from toddler up, always on a smartphone or tablet.
I disagree strongly that the situation is just the same as TVs decades ago.
And I'm not interested in the picture of the people reading newspapers on the subway. It's always been common to ignore strangers of public transit, I'm more interested in a photograph of friends/family staring intently at their own newspaper while at a dinner table or some other social event. This is the norm with smartphones, and color me skeptical that it isn't new.
This happens with my school aged kids as well. I don't think it's "addiction" but the nature of kids and screens.
I've learned to keep my kids' screen time limited and it works best if it's a rigid timing (after homework but before dinner). I give them additional time if they watch in French audio track - in fact that seems to minimize the crankiness when its time to put away the devices.
My kids get school supplied iPads. They get some real life experience from this: how to deal with terrible school mandated applications. This mirrors my experience working at IBM.
For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done.
Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
Figure out what interface they use when reading the emails and if it's HTML compatible, put an email signature in every message that has a random set of curse words in white.
Or, alternatively, they should make a group project to write an essay about the town of Scunthorpe, its railroad to Essex, and a local grower of shitake mushrooms; and make sure to diligently discuss its contents in email.
Source: my 13 year old little brother was recently expelled for YouTube videos on his personal google account. As if he had committed a crime. Its asinine.
That's the thing that bothers me which is why I commented.
School administrators are using the existence of any videos to kick him out by all means necessary. They don't care about the contents or the context. He said the word Hitler in one of his 10 ish videos or a joke about it. He's extremely into history and all he likes watching are youtube history videos. Playing games based on history. Sharing memes with his friends that have a historical context. Some of it isn't funny some of it is.
Doesn't make it ok to permanently ruin a teenagers academic future over a stupid silly completely explainable video less than one minute long.
Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues. He doesn't have any. It's just straight abuse to be completely honest. It's not right.
This concerns me because when I was is school, hardly anything I did online was visible or stuck around very long. Now it's trivial to upload pictures and videos for everyone to see. Either people calm down and stop pretending kids are perfect and fully aware of what they're doing or we punish everyone for every single character they type and bear the consequences. Randomly screening the stuff kids upload and judging it on a similarly random basis effectively means every family has to live with the reality that schools might arbitrarily decide to smite them because someone had a bad day. Really, it sounds rather distopian...
Responsible school administrators do not waste money/time on free speech lawsuits unless (a) they are dead-to-rights certain that they will win, or (b) there is some other incredibly important issue (e.g., an innocent teacher's professional reputation as in Sagehorn v. Rogers, where the lawsuit -- even if lost -- sends an important signal).
Lawsuits are EXTREMELY expensive, not just in dollar terms (which may or may not matter regardless of the outcome; larger school districts have insurance, retainers, often even in-house legal staff) but also -- perhaps more importantly -- in staff time/energy and public relations terms.
Furthermore, there is a lot of grey area in current court precedent re: student free speech on the internet. SCOTUS hasn't made a single peep about this issue. This, combined with the above fact about lawsuits, works in your favor. Lawsuits on contentious and undecided questions tend to get national attention and can therefore take on a life of their own in school board elections, upsetting an otherwise friendly board. Top administrators know this risk. If the issue is really as minor as you're making it out to be, and serves as a good test case for student free speech on the internet, no superintendent in his right mind would risk a friendly board over some dumb internet video.
Furthermore, the circuit courts that have spoken on this issue made many free-speech-friendly decisions; in particular, the second circuit proposes a test that your brother's school will almost certainly have a very hard time passing [1, page Page 16 of 18, top paragraph].
So, I would advise your brother's legal guardian to take the following steps:
1. Write an email to the superintendent expressing their belief that this is a highly inappropriate and very possibly unconstitutional attack on their child's free speech rights. Request a meeting in person. Emphasize that if this issue is not resolved soon and in your child's favor, your next step will be to consult with lawyers.
2. If no dice, contact your school board representatives and explain that you think the administration is over-reaching. Contact them individually and, if possible, in person. A single sympathetic board member can create enough political head-aches for administration to back off.
3. In parallel, contact the regional ACLU. If you don't have luck, try the bar association. If you don't have luck, find a lawyer who provides free consultations and get a sense for how grey your case is.
IANAL, but have some personal experience in this: I had a somewhat similar issue in high school, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream. There was literally zero legal precedent on public school first amendment internet speech issues. Literally not a single case. Is this Tinker land? Is the speech happening at school, outside of school, or both? After all, you can access websites at school. Does whether or not people actually accessed the website at school determine if Hazelwood applies? Etc.
Oh, and this was also before Morse v. Frederick, so administrative reach beyond the schoolhouse doors regardless of internet wasn't even well-understood. (BTW, Morse v. Frederick probably actually works in your brother's favor, unless his video was about Hitler doing drugs.)
Lots of opportunities for the school to lose.
Fortunately, my parents were supportive and the district decided they had better things to spend money/effort/PR on than a test case on the extent of student free speech in the emerging internet age. Good thing for them, because there was an almost identical case less than 2(?) years later with a six-figure settlement against the district. Emailing that decision to the power-hungry admin who tried to suspend me was probably the most passive aggressive email I've ever sent.
frankly at this point, i'd consider it a blessing to get a kid out of the public school system for any reason.
>Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues
it sort of depends on where you go but really that's a misconception. alternative schools are simply that: an alternative to the institutional apathy & intellectually demoralizing environment provided by our modern schools. facilitating a broader array of learning styles can be highly beneficial to those with behavioral problems or disabilities but it is especially empowering for the type of highly intelligent & creative kids who find themselves at odds with the administration & dispassionate structure of our industrial education model.john taylor gatto's criticisms really hit the nail on the head in my opinion.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpycMRTBrfY
this sounds like another case of a highly engaged kid being driven out of a school that doesn't deserve what he has to offer. if that absurd & failing system doesn't want him, then all the better.
First, alternative schools are 100% part of the "system", and are often have a far more "institutionalized" feel than their mainstream counterparts.
Second, in most districts, alternative schools really are a strictly inferior experience for students who do not have special intellectual, behavioral, or emotional needs.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but this is definitely the rule. E.g., how many alternative schools offer Calc BC?
Alternative schools are great, but in the case parent described, they're probably the strictly inferior option.
EDIT: I should say that I can think of two ways they can argue this: since it is school property, nothing on there has the expectation of privacy, and is monitored (my work does that, and as a result I don't log into personal email at work). They could also argue the "in loco parentus", in which they are acting as parents by searching it.
However, legally or not, that is a massive breach of trust, and if I were that kid, I have been taught a hard lesson not to trust electronics I own and not to trust authority figures.
Many (public) schools seem to forget that they are bound by the first amendment like any other government entity. If the child was harassing or bullying another student (or inciting such acts) I could see an argument being made, but beyond that free speech is free speech.
The jurisdiction of schools does not end at the school. If you do something outside of school that the school does not like the school will punish you. My school specifically tells us this, and says the if we post something to social media then they probably will find out about it. I don't know the legality of it, but its very common practice.
I dont understand the iPad thing. Why not laptops? It's a huge burden to do work on a toy instead of a proper machine. They're being conditioned to use inferior tooling.
you're expecting teachers to help each child with a desktop application? Or even troubleshoot the desktop/laptop? have you ever even used any one of those cheap laptops?
A child learns first from their parents. I feel sad for kids when I see parents involved with phones while walking a baby carriage or attending a soccer game. Parents show by their actions which is more important, people or tech.
Would you feel better if the parent were deeply involved in a newspaper or book? How about if the parent was constantly screaming obscenities at the referee? Parents aren't honor or duty bound to pay rapt attention to every second of their child's life. It's one human caring for another, and few humans have identical interests.
Or they could just be present in the actual social situation they were attending. All of the options you suggest seem preferable to staring at a random glowing magic square in their hands.
No, in either of those cases. Those are also awful things for a parent to do at a child's soccer game.
The issue with screens is due to the addictive quality of experiences on screens (tuned by highly paid experts to increase "engagement"!) causes more people to turn to their screens than would otherwise be distracted by other things, such as newspapers.
So instead of tolerating your child's soccer game because bringing and reading a newspaper would be a hassle, seem antisocial, and not be that much more interesting, one can just whip out their pocket computer and have some bright colorful beep-boop gamified but ultimately meaningless experiences much more engaging than the game.
The addictive screen argument is almost as tired as the argument that video games are bad.
It's like the argument about students starting out the window, or at a ceiling, during a lesson. The answer is not to remove the windows, nor is "scolding the ape" a good solution. The real answer is to compete on engagement, and make the lesson more interesting than what's outside the window.
Likewise, the way to have more people engaged in a sporting event is to make the game more engaging. But then more people yell obscenities at the referee.
In the end, all of this "screen time" nonsense is just a dumb way for some people to feel better than other people.
> make the lesson more interesting than what's outside the window
Powering through boring material is an important life skill. You can be bored to tears by your boss or your job but you still have to do it.
A person will learn better from an engaging teacher, but someone with no experience learning from dry content will be woefully unprepared for that first experience.
Just had a baby girl and my wife and I are planning on how to manage this... When we go out we see families where every kid is loaded up on an iphone, including the adult kids. Lets go out to eat and every go on the phone, very nice. I'm speaking from an odd spot, i grew up playing a shit load of computer/video games. However I also enjoyed running around outside with my neighborhood friends doing whatever , playing sports and all of that good stuff. Curious to find what the future holds and I think my own screen time will be limited as the baby gets older. OR i'll say your only screen time is dark souls, better get started young
Screens are fine. But wasting time is not. My middle schooler is allowed unlimited screen time for ebooks, video editing, photoshop, and writing (other than messaging). youtube and social media is rationed.
I've had to go as far as completely router blocking twitter, Snapchat, certain websites, discord, certain Google pages to block new accounts from being created, locking a phone with parental controls so I can disable the camera and only apps that work are texting and calls, bios locking a laptop so I'm able to control usage, disable the camera and plenty of other apps, using my personal email as a recovery option for all the old social media (because you can log right back in within 90 days and it's all back).
If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
My solution is pretty low tech. I have a second desk in my office for my daughter's constructive computer time. So, I can look over her shoulder. All time spent on mobile devices is assumed to be youtube and social media. Limiting this sometimes means taking the device.
>Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.
And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
This is actually why I want to get my 6yo a real, old-fashioned boot-to-BASIC computer.
We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing.
My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long.
Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction.
It is a food story all over again. Few hundred years ago additional body weight was a sign of riches, as they could afford excess food. These days with the prevalence of sugary and processed food tables have turned.
Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)
Technology in schools always takes a lot of adjustment to enhance learning than make another distraction. Technology should be seen as just the medium, not the ends to education
A few years ago my son's (private) high school introduced ipads. The class that had spent a year piloting them was mostly unhappy with them. He led a movement against their introduction. Finally the principal took him aside and told him, "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall."
Which reminded me of my time on a school board -- the parents wanted all sorts of things that the actual teachers/educational experts thought wouldn't help. Each time I looked into these suggestions the obvious excuses of teacher laziness/dogmatism didn't appear to be the case; it was mostly parents who'd talked to someone or seen some article or simply "just knew".
>> "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall."
In a previous life, I worked at quite a few schools (public and private) as a consultant. How the parents would react and what they thought was always priority number 1. The second priority was how the students would react, because if they reacted negatively, then the parents would inevitably get involved. I've seen this from K-12 from all over the US.
I also have had a lot of teachers and administration say that their biggest issue was making sure the parents were happy with everything. A few even said that it didn't matter what the kids thought, as long as their parents thought one way or the other.
/not every school is like this so ymmv, but a depressingly large amount was. This was 5 years ago, but I really doubt anything has changed.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadI learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays.
It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available.
Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals.
Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement.
I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you.
[0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html
It's just like golden eye, but now you've got to pay to play as odjob.
Studies disagree. Too much screen time isn't great for kid development. At best, we're not sure what sort of effect it has on kids.
Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.
We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.
Anyway, we do know and suspect a lot of stuff:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-an...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too...
Meanwhile, keeping a kid off a screen and giving them other activities is expensive, in parental time if not direct cost.
I don't know if it's education directly, or income, or anything else because those are all correlation. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, is that the deciding factor is whether parents have decided their kids are simply a cost (something to be fed, entertained, educated, etc) or an investment. When a kid always wants your attention, and you view them simply as a consumer, it's easy to just hand them a digital device and ask them to get lost. It's much more work to sit down with them and play a game or read together.
If they get addicted, az least it could make them smarter
You can get basically disposable tablets at Walmart for ~$50.
Some 30 years ago, in my country the parent instructions to their kid, for the afternoon, would be: "go outside, play with other kids, I don't want to see you inside before supper".
And all was well. Sort of.
Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
Is the daycare cooperating with your desire for near-zero screen time?
What did parents do before that when they need to cook dinner?
I know this is kind of a rhetorical question, but:
- they'd prepare dinner ahead of time
- the other parent would watch the kids
- they'd have extended family watch the kids
- they'd have neighbors watch the kids
- they'd park the kid in the kitchen
- they'd hope that the kid didn't do anything too destructive in the other room
- toss them outside and task them with entertaining themselves until dinner is done
You can't do that anymore with other parents calling the cops if they see a child outside unattended for longer than 30 seconds but it was effective
We bordered on a large plot of forest. So we'd pay attention if it was hunting season (wear orange/yellow if it was), and go traipsing through the forest. We would routinely be gone for hours. Some times, we'd go from sunrise to sunset.
We'd also build a tiny fire, and have cookouts. One of us had a rifle, so we'd go for small game. First time I had squirrel was doing that. We put out the fires like they told us to do in cub scouts.
(Tl;Dr. Kids with guns, fire, basic camping gear, out for hours)
There's no way in hell anything remotely like this would be "allowed" today.
But yes it was critical asked. Im a software engineer but with quite a negative view on mobile phones.
I close my lit or put my phone away at conferences and try to focus. Still so many people around me doing everything but concentrating on the topic is strange.
If our generation is already like this, how will be a generation growing up without?
You also had - well, have - the option to just drop the kid in a high-chair or a playpen with a couple of distracting objects in the corner of the room. Sometimes the kid gets unhappy about being in a playpen with nothing to do and just screams for an hour while you prepare dinner.
Then you either have the option of stopping to sooth the baby or power through, and everyone wonders why either dinner is late/burnt or why you're in such a foul mood after listening to a screaming infant for an hour.
He was kind of ADHD person, never confirmed by anyone, but he was jumping in place everytime something exciting was on the screen, always wanted to move around, hit other people. And most noticeable - he was furious when somebody told him to turn off tv/pc.
I've seen many not behaving kids of course, this one had uncontrolled access to technology even then.
And now we're alarmed? We had a lot of time to notice. Don't forget that TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones (without internet of course, just SMS) even 10 years ago.
Did your cousin carry the TV around with him?
> TV and computer isn't something new. People were addicted to mobile phones even 10 years ago
It used to be rare to see teenagers with cell phones, let alone toddlers. The iPhone is ~11 years old, and in that time it has become common for me to see people of all ages, from toddler up, always on a smartphone or tablet.
I disagree strongly that the situation is just the same as TVs decades ago.
And I'm not interested in the picture of the people reading newspapers on the subway. It's always been common to ignore strangers of public transit, I'm more interested in a photograph of friends/family staring intently at their own newspaper while at a dinner table or some other social event. This is the norm with smartphones, and color me skeptical that it isn't new.
I've learned to keep my kids' screen time limited and it works best if it's a rigid timing (after homework but before dinner). I give them additional time if they watch in French audio track - in fact that seems to minimize the crankiness when its time to put away the devices.
For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done.
Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
They should start using archaic and foreign curses.
Source: my 13 year old little brother was recently expelled for YouTube videos on his personal google account. As if he had committed a crime. Its asinine.
School administrators are using the existence of any videos to kick him out by all means necessary. They don't care about the contents or the context. He said the word Hitler in one of his 10 ish videos or a joke about it. He's extremely into history and all he likes watching are youtube history videos. Playing games based on history. Sharing memes with his friends that have a historical context. Some of it isn't funny some of it is.
Doesn't make it ok to permanently ruin a teenagers academic future over a stupid silly completely explainable video less than one minute long.
Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues. He doesn't have any. It's just straight abuse to be completely honest. It's not right.
Responsible school administrators do not waste money/time on free speech lawsuits unless (a) they are dead-to-rights certain that they will win, or (b) there is some other incredibly important issue (e.g., an innocent teacher's professional reputation as in Sagehorn v. Rogers, where the lawsuit -- even if lost -- sends an important signal).
Lawsuits are EXTREMELY expensive, not just in dollar terms (which may or may not matter regardless of the outcome; larger school districts have insurance, retainers, often even in-house legal staff) but also -- perhaps more importantly -- in staff time/energy and public relations terms.
Furthermore, there is a lot of grey area in current court precedent re: student free speech on the internet. SCOTUS hasn't made a single peep about this issue. This, combined with the above fact about lawsuits, works in your favor. Lawsuits on contentious and undecided questions tend to get national attention and can therefore take on a life of their own in school board elections, upsetting an otherwise friendly board. Top administrators know this risk. If the issue is really as minor as you're making it out to be, and serves as a good test case for student free speech on the internet, no superintendent in his right mind would risk a friendly board over some dumb internet video.
Furthermore, the circuit courts that have spoken on this issue made many free-speech-friendly decisions; in particular, the second circuit proposes a test that your brother's school will almost certainly have a very hard time passing [1, page Page 16 of 18, top paragraph].
So, I would advise your brother's legal guardian to take the following steps:
1. Write an email to the superintendent expressing their belief that this is a highly inappropriate and very possibly unconstitutional attack on their child's free speech rights. Request a meeting in person. Emphasize that if this issue is not resolved soon and in your child's favor, your next step will be to consult with lawyers.
2. If no dice, contact your school board representatives and explain that you think the administration is over-reaching. Contact them individually and, if possible, in person. A single sympathetic board member can create enough political head-aches for administration to back off.
3. In parallel, contact the regional ACLU. If you don't have luck, try the bar association. If you don't have luck, find a lawyer who provides free consultations and get a sense for how grey your case is.
IANAL, but have some personal experience in this: I had a somewhat similar issue in high school, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream. There was literally zero legal precedent on public school first amendment internet speech issues. Literally not a single case. Is this Tinker land? Is the speech happening at school, outside of school, or both? After all, you can access websites at school. Does whether or not people actually accessed the website at school determine if Hazelwood applies? Etc.
Oh, and this was also before Morse v. Frederick, so administrative reach beyond the schoolhouse doors regardless of internet wasn't even well-understood. (BTW, Morse v. Frederick probably actually works in your brother's favor, unless his video was about Hitler doing drugs.)
Lots of opportunities for the school to lose.
Fortunately, my parents were supportive and the district decided they had better things to spend money/effort/PR on than a test case on the extent of student free speech in the emerging internet age. Good thing for them, because there was an almost identical case less than 2(?) years later with a six-figure settlement against the district. Emailing that decision to the power-hungry admin who tried to suspend me was probably the most passive aggressive email I've ever sent.
[1] odessacubbage ↗ frankly at this point, i'd consider it a blessing to get a kid out of the public school system for any reason. thrmsforbfast ↗ First, alternative schools are 100% part of the "system", and are often have a far more "institutionalized" feel than their mainstream counterparts. mantas ↗ Totally off-topic, but you should introduce that kid to Sabaton.
>Alternative school is for kids with legitimate behavior issues
it sort of depends on where you go but really that's a misconception. alternative schools are simply that: an alternative to the institutional apathy & intellectually demoralizing environment provided by our modern schools. facilitating a broader array of learning styles can be highly beneficial to those with behavioral problems or disabilities but it is especially empowering for the type of highly intelligent & creative kids who find themselves at odds with the administration & dispassionate structure of our industrial education model.john taylor gatto's criticisms really hit the nail on the head in my opinion. >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpycMRTBrfY this sounds like another case of a highly engaged kid being driven out of a school that doesn't deserve what he has to offer. if that absurd & failing system doesn't want him, then all the better.
Second, in most districts, alternative schools really are a strictly inferior experience for students who do not have special intellectual, behavioral, or emotional needs.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but this is definitely the rule. E.g., how many alternative schools offer Calc BC?
Alternative schools are great, but in the case parent described, they're probably the strictly inferior option.
EDIT: I should say that I can think of two ways they can argue this: since it is school property, nothing on there has the expectation of privacy, and is monitored (my work does that, and as a result I don't log into personal email at work). They could also argue the "in loco parentus", in which they are acting as parents by searching it.
However, legally or not, that is a massive breach of trust, and if I were that kid, I have been taught a hard lesson not to trust electronics I own and not to trust authority figures.
This doesn't bode well for the "Are schools daycares or for skill development?" debate.
The issue with screens is due to the addictive quality of experiences on screens (tuned by highly paid experts to increase "engagement"!) causes more people to turn to their screens than would otherwise be distracted by other things, such as newspapers.
So instead of tolerating your child's soccer game because bringing and reading a newspaper would be a hassle, seem antisocial, and not be that much more interesting, one can just whip out their pocket computer and have some bright colorful beep-boop gamified but ultimately meaningless experiences much more engaging than the game.
It's like the argument about students starting out the window, or at a ceiling, during a lesson. The answer is not to remove the windows, nor is "scolding the ape" a good solution. The real answer is to compete on engagement, and make the lesson more interesting than what's outside the window.
Likewise, the way to have more people engaged in a sporting event is to make the game more engaging. But then more people yell obscenities at the referee.
In the end, all of this "screen time" nonsense is just a dumb way for some people to feel better than other people.
Powering through boring material is an important life skill. You can be bored to tears by your boss or your job but you still have to do it.
A person will learn better from an engaging teacher, but someone with no experience learning from dry content will be woefully unprepared for that first experience.
If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
Being able to create such fine grained control on ios seems ... unlikely
And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing.
My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long.
Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction.
Relevant HN discussion about boot-to-BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)
Which reminded me of my time on a school board -- the parents wanted all sorts of things that the actual teachers/educational experts thought wouldn't help. Each time I looked into these suggestions the obvious excuses of teacher laziness/dogmatism didn't appear to be the case; it was mostly parents who'd talked to someone or seen some article or simply "just knew".
As a med student, this reminds me of how medical practices will chase patient satisfaction at the expense of all else
In a previous life, I worked at quite a few schools (public and private) as a consultant. How the parents would react and what they thought was always priority number 1. The second priority was how the students would react, because if they reacted negatively, then the parents would inevitably get involved. I've seen this from K-12 from all over the US.
I also have had a lot of teachers and administration say that their biggest issue was making sure the parents were happy with everything. A few even said that it didn't matter what the kids thought, as long as their parents thought one way or the other.
/not every school is like this so ymmv, but a depressingly large amount was. This was 5 years ago, but I really doubt anything has changed.