@ted -- I run a 21 year old nonprofit that teaches music in juvenile prisons. I echo the experience that those kids are more interested in learning and no access to cell phones is a definite factor. All our students are enrolled in High School while incarcerated and I was initially shocked at their interest in school work. One student explained to me that having less to focus on has made him realize that learning can be fun and valuable. We use music as a vehicle to teach life skills and working with these kids has been a life changing experience for me. Here's a 90 second trailer for a mini documentary I'm working on about our program called "Beats, Bars & Beyond": https://youtu.be/4dDLZVEoqBQ
Boy, is that short clip a dose of hope in a weary world. I taught years ago in a juvenile correctional facility. Kids were so glad to write, and in some ways writing can be like music, taking you to a place where you feel some agency. Nice work.
I mean even the strictest parenting style with absolutely no screens til 18, still live in a world where the screens are ubiquitous -handed out at schools and provided in libraries and that’s not even counting the myriad peers and family members who think you’re weird and subvert you every chance they get.
Screens just are reality. I don’t know how to escape that reality; realistically speaking.
Being a good parent today is more difficult than ever before, because you have people openly telling you that you are crazy when you set rules for your children and enforce them. Tough love is typically misunderstood, most people assume that it is “tough” on the children, but it is the parents who suffer the most. Particularly when the community around them has given up on trying to teach discipline and responsibility to their own kids.
That right there is the real problem.. that youve already decided screens are an unescapable reality. Much like an alcoholic who cant imagine life without alcohol.
We really are limited by our ability(or lack of) to envision our lives.
And that comment about your peers opinions.. come on now, everybody knows the answer to that one. If all your friends jump off a bridge are you going to join them?
But dont get me wrong, im all about unfettered screen access for the masses. It helps clear the chaff. We dont really need all these useless people for anything, may as well let them consign themselves to their bleak fate. And thats the brilliant part, that they do it to themselves.
But if they ever turn the phones off, boy thats gonna be a shit show. More likely though theyll start extracting more and more from everyone for continued access, and that will be hilarious. That people will pay and pay to be made more useless, now thats poetic justice
Let’s be clear: screens are not about screens. They’re the vehicle for programming. And when you think about it deeply, the programming of humans is the most significant activity in the world.
Dont conflate the process of programming with the vehicle used for it. The one is a necessary and inescapable part of the human experience, the other most certainly is not.
And if you think about it deeply, you may see just how insane it is that we're handing that programming process over to entities that care not about our wellbeing.
I think it was not implied that the solution is incarceration. It was about how we should be in control with our usage and be more intentional towards it.
I was hoping someone would take the bait, but exactly: we can’t incarcerate our children or grandchildren to keep them away from the mass cultural programming experiments happening now. Neither can we protect them from science “community” in its viral experiments or vaccine mandates.
Pretty much, we are all helpless sheep, being sheared.
‘cept for the few coyotes of course. Slipping through the cracks and howling‘round the fringes.
I would also add that studies have shown screens are more harmful for younger brains. So, kids who are immersed and not given limits as kids will find it harder to limit themselves as teens and adults. It’s not a complete solution, but it is something that can help. Keep your young kids away from screens. Introduce short, measured screentime as they get older. Don’t fall for the myth that teens are adults and continue to guide them on responsible screen usage. When they’re 18, their brains will at least have had that crucial formative era without constant dopamine hits, time to develop their own thoughts.
Excellent point. I predict One day we will see the results of all these screens on early brains and will be horrified at what turns out to be abuse of children.
True. You'd have to put today's children and teenagers in prison to get them away from screens. The ancient Spartans put youths in military camps. That too might work, but it would make us look too much like North Korea.
I heard the same thing in grad school about a decade ago, from a former public school teacher who had begun to work in juvenile correctional facilities and loved it. The stories I heard from teachers during my years in grad school opened my eyes on a lot of things.
thx -- we've had some new developments recently that may increase the scope and visibility of the doc. since ive gotten so much positive reaction here, ill be sure to update this thread down the road when its released. thank you for the support!
I also notice an insensitivity to events around most of these phone zombies. The other day on a subway train, when it jerked forward after a stop, an elderly woman took a tumble, landing on her back. My wife and I went to her aid as the majority of others in the vicinity either stayed glued to their phones, or they only looked up for a second or two. No one else lifted a finger. Luckily the woman was all right, but witnessing such indifference has stayed with us as much as the fall of the woman. Strange times.
That woman falling down and no one caring is the embodiment of our civilization. Aside from that, what a truly horrible thing to do to a human being, especially a frail one.
Also people in public no longer have a sense of personal space or awareness anymore. They pose with their phone under your nose as if it's normal, that in their mind there is this new 'tiktok privilige' that we've all signed up to, they walk across the street, get in your path directly to take a photo of something or themselves with the phone. Or they'll suddenly stop as they're walking in front of you to take a picture of themselves. Or you're trying to check your bag or something on the street and suddenly you'll find some retard with their phone, uncomfortably close right next to you. Or you get on public transport and they're frozen looking at the phone blocking entrances.
My argument is they are not in control, the phone is controlling them. This is the new smoking and I'm very happy to get rid of the whole thing. I couldn't give a damn how many jobs are lost, and how much money is lost.
This is actually a weird social psych phenom, although I'm sure the phones make it more dramatic. It's a thing that when a person is injured in public, the more people there are around her the less likely it is that she will be helped, and the slower the help will be when it does come.
This is apparently because if you see a person injured and you're the only one there to help, you might feel that you aren't up to the job but you're the only one who can try, so you do.
If there are other people there, you figure someone else can do a better job than you can, so you don't intervene.
And the other people are doing the same thing.
Not to say there isn't indifference and callousness in the world, just to say that sometimes it's not that.
Hmm. I think I'd more say it was taken advantage of by that group.
I do think it's very natural for people to think that in a crisis someone else might be better equipped to handle things. I think that's why we tend to group into hierarchies and seek leadership, in part? If a person is having a seizure, for example, I know a little about what to do, but I don't think it's indoctrination that makes me think that if there are 200 other people on that plane, one of them will have run into this situation before and will have more knowledge, and while I want to help I don't want to get into that person's way.
But it's an interesting point you make, because maybe it's that very impulse that has made so much of community life so easy to manipulate (again, in part). So many things we see a need for in our community, so many ways we can do useful work. But in a healthy community people communicate and take on the work together and suss out who has more and less ability and assign tasks appropriately, in an unhealthy one you have groups that subvert that and take over the process for their own ends.
Our small community has a volunteer fire station with a board that for years was run very imperfectly but that functioned just fine. Outsiders came in and bullied them out and took over (in free elections, so they did so by convincing people they were the better choice). A *huge* part of their bullying is credentialing -- they make up awards they have won, self-promote roles that have been in, etc. Maybe that wouldn't have been possible without decades of public schools telling people that if someone is an "expert" (nevermind why they say they are an expert, they can just self-identify) then you are wrong to question him.
Ex-high school teacher here. This insensitivity to others became particularly noticeable to me around 2020. An illustrative anecdote is when I taught Hamlet to a group of histrionic students (17-18 year olds) who would scream blue murder at any perceived “injustice” directed at them, but the best they could manage describing Hamlet’s feelings was, “He’s a bit upset.”
I teach in a local college setting and see it happening firsthand among young adults. The idea that you are only getting to them in short bursts in between dopamine hits on the internet is so damn accurate. I feel like I’m competing with a grand spectacle at a given time because I am. Students no longer have any understanding of the concept of being present and it really isn’t their fault up until a point. They were given an object that guarantees that they will never have to be bored again and that’s what is getting in between more than just teacher-student relationships—this also explains the gen z struggle to initiate and maintain friendships, relationships, and so on. These tech giants created devices that were intentionally designed to drain you of your time, energy, and of course, money and they have no intention of answering for their crimes. I’ve been saying for a while now that handing a smartphone to a child at an early age is a crime against humanity but what else are we to do? Communicate with kids via snail mail or walkie talkie? Honestly not bad ideas if we lived in a better world where we were allowed to slow down.
"competing with a grand spectacle" -- Some days after teaching undergrads, I feel I'm expected to be a performing six-armed monkey because nothing else will hold their attention.
What would be the solution, then? Because I see this as the inevitable outcome of an economy based on maximizing efficiency, profit, and growth. The incentive for social media companies to write increasingly addictive algorithms is immense; their user base will grow and their profits alongside with it. They do not have to think about the societal ramifications of their actions, just as fast fashion companies don’t have to consider the environmental impact of their massive waste.
We probably need more regulation—barring the use of phones in K-12 schools, strengthening content moderation rules for social media companies, etc—but who will champion this legislation? After all, our political system is intimately tied to our economic system through the influence of lobbyists and PAC money. The winners—an increasingly small share of our population—win, and the rest of us lose. I could offer any number of ideas that might help the issue—the first being to strengthen campaign finance laws—but frankly, that kind of analysis feels overly optimistic for our current era.
Hey Sofia, I believe the only way forward is through degrowth and opting out. For instance, tech promises this unyielding march forward towards an easier life… I’m still waiting and now I’d really like to just opt out of all these technologies. I can get behind the idea of degrowth because I think the US economy also follows this unyielding march forward but towards something different: the promise that you can get anything that you want. The answer? To raise your kids to want less and teach them the virtue of living a small and quiet life. Not to digress but it’s one of the reasons why I despise influencers. They are the concept of “manufactured desire” on full display.
One of the resolutions you offer I support like the regulation of phones. Unfortunately, terms “regulation” seem to be kryptonite to Americans and many associate it with taking away freedoms. I’ve been saying for a while now that offering up technologies without any way of dealing with the fallout that results from their introduction is ultimately a crime against humanity. For instance, your example of tech getting increasingly addictive is designed this way; it’s a crime against children.
I believe Paul Romer has an interesting proposal to tax digital ads in an attempt to "tax attention".
IRC, he tries to set up his tax in order to penalize big players and proliferate smaller social apps. I'm a little dubious of that, because I feel that could create even more political fragmentation with small players such as Gab and Parler.
I'd rather set up the tax so it gets heavier for users who see more ads. Maybe the first ad I see on Facebook gets taxed at 10%, second at 20%, etc. until we get to 100%, and Facebook has no incentive to keep me on the platform further for that day.
The best hope might be for this idea to take root outside the US, where US tech billionaires have less influence on politics. If Australia passes a law like this, and society gets an obvious benefit, perhaps a conversation will start in the US about the possibility of passing a similar law here.
We can only get out of this by a political movement which puts the social interest above private interests - by having private interests above social interests, we are sold addiction and will end up in economic squalor as we fail to mint the next generation of thinkers, doers, mothers, fathers - we see depression rise as our ability to make real friends dwindles, and as a country we will stagnate and fail. There is only one way out of this, there is only one political engine which could shotgun blast wall street in the dick and abolish the attention economy. There is only one orientation which could mass produce technology that favors educational and cultural development. It requires the worker class, worker solidarity, and the violent establisment of a worker's state. That is the only way the social interest can break out from the chains of those private interests that strangle us.
I’m inclined to agree with you, in the sense that unchecked capitalism will always give better outcomes to people, or entities, with money. That includes social media titans. There shouldn’t exist a political system where presidential candidates can fundraise billions in private donations, most coming from corporations, special interests, and extremely wealthy donors. So long as our democracy is under threat, any meaningful action against behemoths like social media companies will be crushed under the weight of Big Law, lobbyists, and corporate donations.
And make no mistake—there should be action. These companies do not care about the public good if it interferes with their profits. That’s where government should step in, but we know it rarely—if ever—does.
Well said, Ted. Let's lead by example. We are not giving our kids any devices until they turn 18.
Parents should take more responsibility for establishing good digital habits and education. No one is coming to save us. The institutions that are supposed to help kids end up hurting them.
Yes, tech companies are turning everyone's brains into slop. But teachers unions destroyed a generation by forcing schools to stay closed for years during COVID, especially in poor communities. The Department of Education wasted $3 trillion while test scores fell during its 50-year existence.
You’re lost if you would rather blame teacher’s unions and the DOE. Does the DOE need some kind of restructuring? Of course, while I think they have the best intentions, students are still struggling. Also, when are we going to stop blaming COVID?
If the DOE really cared about children learning it would have made Cognitive Load Theory central to every aspect of education. It's the blueprint for how the brain learns, emphasises just how important it is to commit schema in areas like Maths and grammar to long-term and, in particular, demonstrates the need for 'consolidation' homework repeating subject matter covered during the day in short evening homework periods. Sure, the DOE supports some CLT but not at anywhere near the level one would expect for a subject so central to an objective scientific understanding of how the brain learns.
Sweden proves the lie that school shutdowns weren't harmful. The only group of students who were switched to remote learning were the 16 to 19 age group- the main group physiologically capable of transmitting Covid to others (including teachers) at viral load levels capable of causing harms. Were they perfect? No. They probably should have offered better advice to teachers over 50, telling those who were obese or who had two or more related comorbidities to stay at home.
But they did better than anyone else in the world at handling Covid. The one exception was social care homes for the elderly. They had the lowest overall rate of excess mortality in Europe although their neighbours in Denmark and Norway were only marginally less effective at preventing overall death during to 2020 to 2022 period. Not something the legacy media likes to disclose given their past hostility to Sweden's approach. I guess they don't like to admit they were completely wrong.
Both Norway and Denmark experienced more severe learning losses than Sweden, although Denmark (which was one of the first to lockdown, but rapidly course corrected after they had a chance to understand that the virus mainly impacted the elderly and vulnerable) had less severe impacts.
From an AI: 'Given Sweden’s 10.5 million population and 150,000 teachers (per 2020 OECD estimates), their death rate likely mirrored the general working-age population’s (0.1–0.2% for ages 20–64, unvaccinated, per CDC proxies) unless exposed uniquely. With schools open, lower-secondary teachers had double the infection risk (PNAS, 2021), but severe outcomes remained rare.'
This is why I stated Sweden weren't perfect. They should have done more to protect lower-secondary teachers in the age and weight categories I mentioned above. This would have mitigated the risk to the point that work-related risks were negligible. A rear view mirror data-driven approach shows that those who argued for the Great Barrington approach to COVID were right, and the more extreme authoritarian approaches ultimately proved more harmful.
Children's learning wasn't the only impact. Many countries massively expanded their borrowing during COVID to cover lockdowns and furloughs. Sweden's borrowing hardly increased during the period. A 2021 IMF report notes Sweden’s approach avoided deep structural economic damage, aiding a quicker recovery- GDP growth rebounded 5% in 2021.
Easier to lay fault at the feet of bureaucrats than to take a hard look at the responsibilities of parents; all this commentary on how we as a society could have yielded better outcomes in terms of the education, socialization and development of children, and your only reference points are teachers and the educational bureaucracy, with not even a passing reference to the adults with whom a child spends the greatest amount of time (one hopes), and who bear primary responsibility for the child's socialization and development?
Sure, that's a fair point. I think it's stupid and cruel not to tell parents how important parenting and early learning is the educational and general development of children.
One of the best examples comes from Northern Ireland. If one were to go back to the eighties, pre-Good Friday, discrimination generally meant that Catholics were poorer, more likely to live in run-down council tenements and residential estates, whilst their Protestant counterpoints lived in leafy suburbs.
Now the situation has reversed. Why? Because Catholic communities with stronger emphasis on family had an advantage when there was finally equality of opportunity, especially in terms of family support for the educational process. Early learning activities like pre-school reading are incredibly important, as is parental enforcement of consolidation homework. And people don't realise how important this is at the peer group level- it only takes a few kids in the class lacking the home-based social enforcement mechanisms to hold the whole class back.
At the same time, only 10 minutes of disruption per hour equates to two years worth of lost education. It's also worth noting that whilst the Catholic Bishops British Schools curriculum in return for funding, the retained didactic pedagogy and managed to avoid the learning through exploring (which can work, but is a far less efficient means of learning than teacher instruction) fallacy of progressive education as well as other disproven faddisms. The achievement levels of White Irish students is still embarrassingly high compared to the White British cohort of the UK mainland.
There should be school choice of all types- but the most important form of school choice around is the ability to select into a community of parents and children who are committed to achieving high standards of excellence. The most important form of school choice is behavioural. It's why certain migrant communities do so well- they have higher standards of social enforcement and higher rates of fathers in the home.
Plus, a behaviourally selective school choice system provides the right incentives for society as a whole. If parents and kids know that doing your homework, not getting in trouble or being disruptive gets you into the school with the better behaved kids, who achieve more academically with the ability they've been given- then it's an upward societal incentive which doesn't even violate the principles of Libertarian Paternalism- free choice is still preserved.
Not to belabor the point, but your acknowledgement of the role of parents and caretakers still strikes me as curiously tepid. Bureaucracy will do as it will, but the buck stops with the parents. If parents and caretakers truly accepted full responsibility, most of the other issues you discuss would be addressed by virtue of their engagement and resolve. And yes, of course, there are parents who are for various reasons functionally ill-equipped to adequately socialize their children, but that doesn't constitute the bulk of the issue, nor does it absolve relatively functional parents of their own responsibilities.
Just a note, students spend a minimum of 16,000 hours in public school buildings. Maybe the buck stops with the parents, but before that it spends a lot of time traveling around school grounds.
Well what is whining about it going to accomplish? You,can complain about individual decisions all day long, and yet millions of individuals are being caught up in the same basic patterns. We are not going to simply talk our way out of this, it is an economic and technological problem and it requires economic and technological solutions - a political solution, a war against the attention economy.
Are you responding to my comment? My alerts suggest that you are, but the way responses are nested visually makes it difficult to track; I'm certainly not whining about anything; on the contrary...
Yes, this was to your comment. Year by year this problem gets worse and year by year I keep hearing people talking about the importance of blaming parents. We are in a system failure, all of us are to blame, however, we will not escape the issue by pressuring one another as individuals - if that was true then all this talk about personal responsibility would have gone somewhere, it is a social problem that needs a social solution. Our society is atomized and divided and conquered, materially, our sense of personal responsibility can only cut across that and build new systems if those personal actions are aligned with a tangible, organized social action. Aimed at political and economic power. If you achieve the maximum unity of those interests and the maximum unity within that project, it would be called a communist party.
you know who ain't dealing with brain rot kids and technology gone amuck? China!
I agree with you. COVID was a stress test to the education system that revealed long standing weaknesses in the system. More and more per pupil spending has been thrown at our educational deficiencies and there’s been no return on investment. My wife works in a middle school. It’s disheartening to hear all the mental health issues the students deal with. It’s enraging to hear the stories of feckless parents who expect the schools to raise their kids.
The data was clear by Fall of 2020 that the risk to kids in schools was extremely minimal, and that the negative impacts from virtual school could very well be far worse.
It's also interesting to note that about a quarter of young people have never had COVID now, probably because they were protected from it as children. That's actually not a good thing, as very, very few children died from COVID during the pandemic and catching a bug when it barely affects you is the best way to acquire a lifetime immunity (at least partial) that will help you when you are 60 years old yourself.
This is nonsense. The early forms of COVID were much deadlier than the current forms which, yes, are still circulating. Antibodies remain in the system from 3-6 months, not for a lifetime. Do you have lifetime immunity from catching a cold or a flu? No, because these viruses mutate into new forms every year. Why do people persist in spreading anti science, ignorant conservative propaganda when there is ample actual science out there, you know the stuff researched by people who've dedicated decades of their lives to understanding human health, and not just been radicalised by watching idiotic YouTube videos made by conspiracy theorists?
This seems to hold with 'chickenpox' which is a childhood developmental phase which protects from tumours later in life. But having chickenpox doesn't protect you from 'shingles' later in life. I think the whole concept of 'bugs' is a complete misunderstanding of disease.
You can reframe the discussion all that you'd like. That won't change the fact that the comment I replied to trotted out the usual tropes of faulting unions. My wife is a recently retired teacher and, at 65, would probably had not made it beyond the pandemic if forced back into her quite small schoolroom.
The original commenter said that the institutions that were supposed to help kids ended up hurting them. Well, if schools had been forced to remain open, there would have been a lot more dead kids/teachers/parents.
If, at age 60, she would "probably" not have survived a COVID infection (likely with a high initial viral load in a classroom like that), then the school system should have devised a way to support her (maybe with early retirement) as a high risk individual. Did she get through the entire pandemic without catching COVID? Do you sincerely believe that most teachers were at risk of death or serious complications and so a national shut down was required for that reason? Because we both know that the children were not directly at risk.
The most reasonable answer to why the schools were shut is that schools are petri dishes that incubate and grow infections, and the kids are then vectors that spread it through the wider population. If the only reason to shut the schools was because the adults working there were at greater risk when they were open, there were other ways to manage that.
That is Bizarre being that mothers, fathers, parents, guardians have zero control over government compulsory schooling.
Now if you view STRANGERS that TELL A VISION of dead kids, teachers, mothers, fathers you need to get a life, same as if you listen to a Doctor of the Rockefeller Medicine Allopathic Business Model of Medicine.
People die, get sick and take ill because they choose knowingly or unknowingly do the things that POLLUTE their bloodSTREAM be it by pharmacological, chemical, modified foods or any other pollutant, toxin...etc...etc.... that slowly sickens the body and when your bodies trashcan fills up you take ill, once better the stupid people start all over...... polluting their bloodSTREAM and getting sick, ill, diseased again until they die sooner than they should have.
Sars-cov2 is In Silico (A Computer Program)
It has never been shown to exist, has never been isolate, purified and shown to the world but it is on a computer program and Mark Saleski says there would have been a lot more dead kids/teachers/parents due to the in silico Sars-cov2 computer program virus......Lol!
Wow you did a great job of evading the point and shining a light on some shit that doesnt really matter outside of your agenda. And you managed to sound smart as you did it, which is alot better than most of them do. Subversion indeed
Here’s something to consider. At a certain age there really is no way we can prevent kids from being exposed to drugs, distracting technology, pornography or any of the other vices they will encounter. So what is the solution? Perhaps teaching kids virtues and self worth so they will realize those things are dehumanizing instead of edifying and that they have a valuable life/soul that is worth protecting and enriching. Some of that could be taught in schools but some of it needs to come from the home and community. As with a lot of things in our society we throw a lot of money dealing with the symptoms of things and not addressing the causes.
Also, lumping drugs and tech together isnt really an accurate picture. Its not like kids get their first taste of social media on the streets. They get it from their parents. Usually as a holiday gift(im guessing in elementary school these days).
Thats a very different beast than say the dope man pushing his product on the playground. This tech is enmeshed in the fabric of their lives. In short, the vast majority arent trying to prevent exposure to tech like they do drugs. They enable and encourage it.
I completely agree with you. I dont think the doe is any kind of solution. Hell i dont even think schools are. I think this has everything to do with the daily choices we make as individuals and as a society.
In fact i was lashing out against yuri even bringing the doe in to the conversation. Hes pushing an agenda(i assume, i didnt click his link). His whole comment was a pitch.. say some reasonable sounding shit then hit em with the sell
But i could be completely wrong. Admittedly i made a gut reaction response. Maybe not the classiest move, but i am fed up with everybody pushing an agenda into well intended comversations:/
Nobody "forced" the schools to stay closed except for the governments that refused to find the *improvements to school infrastructure* that would have made returning to school during COVID less dangerous. *That* is what teachers' unions were pushing for; you have been lied to and are now lying to other people.
Yuri, you're way off base about teacher unions and the effect of COVID school closures on students. Schools stayed closed for one year, not years. Test scores have fallen significantly since those closures, but that decline started more than ten years before that. It's easy to go with the scapegoat, but that's intellectually lazy. The facts don't support your knee-jerk theory.
I have taught high school English for 23 years and more than ever their personal writing confesses a lot of ambivalence about their relationship to technology. Many of them wish that "social media had never been invented" or express a wish to have lived in the 70s or 80s. At the same time, they feel like if they left SM on their own they would be completely isolated, have no friends, be losers, which, they don't seem to realize, is exactly how social media has already made them feel.
If the problem is going to be fixed, they're going to have to do it on their own. They won't let it be imposed upon them.
I’m not sure I agree… phones and social media apps are designed to be addictive. Asking millions of young people to break their screentime addiction is, to me, like asking millions of food addicts to stop eating or millions of alcoholics to stop drinking (albeit, the latter cases are more extreme and detrimental). Some will have the ability to do so, many won’t. Rather, I think a macro-level solution or policy works better here.
Good comment to see. Many are doing it on their own. And with the internet so thoroughly integrated into all our social lives, expecting young people to just take the hit of being an internal outsider verges on cruel. Looking at the actual situation and the challenges is the best thing to do.
Ted, thanks so much for continuing to give this issue the attention it deserves. I've worked in thie area for several years, specifically around how screen use is degrading the ability to read deeply, both among youth and adults.
I'm so glad you're optimistic, but I'm afriad I'm losing hope -- at least in the short term. I think the crisis isn't ahead of us, I think we're in it right now. The political crisis in the States and in other parts of the West is a direct result of manipulation by social media alogorithms, the kind of manipulation you've so convincingly shown in many posts. But I think the rot goes much deeper -- we live in a society that unashamedly worships money, power and fame. Incentives for our tech overlords will only change when we do. That's the key. We have to create a society that celebrates virtues like integrity, compassion and solidarity with our fellow human beings. We need to get over ourselves and recognize our interdependence with one another. Things need to change at the root level, not just a few isolated individuals in tech companies, but the whole society. And unfortunately, I don't see how we get there at scale without real, deep pain.
I'm a Canadian, and I freely admit that we suffer from all the same delusions as Americans. But as Leonard Cohen wrote, America is "the cradle of the best and of the worst." And the worst in this case is the whole greed is good ethos that seem to have melded itself onto the US psyche. There isn't going to be meaningful change for these kids or for any of us until we let go of the idea that getting rich is the sole purpose of life. (Apologies for the rant.)
As for how many people have to suffer to change the fundamental moral orientation of a society, I really don't know. How many had to suffer in Germany at the end of WW2 to have that society recognize that Nazism was the problem, not those they scapegoated? From the Canadian side of the border it looks like the US is going through something similar, with Trump and his people destroying millions of lives so he can fund his tax cuts for the rich. I think in the aftermath of all the destruction that this is going to bring, those who suffer the most will ask why it happened and see the elevation of greed as the cause. I hope I'm wrong, but at the moment, things are not looking good.
Trying to fix the entire ethos of the US psyche is not a remotely attainable goal since that's been the spiritual core of the country for a lot longer than phone addiction.
Would be wiser to hone in on the specific issue than casting such a wide net.
Legislation, then? Stronger rules put upon social media companies regarding content moderation, age verification, and use of phones in specific contexts, like K-12 schools. Only, such regulations will face the weight of Big Law, corporate lobbyists, unrestricted PAC donations, and other entities. It feels like the entirety of the system needs some form of change; namely, reducing the prioritization of special interests over the public good.
For the past twenty one years I've taught fourth grade (4/5 combo this year) at a private Christian school, so the students I've dealt with are for the most part outside the cohort being talked about here - younger, not on screens as much, from more intact families (though not as much as you might think) and I still see a significant change from the groups I started with two decades ago. The biggest thing is that far fewer of these kids can read, and what I mean is that even the brightest of them can look at a page and though they can decode the text, they can't see the answer that's sitting right there in front of them; so often they are literally unable to extract even basic information out of text unless they have significant help. Countless times the exchange is, "Mr. Parker, I can't find the answer to this question." "Did you read the page/paragraph/whatever?" "Yes." And they're telling the truth. So we go over it together and I literally have to put my finger on it for them to even see it; before that, it's just invisible.
I taught middle school for 3 months before quitting and going back to tutoring only before starting my PhD in the fall. It’s everything — the apathy, the attention spans, and worst of all the parents who literally don’t seem to care. Apathy is a dominant gene and seems to be very “inheritable.” If students are not calling out every 30 seconds or fidgeting or leaving class five times an hour, they’re completely giving up and staring off silently into space, not doing their work, so at the very least they can’t get in trouble. The biggest problem with the apathy about learning or the classroom is that even positive incentives don’t work. It used to be that kids looked forward to games, team activities, kahoots, stickers, parties, but now it’s just “oh we don’t get a prize? we don’t get the game? we don’t have a party? who cares!” It’s very hard and admins don’t give a damn and are also totally delusional
I agree the parents can make things super difficult. My school is on a tough estate where many of the parents lived as kids, attending the previous incarnation of the school. A lot of them trust their kids over the teachers, insulting the school and teachers online. You can have a kid swear or threaten you, but then the parent just outright say you are lying and that this didn't happen. However, there's an (understandable) resistance to cameras in classrooms. When parents have open disrespect and contempt for teachers, it makes sense their kids will follow their example.
My wife teaches 11th grade English. A few months ago she got a forty-slot lock box for cell phones. Students have to lock up their phones as soon as they come to class or they're counted absent and parents are called. Each student in the period holds onto the key for their own box. It's worked so well that the district administration is looking into buying them for every secondary school classroom.
True story. A university business student came to my office seeking advice on how to break into an enterprise sales role. I went to my office book case and pulled out a book I recommended he read. I handed it to him, he skimmed the cover and opened the book briefly and politely handed it back to me. He thanked me but said “I appreciate that but I don’t like to read” I retired 12 months later.
I too don't have faith that CEOs and Silicon Valley will admit their wrongdoings and affect positive change. The real change will come from outside the tech ecosystem.
And one of the terrible side effects of too much screen time is the decline in creativity. Exciting creative breakthroughs come from boredom. But if screen dopamine addicts are no longer bored, it's difficult for them to come up with new ideas.
My high school daughter is on screens too much (as am I), neurochemically.
But a big chunk of that time is spent with an online group of people across the country that enjoy sharing 2D animation, art, and fiction with each other (teen version of Mr. Goia sharing here). Other time is spent watching videos of creative works put together by "content creators".
I'm not happy with the proportion of time spent there, but I am very happy she is finding independent artists to follow instead of logging on to the streaming services and ingesting that. And she also spends a great deal of time on physically drawing, etc.
Screens can be integrated in a more healthy way than the article describes (totally granting the reality of that description for a ton of us, and the cold reality of the dopamine involvement).
I think part of the problem is that the schools put them in front of screens for all their school work, then when they are "free" they naturally want some screen time for recreation, and then the addictive aspect is really enhanced and it winds up being even harder to limit that voluntary screen time. Since we home school, we can keep most screen time out of the school day, just naturally.
I've taught organic chemistry since before the smart phone. I've seen the devastation first hand. Bad news: many of the zombies are headed to Med School.
We laugh, but... The young doctor who came in to do my colonoscopy was glued to his phone. Sensing my concern, he at least had the comedic reflex to look up and say, "Just looking up the procedure." I guess stand-up could be a fall-back if the malpractice insurance premiums get too high.
I work as a high school teacher (and musician) and I can attest that every word here is true. Something is rotten in the land of the ___________. Zombies are real at school and I still kick myself at home for giving our kids ipads too young. This is all true. except I have trouble believing in the positive spin at the end. Having hope may not be a strategy but is essential for sanity these days. In your galvanizing and fomenting role, I understand staying positive, reminds me of my therapist and financial advisor, but it's hard to believe in with the shocking speed the current cult of cruelty, anti-compassion, anti-constitution, anti-education, and anti-sanity, is leading us to what seems like a Shakespearean tragedy where AI driven broligarchs blinded by power profit from environmental and mental destruction on the precipice of collective idiocy. And we are all culprits. It is a huge ask to join the new Romanticism you're calling for and I see no sign of it at the moment, the teens are not all right, but "Oh cursed spite! The time is out of joint. That ever I was born to set it right!"
We have to create that movement. If we refuse to step out into the void, we will never build the bridge. We need a political movement which can raise the social interest above all private interests. Right now, we are sold addiction for profit, that is the consequence of the dominance of private interests - we are trapped in a net in which we strangle one another.
Wall Street must be abolished in favor of state banks. New democratic institutions must be built to administer and yolk those banks. Only then can we mass produce technology which uplifts our consciousness and culture. Only once we control our technology can we alter this issue. We can only control the production of our technology, socially, through the mediation of a democratic state. The masses of the people, dominating our state, dominating our technology.
I work in higher ed and students are using AI for virtually all written assignments. They don’t consider it cheating.
And the instructors I know can’t do much about it either.
Personally, I got approval to use AI to enhance my job as a programmer. I learned to code back in the early 90s - the hard way - but I feel bad for anyone trying to do that now…
In class written essays with a pen in an exam book, or even worse, an oral exam in front of a few questioners. You can show what you know (or not) in an exam book, but in the oral exam, once the questioners have determined that you know the answer, they can go deeper or off to the side. Actually, the oral exam is excellent preperation for when superiors are questioning you and why you did or suggested something.
Teachers need to adapt, as you suggest here. Yes it’s hard. Simply bemoaning and quitting (most comments here) are abdicating responsibility for education.
Our brains can't handle what cell phones do to them. I limit my social media usage and can still feel it negatively effecting me. The only solution is to not use these phone apps at all.
@ted -- I run a 21 year old nonprofit that teaches music in juvenile prisons. I echo the experience that those kids are more interested in learning and no access to cell phones is a definite factor. All our students are enrolled in High School while incarcerated and I was initially shocked at their interest in school work. One student explained to me that having less to focus on has made him realize that learning can be fun and valuable. We use music as a vehicle to teach life skills and working with these kids has been a life changing experience for me. Here's a 90 second trailer for a mini documentary I'm working on about our program called "Beats, Bars & Beyond": https://youtu.be/4dDLZVEoqBQ
Boy, is that short clip a dose of hope in a weary world. I taught years ago in a juvenile correctional facility. Kids were so glad to write, and in some ways writing can be like music, taking you to a place where you feel some agency. Nice work.
much appreciated. i get as much out of it as they do.
So the solution is incarceration?😳.
I mean even the strictest parenting style with absolutely no screens til 18, still live in a world where the screens are ubiquitous -handed out at schools and provided in libraries and that’s not even counting the myriad peers and family members who think you’re weird and subvert you every chance they get.
Screens just are reality. I don’t know how to escape that reality; realistically speaking.
Being a good parent today is more difficult than ever before, because you have people openly telling you that you are crazy when you set rules for your children and enforce them. Tough love is typically misunderstood, most people assume that it is “tough” on the children, but it is the parents who suffer the most. Particularly when the community around them has given up on trying to teach discipline and responsibility to their own kids.
That right there is the real problem.. that youve already decided screens are an unescapable reality. Much like an alcoholic who cant imagine life without alcohol.
We really are limited by our ability(or lack of) to envision our lives.
And that comment about your peers opinions.. come on now, everybody knows the answer to that one. If all your friends jump off a bridge are you going to join them?
But dont get me wrong, im all about unfettered screen access for the masses. It helps clear the chaff. We dont really need all these useless people for anything, may as well let them consign themselves to their bleak fate. And thats the brilliant part, that they do it to themselves.
But if they ever turn the phones off, boy thats gonna be a shit show. More likely though theyll start extracting more and more from everyone for continued access, and that will be hilarious. That people will pay and pay to be made more useless, now thats poetic justice
Let’s be clear: screens are not about screens. They’re the vehicle for programming. And when you think about it deeply, the programming of humans is the most significant activity in the world.
Dont conflate the process of programming with the vehicle used for it. The one is a necessary and inescapable part of the human experience, the other most certainly is not.
And if you think about it deeply, you may see just how insane it is that we're handing that programming process over to entities that care not about our wellbeing.
I think it was not implied that the solution is incarceration. It was about how we should be in control with our usage and be more intentional towards it.
I was hoping someone would take the bait, but exactly: we can’t incarcerate our children or grandchildren to keep them away from the mass cultural programming experiments happening now. Neither can we protect them from science “community” in its viral experiments or vaccine mandates.
Pretty much, we are all helpless sheep, being sheared.
‘cept for the few coyotes of course. Slipping through the cracks and howling‘round the fringes.
I would also add that studies have shown screens are more harmful for younger brains. So, kids who are immersed and not given limits as kids will find it harder to limit themselves as teens and adults. It’s not a complete solution, but it is something that can help. Keep your young kids away from screens. Introduce short, measured screentime as they get older. Don’t fall for the myth that teens are adults and continue to guide them on responsible screen usage. When they’re 18, their brains will at least have had that crucial formative era without constant dopamine hits, time to develop their own thoughts.
Excellent point. I predict One day we will see the results of all these screens on early brains and will be horrified at what turns out to be abuse of children.
True. You'd have to put today's children and teenagers in prison to get them away from screens. The ancient Spartans put youths in military camps. That too might work, but it would make us look too much like North Korea.
I heard the same thing in grad school about a decade ago, from a former public school teacher who had begun to work in juvenile correctional facilities and loved it. The stories I heard from teachers during my years in grad school opened my eyes on a lot of things.
That's great work...certainly resonates! Hope your program is able to continue under the current administration...
We're doing well thanks. We don't rely on govt funding to operate.
Which is probably lucky at this point in time.
Beautiful work to be doing!
thank you very much
Can't wait for this documentary!
thx -- we've had some new developments recently that may increase the scope and visibility of the doc. since ive gotten so much positive reaction here, ill be sure to update this thread down the road when its released. thank you for the support!
Wow, this is so touching. It makes me realize how much we can always do. There's always a way to contribute.
I also notice an insensitivity to events around most of these phone zombies. The other day on a subway train, when it jerked forward after a stop, an elderly woman took a tumble, landing on her back. My wife and I went to her aid as the majority of others in the vicinity either stayed glued to their phones, or they only looked up for a second or two. No one else lifted a finger. Luckily the woman was all right, but witnessing such indifference has stayed with us as much as the fall of the woman. Strange times.
That woman falling down and no one caring is the embodiment of our civilization. Aside from that, what a truly horrible thing to do to a human being, especially a frail one.
Please Alex: our No longer civilization...
This is exactly right. It's awful and shameful .
Also people in public no longer have a sense of personal space or awareness anymore. They pose with their phone under your nose as if it's normal, that in their mind there is this new 'tiktok privilige' that we've all signed up to, they walk across the street, get in your path directly to take a photo of something or themselves with the phone. Or they'll suddenly stop as they're walking in front of you to take a picture of themselves. Or you're trying to check your bag or something on the street and suddenly you'll find some retard with their phone, uncomfortably close right next to you. Or you get on public transport and they're frozen looking at the phone blocking entrances.
My argument is they are not in control, the phone is controlling them. This is the new smoking and I'm very happy to get rid of the whole thing. I couldn't give a damn how many jobs are lost, and how much money is lost.
This is actually a weird social psych phenom, although I'm sure the phones make it more dramatic. It's a thing that when a person is injured in public, the more people there are around her the less likely it is that she will be helped, and the slower the help will be when it does come.
This is apparently because if you see a person injured and you're the only one there to help, you might feel that you aren't up to the job but you're the only one who can try, so you do.
If there are other people there, you figure someone else can do a better job than you can, so you don't intervene.
And the other people are doing the same thing.
Not to say there isn't indifference and callousness in the world, just to say that sometimes it's not that.
And that’s promoted by the public indoctrination facilities cult of Trust The Experts.
Hmm. I think I'd more say it was taken advantage of by that group.
I do think it's very natural for people to think that in a crisis someone else might be better equipped to handle things. I think that's why we tend to group into hierarchies and seek leadership, in part? If a person is having a seizure, for example, I know a little about what to do, but I don't think it's indoctrination that makes me think that if there are 200 other people on that plane, one of them will have run into this situation before and will have more knowledge, and while I want to help I don't want to get into that person's way.
But it's an interesting point you make, because maybe it's that very impulse that has made so much of community life so easy to manipulate (again, in part). So many things we see a need for in our community, so many ways we can do useful work. But in a healthy community people communicate and take on the work together and suss out who has more and less ability and assign tasks appropriately, in an unhealthy one you have groups that subvert that and take over the process for their own ends.
Our small community has a volunteer fire station with a board that for years was run very imperfectly but that functioned just fine. Outsiders came in and bullied them out and took over (in free elections, so they did so by convincing people they were the better choice). A *huge* part of their bullying is credentialing -- they make up awards they have won, self-promote roles that have been in, etc. Maybe that wouldn't have been possible without decades of public schools telling people that if someone is an "expert" (nevermind why they say they are an expert, they can just self-identify) then you are wrong to question him.
It's been very distressing.
Ex-high school teacher here. This insensitivity to others became particularly noticeable to me around 2020. An illustrative anecdote is when I taught Hamlet to a group of histrionic students (17-18 year olds) who would scream blue murder at any perceived “injustice” directed at them, but the best they could manage describing Hamlet’s feelings was, “He’s a bit upset.”
I rode the subway decades before smartphones. People were selfish and indifferent then too.
Smartphones don't help, but they are not the only cause of trouble.
English, please, child?
I teach in a local college setting and see it happening firsthand among young adults. The idea that you are only getting to them in short bursts in between dopamine hits on the internet is so damn accurate. I feel like I’m competing with a grand spectacle at a given time because I am. Students no longer have any understanding of the concept of being present and it really isn’t their fault up until a point. They were given an object that guarantees that they will never have to be bored again and that’s what is getting in between more than just teacher-student relationships—this also explains the gen z struggle to initiate and maintain friendships, relationships, and so on. These tech giants created devices that were intentionally designed to drain you of your time, energy, and of course, money and they have no intention of answering for their crimes. I’ve been saying for a while now that handing a smartphone to a child at an early age is a crime against humanity but what else are we to do? Communicate with kids via snail mail or walkie talkie? Honestly not bad ideas if we lived in a better world where we were allowed to slow down.
"competing with a grand spectacle" -- Some days after teaching undergrads, I feel I'm expected to be a performing six-armed monkey because nothing else will hold their attention.
What would be the solution, then? Because I see this as the inevitable outcome of an economy based on maximizing efficiency, profit, and growth. The incentive for social media companies to write increasingly addictive algorithms is immense; their user base will grow and their profits alongside with it. They do not have to think about the societal ramifications of their actions, just as fast fashion companies don’t have to consider the environmental impact of their massive waste.
We probably need more regulation—barring the use of phones in K-12 schools, strengthening content moderation rules for social media companies, etc—but who will champion this legislation? After all, our political system is intimately tied to our economic system through the influence of lobbyists and PAC money. The winners—an increasingly small share of our population—win, and the rest of us lose. I could offer any number of ideas that might help the issue—the first being to strengthen campaign finance laws—but frankly, that kind of analysis feels overly optimistic for our current era.
Hey Sofia, I believe the only way forward is through degrowth and opting out. For instance, tech promises this unyielding march forward towards an easier life… I’m still waiting and now I’d really like to just opt out of all these technologies. I can get behind the idea of degrowth because I think the US economy also follows this unyielding march forward but towards something different: the promise that you can get anything that you want. The answer? To raise your kids to want less and teach them the virtue of living a small and quiet life. Not to digress but it’s one of the reasons why I despise influencers. They are the concept of “manufactured desire” on full display.
One of the resolutions you offer I support like the regulation of phones. Unfortunately, terms “regulation” seem to be kryptonite to Americans and many associate it with taking away freedoms. I’ve been saying for a while now that offering up technologies without any way of dealing with the fallout that results from their introduction is ultimately a crime against humanity. For instance, your example of tech getting increasingly addictive is designed this way; it’s a crime against children.
I believe Paul Romer has an interesting proposal to tax digital ads in an attempt to "tax attention".
IRC, he tries to set up his tax in order to penalize big players and proliferate smaller social apps. I'm a little dubious of that, because I feel that could create even more political fragmentation with small players such as Gab and Parler.
I'd rather set up the tax so it gets heavier for users who see more ads. Maybe the first ad I see on Facebook gets taxed at 10%, second at 20%, etc. until we get to 100%, and Facebook has no incentive to keep me on the platform further for that day.
The best hope might be for this idea to take root outside the US, where US tech billionaires have less influence on politics. If Australia passes a law like this, and society gets an obvious benefit, perhaps a conversation will start in the US about the possibility of passing a similar law here.
Give them a dumb phone. They still exist, and we all used them like 15 years ago before smartphones existed. The tech is there.
We can only get out of this by a political movement which puts the social interest above private interests - by having private interests above social interests, we are sold addiction and will end up in economic squalor as we fail to mint the next generation of thinkers, doers, mothers, fathers - we see depression rise as our ability to make real friends dwindles, and as a country we will stagnate and fail. There is only one way out of this, there is only one political engine which could shotgun blast wall street in the dick and abolish the attention economy. There is only one orientation which could mass produce technology that favors educational and cultural development. It requires the worker class, worker solidarity, and the violent establisment of a worker's state. That is the only way the social interest can break out from the chains of those private interests that strangle us.
I’m inclined to agree with you, in the sense that unchecked capitalism will always give better outcomes to people, or entities, with money. That includes social media titans. There shouldn’t exist a political system where presidential candidates can fundraise billions in private donations, most coming from corporations, special interests, and extremely wealthy donors. So long as our democracy is under threat, any meaningful action against behemoths like social media companies will be crushed under the weight of Big Law, lobbyists, and corporate donations.
And make no mistake—there should be action. These companies do not care about the public good if it interferes with their profits. That’s where government should step in, but we know it rarely—if ever—does.
Well said, Ted. Let's lead by example. We are not giving our kids any devices until they turn 18.
Parents should take more responsibility for establishing good digital habits and education. No one is coming to save us. The institutions that are supposed to help kids end up hurting them.
Yes, tech companies are turning everyone's brains into slop. But teachers unions destroyed a generation by forcing schools to stay closed for years during COVID, especially in poor communities. The Department of Education wasted $3 trillion while test scores fell during its 50-year existence.
We cannot keep lowering the bar and outsourcing parenthood: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/outsourced-parenthood-collateral-damage
You’re lost if you would rather blame teacher’s unions and the DOE. Does the DOE need some kind of restructuring? Of course, while I think they have the best intentions, students are still struggling. Also, when are we going to stop blaming COVID?
If the DOE really cared about children learning it would have made Cognitive Load Theory central to every aspect of education. It's the blueprint for how the brain learns, emphasises just how important it is to commit schema in areas like Maths and grammar to long-term and, in particular, demonstrates the need for 'consolidation' homework repeating subject matter covered during the day in short evening homework periods. Sure, the DOE supports some CLT but not at anywhere near the level one would expect for a subject so central to an objective scientific understanding of how the brain learns.
Sweden proves the lie that school shutdowns weren't harmful. The only group of students who were switched to remote learning were the 16 to 19 age group- the main group physiologically capable of transmitting Covid to others (including teachers) at viral load levels capable of causing harms. Were they perfect? No. They probably should have offered better advice to teachers over 50, telling those who were obese or who had two or more related comorbidities to stay at home.
But they did better than anyone else in the world at handling Covid. The one exception was social care homes for the elderly. They had the lowest overall rate of excess mortality in Europe although their neighbours in Denmark and Norway were only marginally less effective at preventing overall death during to 2020 to 2022 period. Not something the legacy media likes to disclose given their past hostility to Sweden's approach. I guess they don't like to admit they were completely wrong.
Both Norway and Denmark experienced more severe learning losses than Sweden, although Denmark (which was one of the first to lockdown, but rapidly course corrected after they had a chance to understand that the virus mainly impacted the elderly and vulnerable) had less severe impacts.
From an AI: 'Given Sweden’s 10.5 million population and 150,000 teachers (per 2020 OECD estimates), their death rate likely mirrored the general working-age population’s (0.1–0.2% for ages 20–64, unvaccinated, per CDC proxies) unless exposed uniquely. With schools open, lower-secondary teachers had double the infection risk (PNAS, 2021), but severe outcomes remained rare.'
This is why I stated Sweden weren't perfect. They should have done more to protect lower-secondary teachers in the age and weight categories I mentioned above. This would have mitigated the risk to the point that work-related risks were negligible. A rear view mirror data-driven approach shows that those who argued for the Great Barrington approach to COVID were right, and the more extreme authoritarian approaches ultimately proved more harmful.
Children's learning wasn't the only impact. Many countries massively expanded their borrowing during COVID to cover lockdowns and furloughs. Sweden's borrowing hardly increased during the period. A 2021 IMF report notes Sweden’s approach avoided deep structural economic damage, aiding a quicker recovery- GDP growth rebounded 5% in 2021.
Easier to lay fault at the feet of bureaucrats than to take a hard look at the responsibilities of parents; all this commentary on how we as a society could have yielded better outcomes in terms of the education, socialization and development of children, and your only reference points are teachers and the educational bureaucracy, with not even a passing reference to the adults with whom a child spends the greatest amount of time (one hopes), and who bear primary responsibility for the child's socialization and development?
Sure, that's a fair point. I think it's stupid and cruel not to tell parents how important parenting and early learning is the educational and general development of children.
One of the best examples comes from Northern Ireland. If one were to go back to the eighties, pre-Good Friday, discrimination generally meant that Catholics were poorer, more likely to live in run-down council tenements and residential estates, whilst their Protestant counterpoints lived in leafy suburbs.
Now the situation has reversed. Why? Because Catholic communities with stronger emphasis on family had an advantage when there was finally equality of opportunity, especially in terms of family support for the educational process. Early learning activities like pre-school reading are incredibly important, as is parental enforcement of consolidation homework. And people don't realise how important this is at the peer group level- it only takes a few kids in the class lacking the home-based social enforcement mechanisms to hold the whole class back.
At the same time, only 10 minutes of disruption per hour equates to two years worth of lost education. It's also worth noting that whilst the Catholic Bishops British Schools curriculum in return for funding, the retained didactic pedagogy and managed to avoid the learning through exploring (which can work, but is a far less efficient means of learning than teacher instruction) fallacy of progressive education as well as other disproven faddisms. The achievement levels of White Irish students is still embarrassingly high compared to the White British cohort of the UK mainland.
There should be school choice of all types- but the most important form of school choice around is the ability to select into a community of parents and children who are committed to achieving high standards of excellence. The most important form of school choice is behavioural. It's why certain migrant communities do so well- they have higher standards of social enforcement and higher rates of fathers in the home.
Plus, a behaviourally selective school choice system provides the right incentives for society as a whole. If parents and kids know that doing your homework, not getting in trouble or being disruptive gets you into the school with the better behaved kids, who achieve more academically with the ability they've been given- then it's an upward societal incentive which doesn't even violate the principles of Libertarian Paternalism- free choice is still preserved.
https://www.the74million.org/article/pondiscio-i-just-wrote-a-book-about-success-academy-charter-schools-it-does-not-support-your-preferred-narrative-i-hope-you-hate-it/
Not to belabor the point, but your acknowledgement of the role of parents and caretakers still strikes me as curiously tepid. Bureaucracy will do as it will, but the buck stops with the parents. If parents and caretakers truly accepted full responsibility, most of the other issues you discuss would be addressed by virtue of their engagement and resolve. And yes, of course, there are parents who are for various reasons functionally ill-equipped to adequately socialize their children, but that doesn't constitute the bulk of the issue, nor does it absolve relatively functional parents of their own responsibilities.
Just a note, students spend a minimum of 16,000 hours in public school buildings. Maybe the buck stops with the parents, but before that it spends a lot of time traveling around school grounds.
Well what is whining about it going to accomplish? You,can complain about individual decisions all day long, and yet millions of individuals are being caught up in the same basic patterns. We are not going to simply talk our way out of this, it is an economic and technological problem and it requires economic and technological solutions - a political solution, a war against the attention economy.
Are you responding to my comment? My alerts suggest that you are, but the way responses are nested visually makes it difficult to track; I'm certainly not whining about anything; on the contrary...
Yes, this was to your comment. Year by year this problem gets worse and year by year I keep hearing people talking about the importance of blaming parents. We are in a system failure, all of us are to blame, however, we will not escape the issue by pressuring one another as individuals - if that was true then all this talk about personal responsibility would have gone somewhere, it is a social problem that needs a social solution. Our society is atomized and divided and conquered, materially, our sense of personal responsibility can only cut across that and build new systems if those personal actions are aligned with a tangible, organized social action. Aimed at political and economic power. If you achieve the maximum unity of those interests and the maximum unity within that project, it would be called a communist party.
you know who ain't dealing with brain rot kids and technology gone amuck? China!
I agree with you. COVID was a stress test to the education system that revealed long standing weaknesses in the system. More and more per pupil spending has been thrown at our educational deficiencies and there’s been no return on investment. My wife works in a middle school. It’s disheartening to hear all the mental health issues the students deal with. It’s enraging to hear the stories of feckless parents who expect the schools to raise their kids.
Yeah, it was just so terrible that they didn't want teachers and students to DIE.
I don’t know who you are but even so I think you can do better than this. Public discourse is a public good. Chip in.
Best response ever. Kick the low effort noise out!
The data was clear by Fall of 2020 that the risk to kids in schools was extremely minimal, and that the negative impacts from virtual school could very well be far worse.
They were supposed to sacrifice themselves willingly, obviously. 🙄 Most teachers are women, so those expectations are pretty par for the course.
And what about the risk to the teachers and other school employees?
There was no risk from mixing with children. It's good for you.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/some-people-say-we-dont-know-why
It's also interesting to note that about a quarter of young people have never had COVID now, probably because they were protected from it as children. That's actually not a good thing, as very, very few children died from COVID during the pandemic and catching a bug when it barely affects you is the best way to acquire a lifetime immunity (at least partial) that will help you when you are 60 years old yourself.
This is nonsense. The early forms of COVID were much deadlier than the current forms which, yes, are still circulating. Antibodies remain in the system from 3-6 months, not for a lifetime. Do you have lifetime immunity from catching a cold or a flu? No, because these viruses mutate into new forms every year. Why do people persist in spreading anti science, ignorant conservative propaganda when there is ample actual science out there, you know the stuff researched by people who've dedicated decades of their lives to understanding human health, and not just been radicalised by watching idiotic YouTube videos made by conspiracy theorists?
If 'viruses' mutate every years why are 'flu's'constantly A or B?
Why does it have to be 'conservative propaganda', why not just discuss the evidence?
And about those people who dedicate their lives to human health- it doesn't mean they're right.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/x-ray-crystallography-and-3d-computer?utm_source=publication-search
This seems to hold with 'chickenpox' which is a childhood developmental phase which protects from tumours later in life. But having chickenpox doesn't protect you from 'shingles' later in life. I think the whole concept of 'bugs' is a complete misunderstanding of disease.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-chickenpox-parties?utm_source=publication-search
No. That isn’t what’s being commented on. The discussion is about the intelligence of the responses to the problem.
You can reframe the discussion all that you'd like. That won't change the fact that the comment I replied to trotted out the usual tropes of faulting unions. My wife is a recently retired teacher and, at 65, would probably had not made it beyond the pandemic if forced back into her quite small schoolroom.
The original commenter said that the institutions that were supposed to help kids ended up hurting them. Well, if schools had been forced to remain open, there would have been a lot more dead kids/teachers/parents.
If, at age 60, she would "probably" not have survived a COVID infection (likely with a high initial viral load in a classroom like that), then the school system should have devised a way to support her (maybe with early retirement) as a high risk individual. Did she get through the entire pandemic without catching COVID? Do you sincerely believe that most teachers were at risk of death or serious complications and so a national shut down was required for that reason? Because we both know that the children were not directly at risk.
The most reasonable answer to why the schools were shut is that schools are petri dishes that incubate and grow infections, and the kids are then vectors that spread it through the wider population. If the only reason to shut the schools was because the adults working there were at greater risk when they were open, there were other ways to manage that.
Schools Forced to Remain Open?
That is Bizarre being that mothers, fathers, parents, guardians have zero control over government compulsory schooling.
Now if you view STRANGERS that TELL A VISION of dead kids, teachers, mothers, fathers you need to get a life, same as if you listen to a Doctor of the Rockefeller Medicine Allopathic Business Model of Medicine.
People die, get sick and take ill because they choose knowingly or unknowingly do the things that POLLUTE their bloodSTREAM be it by pharmacological, chemical, modified foods or any other pollutant, toxin...etc...etc.... that slowly sickens the body and when your bodies trashcan fills up you take ill, once better the stupid people start all over...... polluting their bloodSTREAM and getting sick, ill, diseased again until they die sooner than they should have.
Sars-cov2 is In Silico (A Computer Program)
It has never been shown to exist, has never been isolate, purified and shown to the world but it is on a computer program and Mark Saleski says there would have been a lot more dead kids/teachers/parents due to the in silico Sars-cov2 computer program virus......Lol!
That wasn't what 'covid' was about.
Wow you did a great job of evading the point and shining a light on some shit that doesnt really matter outside of your agenda. And you managed to sound smart as you did it, which is alot better than most of them do. Subversion indeed
Here’s something to consider. At a certain age there really is no way we can prevent kids from being exposed to drugs, distracting technology, pornography or any of the other vices they will encounter. So what is the solution? Perhaps teaching kids virtues and self worth so they will realize those things are dehumanizing instead of edifying and that they have a valuable life/soul that is worth protecting and enriching. Some of that could be taught in schools but some of it needs to come from the home and community. As with a lot of things in our society we throw a lot of money dealing with the symptoms of things and not addressing the causes.
Also, lumping drugs and tech together isnt really an accurate picture. Its not like kids get their first taste of social media on the streets. They get it from their parents. Usually as a holiday gift(im guessing in elementary school these days).
Thats a very different beast than say the dope man pushing his product on the playground. This tech is enmeshed in the fabric of their lives. In short, the vast majority arent trying to prevent exposure to tech like they do drugs. They enable and encourage it.
I completely agree with you. I dont think the doe is any kind of solution. Hell i dont even think schools are. I think this has everything to do with the daily choices we make as individuals and as a society.
In fact i was lashing out against yuri even bringing the doe in to the conversation. Hes pushing an agenda(i assume, i didnt click his link). His whole comment was a pitch.. say some reasonable sounding shit then hit em with the sell
But i could be completely wrong. Admittedly i made a gut reaction response. Maybe not the classiest move, but i am fed up with everybody pushing an agenda into well intended comversations:/
Progress not perfection yo
Nobody "forced" the schools to stay closed except for the governments that refused to find the *improvements to school infrastructure* that would have made returning to school during COVID less dangerous. *That* is what teachers' unions were pushing for; you have been lied to and are now lying to other people.
Yuri, you're way off base about teacher unions and the effect of COVID school closures on students. Schools stayed closed for one year, not years. Test scores have fallen significantly since those closures, but that decline started more than ten years before that. It's easy to go with the scapegoat, but that's intellectually lazy. The facts don't support your knee-jerk theory.
I have taught high school English for 23 years and more than ever their personal writing confesses a lot of ambivalence about their relationship to technology. Many of them wish that "social media had never been invented" or express a wish to have lived in the 70s or 80s. At the same time, they feel like if they left SM on their own they would be completely isolated, have no friends, be losers, which, they don't seem to realize, is exactly how social media has already made them feel.
If the problem is going to be fixed, they're going to have to do it on their own. They won't let it be imposed upon them.
The proverbial "hitting bottom" of the addict...
I’m not sure I agree… phones and social media apps are designed to be addictive. Asking millions of young people to break their screentime addiction is, to me, like asking millions of food addicts to stop eating or millions of alcoholics to stop drinking (albeit, the latter cases are more extreme and detrimental). Some will have the ability to do so, many won’t. Rather, I think a macro-level solution or policy works better here.
Good comment to see. Many are doing it on their own. And with the internet so thoroughly integrated into all our social lives, expecting young people to just take the hit of being an internal outsider verges on cruel. Looking at the actual situation and the challenges is the best thing to do.
Thanks for sharing this. Really helpful to get a perspective that spans so much time.
Ted, thanks so much for continuing to give this issue the attention it deserves. I've worked in thie area for several years, specifically around how screen use is degrading the ability to read deeply, both among youth and adults.
I'm so glad you're optimistic, but I'm afriad I'm losing hope -- at least in the short term. I think the crisis isn't ahead of us, I think we're in it right now. The political crisis in the States and in other parts of the West is a direct result of manipulation by social media alogorithms, the kind of manipulation you've so convincingly shown in many posts. But I think the rot goes much deeper -- we live in a society that unashamedly worships money, power and fame. Incentives for our tech overlords will only change when we do. That's the key. We have to create a society that celebrates virtues like integrity, compassion and solidarity with our fellow human beings. We need to get over ourselves and recognize our interdependence with one another. Things need to change at the root level, not just a few isolated individuals in tech companies, but the whole society. And unfortunately, I don't see how we get there at scale without real, deep pain.
I'm a Canadian, and I freely admit that we suffer from all the same delusions as Americans. But as Leonard Cohen wrote, America is "the cradle of the best and of the worst." And the worst in this case is the whole greed is good ethos that seem to have melded itself onto the US psyche. There isn't going to be meaningful change for these kids or for any of us until we let go of the idea that getting rich is the sole purpose of life. (Apologies for the rant.)
Why must there be 'real, deep pain?'
And who must feel it? People with delusions, or everybody?
“Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods.”
― Aeschylus, Agamemnon
As for how many people have to suffer to change the fundamental moral orientation of a society, I really don't know. How many had to suffer in Germany at the end of WW2 to have that society recognize that Nazism was the problem, not those they scapegoated? From the Canadian side of the border it looks like the US is going through something similar, with Trump and his people destroying millions of lives so he can fund his tax cuts for the rich. I think in the aftermath of all the destruction that this is going to bring, those who suffer the most will ask why it happened and see the elevation of greed as the cause. I hope I'm wrong, but at the moment, things are not looking good.
My delusion is the opposite of yours.
Mine too.
Trying to fix the entire ethos of the US psyche is not a remotely attainable goal since that's been the spiritual core of the country for a lot longer than phone addiction.
Would be wiser to hone in on the specific issue than casting such a wide net.
Legislation, then? Stronger rules put upon social media companies regarding content moderation, age verification, and use of phones in specific contexts, like K-12 schools. Only, such regulations will face the weight of Big Law, corporate lobbyists, unrestricted PAC donations, and other entities. It feels like the entirety of the system needs some form of change; namely, reducing the prioritization of special interests over the public good.
For the past twenty one years I've taught fourth grade (4/5 combo this year) at a private Christian school, so the students I've dealt with are for the most part outside the cohort being talked about here - younger, not on screens as much, from more intact families (though not as much as you might think) and I still see a significant change from the groups I started with two decades ago. The biggest thing is that far fewer of these kids can read, and what I mean is that even the brightest of them can look at a page and though they can decode the text, they can't see the answer that's sitting right there in front of them; so often they are literally unable to extract even basic information out of text unless they have significant help. Countless times the exchange is, "Mr. Parker, I can't find the answer to this question." "Did you read the page/paragraph/whatever?" "Yes." And they're telling the truth. So we go over it together and I literally have to put my finger on it for them to even see it; before that, it's just invisible.
Not to be an old fogey, but that's a problem.
This makes me unbearably sad. How much personal agency is lost when we can't even find basic meaning in a text?
I taught middle school for 3 months before quitting and going back to tutoring only before starting my PhD in the fall. It’s everything — the apathy, the attention spans, and worst of all the parents who literally don’t seem to care. Apathy is a dominant gene and seems to be very “inheritable.” If students are not calling out every 30 seconds or fidgeting or leaving class five times an hour, they’re completely giving up and staring off silently into space, not doing their work, so at the very least they can’t get in trouble. The biggest problem with the apathy about learning or the classroom is that even positive incentives don’t work. It used to be that kids looked forward to games, team activities, kahoots, stickers, parties, but now it’s just “oh we don’t get a prize? we don’t get the game? we don’t have a party? who cares!” It’s very hard and admins don’t give a damn and are also totally delusional
I agree the parents can make things super difficult. My school is on a tough estate where many of the parents lived as kids, attending the previous incarnation of the school. A lot of them trust their kids over the teachers, insulting the school and teachers online. You can have a kid swear or threaten you, but then the parent just outright say you are lying and that this didn't happen. However, there's an (understandable) resistance to cameras in classrooms. When parents have open disrespect and contempt for teachers, it makes sense their kids will follow their example.
My wife teaches 11th grade English. A few months ago she got a forty-slot lock box for cell phones. Students have to lock up their phones as soon as they come to class or they're counted absent and parents are called. Each student in the period holds onto the key for their own box. It's worked so well that the district administration is looking into buying them for every secondary school classroom.
This is genius. Apply it to everyone so no one gets singled out.
True story. A university business student came to my office seeking advice on how to break into an enterprise sales role. I went to my office book case and pulled out a book I recommended he read. I handed it to him, he skimmed the cover and opened the book briefly and politely handed it back to me. He thanked me but said “I appreciate that but I don’t like to read” I retired 12 months later.
I too don't have faith that CEOs and Silicon Valley will admit their wrongdoings and affect positive change. The real change will come from outside the tech ecosystem.
And one of the terrible side effects of too much screen time is the decline in creativity. Exciting creative breakthroughs come from boredom. But if screen dopamine addicts are no longer bored, it's difficult for them to come up with new ideas.
My high school daughter is on screens too much (as am I), neurochemically.
But a big chunk of that time is spent with an online group of people across the country that enjoy sharing 2D animation, art, and fiction with each other (teen version of Mr. Goia sharing here). Other time is spent watching videos of creative works put together by "content creators".
I'm not happy with the proportion of time spent there, but I am very happy she is finding independent artists to follow instead of logging on to the streaming services and ingesting that. And she also spends a great deal of time on physically drawing, etc.
Screens can be integrated in a more healthy way than the article describes (totally granting the reality of that description for a ton of us, and the cold reality of the dopamine involvement).
I think part of the problem is that the schools put them in front of screens for all their school work, then when they are "free" they naturally want some screen time for recreation, and then the addictive aspect is really enhanced and it winds up being even harder to limit that voluntary screen time. Since we home school, we can keep most screen time out of the school day, just naturally.
This is our reality too. Thanks for providing the counter-narrative!
What's Happening to Students? - Check out the magnificent Gandhi-esque student protests currently happening in Serbia.
They are showing that young people are smart, and once they raise their voices, they can refute the current government.
I love this point and I’m so glad about those protests.
I've taught organic chemistry since before the smart phone. I've seen the devastation first hand. Bad news: many of the zombies are headed to Med School.
“Stop bleeding until I reconnect my WiFi “
We laugh, but... The young doctor who came in to do my colonoscopy was glued to his phone. Sensing my concern, he at least had the comedic reflex to look up and say, "Just looking up the procedure." I guess stand-up could be a fall-back if the malpractice insurance premiums get too high.
I work as a high school teacher (and musician) and I can attest that every word here is true. Something is rotten in the land of the ___________. Zombies are real at school and I still kick myself at home for giving our kids ipads too young. This is all true. except I have trouble believing in the positive spin at the end. Having hope may not be a strategy but is essential for sanity these days. In your galvanizing and fomenting role, I understand staying positive, reminds me of my therapist and financial advisor, but it's hard to believe in with the shocking speed the current cult of cruelty, anti-compassion, anti-constitution, anti-education, and anti-sanity, is leading us to what seems like a Shakespearean tragedy where AI driven broligarchs blinded by power profit from environmental and mental destruction on the precipice of collective idiocy. And we are all culprits. It is a huge ask to join the new Romanticism you're calling for and I see no sign of it at the moment, the teens are not all right, but "Oh cursed spite! The time is out of joint. That ever I was born to set it right!"
We have to create that movement. If we refuse to step out into the void, we will never build the bridge. We need a political movement which can raise the social interest above all private interests. Right now, we are sold addiction for profit, that is the consequence of the dominance of private interests - we are trapped in a net in which we strangle one another.
Wall Street must be abolished in favor of state banks. New democratic institutions must be built to administer and yolk those banks. Only then can we mass produce technology which uplifts our consciousness and culture. Only once we control our technology can we alter this issue. We can only control the production of our technology, socially, through the mediation of a democratic state. The masses of the people, dominating our state, dominating our technology.
I work in higher ed and students are using AI for virtually all written assignments. They don’t consider it cheating.
And the instructors I know can’t do much about it either.
Personally, I got approval to use AI to enhance my job as a programmer. I learned to code back in the early 90s - the hard way - but I feel bad for anyone trying to do that now…
In class written essays with a pen in an exam book, or even worse, an oral exam in front of a few questioners. You can show what you know (or not) in an exam book, but in the oral exam, once the questioners have determined that you know the answer, they can go deeper or off to the side. Actually, the oral exam is excellent preperation for when superiors are questioning you and why you did or suggested something.
Teachers need to adapt, as you suggest here. Yes it’s hard. Simply bemoaning and quitting (most comments here) are abdicating responsibility for education.
Our brains can't handle what cell phones do to them. I limit my social media usage and can still feel it negatively effecting me. The only solution is to not use these phone apps at all.