This anecdote reminds me of the "rat park" studies on addiction.
From The Psychiatry Times:
"Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles-one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine-the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed...
But [researchers] wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs."
I think this relates the most to the arguments above. I am a college student that moved across the country to start college and anecdotally this lines up with my experience. In high school, I had a rich social life with sports and community and didn't go on social media much at all even though I had it and enjoyed using it for pursuing niche interests or entertainment occasionally. Once I got to college and had to rebuild my social life from scratch, i was sucked into social media a lot more and found it hard to be alone without it. Then, once I built a stronger community again, social media use declined again.
I feel that Ben Draper's observations are important (together with Peter's comments). If it is true that young people who have the time and space to find their way with their peers make better and more limited use of smart phones that is yet another support for my 20% campaign in England (https://www.humanscaleeducation.com/post/20-time-for-schools-a-modest-proposal-from-derry-hannam#:~:text=The%2020%25%20proposal,and%20questions%20of%20the%20students.) It is suggested in the piece that students tend to use their phones more before their friends arrive at the Macomber Centre - has Ben found this to be the case? My head is buzzing with questions for further research. Thanks from across the pond.
It's cheaper to ban social media with legislation so that kids who access it are breaking the law than to improve the environment within schools, make schools more like the one described in this article. Australia is currently considering this. :-(
I am very impressed with the teenagers' behavior at the independent school -- it is the type of school that I would have liked to have attended. It shows how important it is to actually check in every once in a while and observe what is happening at street level and not make all sort of theoretical assumptions about cell phone abuse etc.. It also illustrates to me how when you get the top line aspects of the learning environment correct, everything naturally works out from there.
Perhaps foremost amongst such aspects is the entire learning framework of these students. Independent study based upon pursuing personal passions is a very good starting point. Notably almost all of the students when just randomly questioned about how they were using their cell phones were actually engaged in something that they were passionate about and were in fact focused on their learning; even while seemingly just scrolling. Channeling positive energy of young people to what they are passionate about is critically important to create a positive social atmosphere.
However, this positivity completely contrasts with the standardized educational model. In typical bricks and mortar public schools, children will be constantly dragged through educational experiences that they have little or no interest in. For many this can continue to be true through college and even when they are employed. In fact after COVID in some workplaces 100% voted to continue to work remotely as they felt that none of the social interactions they had with co-workers or others was in any way positive for them. Their work place brought them ZERO joy? When public school students are questioned, roughly 70% will reply that they have little if any interest in their schooling. Ironically, when they then do engage with something on their phones that they are passionate about they risk having their phones seized. Confiscating cell phones seems to me to be a hopelessly misguided short term fix. Instead of addressing the lack of engagement in their education, schools are simply choosing to paper over the problem by forcing compliance. Is this strategy effective the minute the school day is over or when the students graduate?
From the positive energy generated by the independent school approach to self-directed learning we then see how these students can imagine their peers as potential assets in pursuing their own interests. One might even suspect a type of economy could emerge in which students good in math might help out others good in social studies in exchange for reciprocity. These exchanges could lead to sustainable and mutually beneficial social interactions. One can also observe the casual and non-punitive interactions of the staff member with the students in the quoted blog. In a public school environment such coffee talk type interaction is unheard of.
Such social motivations are all too often absent in public schools. With highly standardized curriculum and deeply unmotivated students there is then a culture of social disengagement that is so pervasive and entrenched that there is no obvious way to reverse the institutional dysfunction. Almost all that is left is to patch up problems (by banning cell phones etc.) while never addressing the deep structural flaws.
This short vignette of the independent learning school reveals a surprising amount about the pathology of our prescribed modern school/work system and the relatively intuitive ways in which the problems could be addressed when innovation is allowed.
Knowing what to look for in a school environment as a prospective student is critically important. One additional observation that I find worthy of note is that when asked all of the students were pursuing a DIFFERENT passion in the independent school. That is notable because in a traditional mass school environment the social hierarchy is established through a highly limited number of subjects many of which typical students have no interest and then the students compete with one another for status. This leaves only one champion at the top of the pyramid. Yet, in the independent school all of the students can achieve their own personal success in orthogonal dimensions. This means that helping your peers in the independent school does not in some way lower your status as it would in the bleakly Darwinian dystopia of a traditional school.
These resonates with what I have seen at my son’s Sudbury school here in Illinois. Adults love talking about kids being “zombies” on their phones, but this isn’t what I see. The children seem to more intuitively engage with tech in healthy ways than adults who weren’t raised with it.
The observations here echo what I've observed in my unschooled 22 year old. She's better at self-regulating social media use than her Boomer grandparents are or her GenX mother is! She's very savvy about the addictive nature of some of the platforms and won't use ones she finds unethical. They are not all created equal!
I do think social media is harmful when it becomes that "last resort" for contact and community, instead of a supplement to connection. I think that's the difference between "neutral" and "harmful."
I think it's also important to note, too, that not all social media works the same. A tight knit online group on a small special interest forum may develop into real-life friends; conversely, open short form posting driven by algorithms may stoke rage or unhealthy appearance comparisons.
This post is pretty persuasive. I'm on board with all of its premises, but I still feel for the parents whose kids attend traditional schools for one reason or another. They must feel pretty trapped and scared.
I'm sceptical. I see how addictive these devices are and even adults can't regulate their use, so i'd be surprised if kids could. I consider myself pretty happy with a fulfilled life, and yet, i get sucked in (not social media but information i'm interested in, mostly history and geopolitics) to a point where i spend countless hours daily in mediated reality instead of in real life. So even if you're educating yourself online, it still cuts you off from real life social interactions, which i consider a bad thing.
I think it's a mistake to conflate getting sucked into social media with getting sucked into information you're interested in. If you're a professor of history and geopolitics then getting sucked into that sort of information sounds like a happy and fulfilling use of time. I'm a vaccine scientist and I reflect almost daily on what a privilege it is to be able to indulge my interests in molecular biology, politics, ethics, history, evolution, food, etc. I'm incredibly lucky to be in a situation where getting sucked into that stuff is my actual day job.
Here's a case study: a recent commentary in Science got me interested in a scientist named Paul Berg. Although popular culture has long painted Berg as the man who sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of recombinant DNA technology, I've been excited to learn the forgotten history of how he also tried to sound the alarm about the dangers of letting political stooges and public hysteria dictate which experiments scientists can or cannot do. To the point at hand, here's an excerpt of the autobiography Berg submitted for his 1980 Nobel:
"An inspiring high school 'teacher,' Sophie Wolfe, whose job was to supervise the stockroom that supplied the classes in chemistry, physics and biology, nurtured that ambition. Her love of young people and interest in science led her to start an after school program of science clubs. Rather than answering questions we asked, she encouraged us to seek solutions for ourselves, which most often turned into mini research projects. Sometimes that involved experiments in the small lab she kept but sometimes it meant going to the library to find the answers. The satisfaction derived from solving a problem with an experiment was a very heady experience, almost addicting."
It doesn't make any sense to view intellectual "addiction" as a bad thing. It's among the best things modern humans have the privilege of exploring.
There's an interesting research question here. I'm happily child-free, but observations of my nieces and nephews makes me wonder whether self-directed education may only be vitally important for a minority of children. For the sake of argument, let's say a third of humans are born with minds that flourish under self-direction. I'm familiar with the biographies of quite a few Nobel laureates and my impression is that pretty much all of them emphasize the importance of self-directed learning. I bet there could be ways to apply statistics to the question of whether the type of mind that goes on to do amazing science disproportionately requires self-directed learning in childhood.
To put it in darker terms, my sense is that No Child Left Behind may be guaranteeing that all the Paul Berg minds are getting left behind - because they can't fully thrive under top-down pedagogic dictation.
I guess it is easy to be skeptical. Perhaps, what is missing from your recount is the people around you that would provide the interest to interact. Interesting that when I travelled back to Romania this summer for a month of holiday I saw very few young people on phones in open spaces like outdoor cafes and parks. I saw many gathered to chat with one another. I think cultural conditions have an influence. I personally feel that Romania has smaller cities and lots of green places, people love the outdoors. I also have an interesting conversation recently with one of the educators in my team (I run two outdoor schools in Brunei) . This person nis American married locally. This conversation brook place on our teacher.s day celebration when my husband and I invited all educators out for hightea. He,is a casual staff and joins us in one of the schools once a week. He mentioned in us rarely people join work events. Perhaps that was his experience. He would add that people don't talk about their life with others in work and that they don't know about one another to the extent that we kind of did. I remember me saying.. I think some people (from his context) would feel very lonely.
I can’t stand the straw man here either. These children are demonstrating regulation. No one is advocating for children to use tech to the point of dysregulation. I’m objecting to your view which I see as demonstrating ableism (anti-tech) and childism (bias for adults).
You said you’re skeptical children can regulate their own use because adults can’t. I said apply the same logic to something else with addictive qualities. The reality is there is a huge bias against tech and your response is exemplifying that perspective
Sorry i'm not as optimistic as you. I recognize my own problems with this, which makes me sceptical. So you're also against parents limiting their children's cellphone usage?
I've thought about this a lot too. Resisting temptation is the broader theme here. What does it truly take to resist temptation? Part of it is getting genuine needs met in healthy ways, but of course "healthy" is pretty subjective. Another part of it is self-awareness. You aren't very self-aware when you are "sucked in".
This is a really interesting observation. I immediately asked my teenagers what they do on their phones most often and reflected on their own social communities. I love the self directed model and we were unschoolers for awhile but as the kids got older they chose traditional high school in order to connect with others. We live in a small community of 5000 people and that’s where all the other kids are.
One of them is highly engaged in her academic work, as are her friends, and has a strong but small group of friends who are never on their phones when they are together. She has complained that other kids in the high school spend time on their phones at lunch rather than talking to each other, which she considers annoying and obnoxious. When she is not at school, sports, or hanging out in person, or doing homework, she does spend time scrolling Instagram or watching Netflix, but from my observation that time is not a lot and seems more like downtime activities.
Second kid who is in college says she deleted all her social media apps because felt they were too “algorithmic” and not useful. She had the observation that it was easy to get addicted, especially if some of your friends inside your in person social circle were heavy users, because you felt like you had to keep up and see what they were doing. But then it turned into a competition of sorts. She said as a freshman when she didn’t have a lot of friends she spent a lot more time on instagram. But then made a conscious decision for herself that it wasn’t helpful so deleted those accounts and joined clubs instead. Interestingly, she said she was kind of “anti phone” in general.
So this very small sample does seem to corroborate that there is a tie between in person social connections vs social media use. And does show that young people are certainly capable of understanding and regulating their own use. The question of how to build community and true social connection inside a traditional high school is an age old question that has been around before phones, and I’m not sure if phones actually make the problem worse or not. Maybe they do. Or maybe they just make the problem more obvious. I’m not sure
I see a lot of younger children on social media that they don’t meet the legal age for. I also see a lot of problems being caused by this - bullying, unkind words, negative social dynamics, arguments, anxiety.
I’d be fascinated to know whether the children at the Centre had the same early exposure to social media. Has being on there young taught them its dangers early too? Have they simply outgrown it? Or were they in fact never really using it in the first place?
I think it seems they’ve learned how to use it appropriately and productively at an early age.
I would love to see more research done on this, including informal discussions like this one.
I love to see posts like this reporting what really happens in classrooms, rather than research that might have more of a bias or present nothing but numbers and figures without context. So what if his ‘study’ wasn’t scientifically robust? If people take it as that, it’s on them.
I do argue that the internet isn’t the ‘greatest’ educational invention, however. It may be the broadest and the most convenient but, as someone who googles a lot of things out of interest, I find that the resulting information doesn’t stay in. I think having to find things out through a more inconvenient method, like trawling through books, is better for understanding and retention.
Free kids do not get addicted. They do fantastic educational things on their phone.
I rather see a preference for a PC though, where the true magic happens.
If you want to stay up with the technology, stay in touch with 8-12 year olds! They explore the new things first! Hourly!
If you have courage to show them your own work, you will be berated severely for using old school approach to EVERYTHING!
(sorry for full agreement Peter, you do not learn new stuff from me, but at least you know your observations are confirmed on the other side of the globe!) :)
Thanks for sharing this article. These are important and helpful perspectives.
A teen that I mentored described her experience on her phone as changing over time that it took her to settle into homeschooling, and heal from her school experience: At first she was "mindlessly scrolling". She gradually realized that she was starting to take in some of what she was seeing. Then she started actually thinking about what she was seeing. Eventually, she began using her phone in a more intentional way, similar to that described by the Macomber Center's teens.
She noted that to an outside observer, all stages of that process looked identical.
She was so grateful that her parents had given her the space to move through those stages...it was an important part of her journey.
Being a Professor of Electrical Engineering, I guess I had early access to the Internet when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s. We didn't have smart phones but would spend hours on internet Relay Chat groups. But I don't think I or others were addicted (maybe a few were). I think the smart phone is simply the tool of the moment. 20 or 30 years later it will be something else (humanoid robots perhaps?). So I think as a tool it can be used and misused. I don't have any experimental data to back this up, but my opinion is like any technology, there will basically be a Bell curve. The majority use it in a fairly good way and are not addicted. Some don't use it at all. And some are actually really addicted and just wasting time. But for the majority it is just the useful tool of our era.
This lines up with what I've experienced with my homeschooled students and my own children. A couple of examples:
My autistic son was on his computer a lot when he was in school, playing video games. We were concerned and tried to get him outside and involved in hobbies. He had a terrible experience in school and eventually dropped out. After that, he almost completely lost interest in video games. He now (age 25) uses his computer to research and learn new things, and has gone back to reading books a lot.
My students are not fully self-directed, but their parents and I aim to follow their lead and interests while covering skills that would benefit them. When the topic of phones or social media comes up, they express relief at not having to cope with social media. Most have iPads for schoolwork (with parental restrictions on apps and sites), and can do video calls with friends and relatives who live far away. They are far too busy with classes they take for enjoyment, anyway.
I completely agree that public school students are using social media because they already feel hopeless, not the other way around. Banning is an authoritarian move that can only make things worse. We need to do what Ben did and talk to the kids. If they were offered a better way to learn and connect, I'm sure they would choose it.
This anecdote reminds me of the "rat park" studies on addiction.
From The Psychiatry Times:
"Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles-one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine-the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed...
But [researchers] wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs."
I think this relates the most to the arguments above. I am a college student that moved across the country to start college and anecdotally this lines up with my experience. In high school, I had a rich social life with sports and community and didn't go on social media much at all even though I had it and enjoyed using it for pursuing niche interests or entertainment occasionally. Once I got to college and had to rebuild my social life from scratch, i was sucked into social media a lot more and found it hard to be alone without it. Then, once I built a stronger community again, social media use declined again.
Yes! Bored and lonely rats are dope fiends. There is no reason to belive people are any different. More in this same vein https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731630-500-the-love-drug-that-could-draw-people-away-from-any-addiction/
I feel that Ben Draper's observations are important (together with Peter's comments). If it is true that young people who have the time and space to find their way with their peers make better and more limited use of smart phones that is yet another support for my 20% campaign in England (https://www.humanscaleeducation.com/post/20-time-for-schools-a-modest-proposal-from-derry-hannam#:~:text=The%2020%25%20proposal,and%20questions%20of%20the%20students.) It is suggested in the piece that students tend to use their phones more before their friends arrive at the Macomber Centre - has Ben found this to be the case? My head is buzzing with questions for further research. Thanks from across the pond.
It's cheaper to ban social media with legislation so that kids who access it are breaking the law than to improve the environment within schools, make schools more like the one described in this article. Australia is currently considering this. :-(
I am very impressed with the teenagers' behavior at the independent school -- it is the type of school that I would have liked to have attended. It shows how important it is to actually check in every once in a while and observe what is happening at street level and not make all sort of theoretical assumptions about cell phone abuse etc.. It also illustrates to me how when you get the top line aspects of the learning environment correct, everything naturally works out from there.
Perhaps foremost amongst such aspects is the entire learning framework of these students. Independent study based upon pursuing personal passions is a very good starting point. Notably almost all of the students when just randomly questioned about how they were using their cell phones were actually engaged in something that they were passionate about and were in fact focused on their learning; even while seemingly just scrolling. Channeling positive energy of young people to what they are passionate about is critically important to create a positive social atmosphere.
However, this positivity completely contrasts with the standardized educational model. In typical bricks and mortar public schools, children will be constantly dragged through educational experiences that they have little or no interest in. For many this can continue to be true through college and even when they are employed. In fact after COVID in some workplaces 100% voted to continue to work remotely as they felt that none of the social interactions they had with co-workers or others was in any way positive for them. Their work place brought them ZERO joy? When public school students are questioned, roughly 70% will reply that they have little if any interest in their schooling. Ironically, when they then do engage with something on their phones that they are passionate about they risk having their phones seized. Confiscating cell phones seems to me to be a hopelessly misguided short term fix. Instead of addressing the lack of engagement in their education, schools are simply choosing to paper over the problem by forcing compliance. Is this strategy effective the minute the school day is over or when the students graduate?
From the positive energy generated by the independent school approach to self-directed learning we then see how these students can imagine their peers as potential assets in pursuing their own interests. One might even suspect a type of economy could emerge in which students good in math might help out others good in social studies in exchange for reciprocity. These exchanges could lead to sustainable and mutually beneficial social interactions. One can also observe the casual and non-punitive interactions of the staff member with the students in the quoted blog. In a public school environment such coffee talk type interaction is unheard of.
Such social motivations are all too often absent in public schools. With highly standardized curriculum and deeply unmotivated students there is then a culture of social disengagement that is so pervasive and entrenched that there is no obvious way to reverse the institutional dysfunction. Almost all that is left is to patch up problems (by banning cell phones etc.) while never addressing the deep structural flaws.
This short vignette of the independent learning school reveals a surprising amount about the pathology of our prescribed modern school/work system and the relatively intuitive ways in which the problems could be addressed when innovation is allowed.
Knowing what to look for in a school environment as a prospective student is critically important. One additional observation that I find worthy of note is that when asked all of the students were pursuing a DIFFERENT passion in the independent school. That is notable because in a traditional mass school environment the social hierarchy is established through a highly limited number of subjects many of which typical students have no interest and then the students compete with one another for status. This leaves only one champion at the top of the pyramid. Yet, in the independent school all of the students can achieve their own personal success in orthogonal dimensions. This means that helping your peers in the independent school does not in some way lower your status as it would in the bleakly Darwinian dystopia of a traditional school.
These resonates with what I have seen at my son’s Sudbury school here in Illinois. Adults love talking about kids being “zombies” on their phones, but this isn’t what I see. The children seem to more intuitively engage with tech in healthy ways than adults who weren’t raised with it.
The observations here echo what I've observed in my unschooled 22 year old. She's better at self-regulating social media use than her Boomer grandparents are or her GenX mother is! She's very savvy about the addictive nature of some of the platforms and won't use ones she finds unethical. They are not all created equal!
I do think social media is harmful when it becomes that "last resort" for contact and community, instead of a supplement to connection. I think that's the difference between "neutral" and "harmful."
I think it's also important to note, too, that not all social media works the same. A tight knit online group on a small special interest forum may develop into real-life friends; conversely, open short form posting driven by algorithms may stoke rage or unhealthy appearance comparisons.
This post is pretty persuasive. I'm on board with all of its premises, but I still feel for the parents whose kids attend traditional schools for one reason or another. They must feel pretty trapped and scared.
Yes, and parents must start prioritizing their children’s humanity over their own fears. Enough is enough
I'm sceptical. I see how addictive these devices are and even adults can't regulate their use, so i'd be surprised if kids could. I consider myself pretty happy with a fulfilled life, and yet, i get sucked in (not social media but information i'm interested in, mostly history and geopolitics) to a point where i spend countless hours daily in mediated reality instead of in real life. So even if you're educating yourself online, it still cuts you off from real life social interactions, which i consider a bad thing.
I think it's a mistake to conflate getting sucked into social media with getting sucked into information you're interested in. If you're a professor of history and geopolitics then getting sucked into that sort of information sounds like a happy and fulfilling use of time. I'm a vaccine scientist and I reflect almost daily on what a privilege it is to be able to indulge my interests in molecular biology, politics, ethics, history, evolution, food, etc. I'm incredibly lucky to be in a situation where getting sucked into that stuff is my actual day job.
Here's a case study: a recent commentary in Science got me interested in a scientist named Paul Berg. Although popular culture has long painted Berg as the man who sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of recombinant DNA technology, I've been excited to learn the forgotten history of how he also tried to sound the alarm about the dangers of letting political stooges and public hysteria dictate which experiments scientists can or cannot do. To the point at hand, here's an excerpt of the autobiography Berg submitted for his 1980 Nobel:
"An inspiring high school 'teacher,' Sophie Wolfe, whose job was to supervise the stockroom that supplied the classes in chemistry, physics and biology, nurtured that ambition. Her love of young people and interest in science led her to start an after school program of science clubs. Rather than answering questions we asked, she encouraged us to seek solutions for ourselves, which most often turned into mini research projects. Sometimes that involved experiments in the small lab she kept but sometimes it meant going to the library to find the answers. The satisfaction derived from solving a problem with an experiment was a very heady experience, almost addicting."
It doesn't make any sense to view intellectual "addiction" as a bad thing. It's among the best things modern humans have the privilege of exploring.
There's an interesting research question here. I'm happily child-free, but observations of my nieces and nephews makes me wonder whether self-directed education may only be vitally important for a minority of children. For the sake of argument, let's say a third of humans are born with minds that flourish under self-direction. I'm familiar with the biographies of quite a few Nobel laureates and my impression is that pretty much all of them emphasize the importance of self-directed learning. I bet there could be ways to apply statistics to the question of whether the type of mind that goes on to do amazing science disproportionately requires self-directed learning in childhood.
To put it in darker terms, my sense is that No Child Left Behind may be guaranteeing that all the Paul Berg minds are getting left behind - because they can't fully thrive under top-down pedagogic dictation.
I guess it is easy to be skeptical. Perhaps, what is missing from your recount is the people around you that would provide the interest to interact. Interesting that when I travelled back to Romania this summer for a month of holiday I saw very few young people on phones in open spaces like outdoor cafes and parks. I saw many gathered to chat with one another. I think cultural conditions have an influence. I personally feel that Romania has smaller cities and lots of green places, people love the outdoors. I also have an interesting conversation recently with one of the educators in my team (I run two outdoor schools in Brunei) . This person nis American married locally. This conversation brook place on our teacher.s day celebration when my husband and I invited all educators out for hightea. He,is a casual staff and joins us in one of the schools once a week. He mentioned in us rarely people join work events. Perhaps that was his experience. He would add that people don't talk about their life with others in work and that they don't know about one another to the extent that we kind of did. I remember me saying.. I think some people (from his context) would feel very lonely.
Ok so now do sugar. It’s addictive, some say as addictive as cocaine. Why do we let kids have sugar knowing adults can’t regulate their use?
I didn't say forbid. Limiting sugar is probably also a wise idea ;)
I can’t stand the straw man here either. These children are demonstrating regulation. No one is advocating for children to use tech to the point of dysregulation. I’m objecting to your view which I see as demonstrating ableism (anti-tech) and childism (bias for adults).
You said you’re skeptical children can regulate their own use because adults can’t. I said apply the same logic to something else with addictive qualities. The reality is there is a huge bias against tech and your response is exemplifying that perspective
Sorry i'm not as optimistic as you. I recognize my own problems with this, which makes me sceptical. So you're also against parents limiting their children's cellphone usage?
I’m against parents controlling their kids. Im for anyone setting limits on themselves as they see necessary for their health and well being.
Starting what age?
I've thought about this a lot too. Resisting temptation is the broader theme here. What does it truly take to resist temptation? Part of it is getting genuine needs met in healthy ways, but of course "healthy" is pretty subjective. Another part of it is self-awareness. You aren't very self-aware when you are "sucked in".
This is a really interesting observation. I immediately asked my teenagers what they do on their phones most often and reflected on their own social communities. I love the self directed model and we were unschoolers for awhile but as the kids got older they chose traditional high school in order to connect with others. We live in a small community of 5000 people and that’s where all the other kids are.
One of them is highly engaged in her academic work, as are her friends, and has a strong but small group of friends who are never on their phones when they are together. She has complained that other kids in the high school spend time on their phones at lunch rather than talking to each other, which she considers annoying and obnoxious. When she is not at school, sports, or hanging out in person, or doing homework, she does spend time scrolling Instagram or watching Netflix, but from my observation that time is not a lot and seems more like downtime activities.
Second kid who is in college says she deleted all her social media apps because felt they were too “algorithmic” and not useful. She had the observation that it was easy to get addicted, especially if some of your friends inside your in person social circle were heavy users, because you felt like you had to keep up and see what they were doing. But then it turned into a competition of sorts. She said as a freshman when she didn’t have a lot of friends she spent a lot more time on instagram. But then made a conscious decision for herself that it wasn’t helpful so deleted those accounts and joined clubs instead. Interestingly, she said she was kind of “anti phone” in general.
So this very small sample does seem to corroborate that there is a tie between in person social connections vs social media use. And does show that young people are certainly capable of understanding and regulating their own use. The question of how to build community and true social connection inside a traditional high school is an age old question that has been around before phones, and I’m not sure if phones actually make the problem worse or not. Maybe they do. Or maybe they just make the problem more obvious. I’m not sure
I see a lot of younger children on social media that they don’t meet the legal age for. I also see a lot of problems being caused by this - bullying, unkind words, negative social dynamics, arguments, anxiety.
I’d be fascinated to know whether the children at the Centre had the same early exposure to social media. Has being on there young taught them its dangers early too? Have they simply outgrown it? Or were they in fact never really using it in the first place?
I think it seems they’ve learned how to use it appropriately and productively at an early age.
I would love to see more research done on this, including informal discussions like this one.
I love to see posts like this reporting what really happens in classrooms, rather than research that might have more of a bias or present nothing but numbers and figures without context. So what if his ‘study’ wasn’t scientifically robust? If people take it as that, it’s on them.
I do argue that the internet isn’t the ‘greatest’ educational invention, however. It may be the broadest and the most convenient but, as someone who googles a lot of things out of interest, I find that the resulting information doesn’t stay in. I think having to find things out through a more inconvenient method, like trawling through books, is better for understanding and retention.
Free kids do not get addicted. They do fantastic educational things on their phone.
I rather see a preference for a PC though, where the true magic happens.
If you want to stay up with the technology, stay in touch with 8-12 year olds! They explore the new things first! Hourly!
If you have courage to show them your own work, you will be berated severely for using old school approach to EVERYTHING!
(sorry for full agreement Peter, you do not learn new stuff from me, but at least you know your observations are confirmed on the other side of the globe!) :)
Thanks for sharing this article. These are important and helpful perspectives.
A teen that I mentored described her experience on her phone as changing over time that it took her to settle into homeschooling, and heal from her school experience: At first she was "mindlessly scrolling". She gradually realized that she was starting to take in some of what she was seeing. Then she started actually thinking about what she was seeing. Eventually, she began using her phone in a more intentional way, similar to that described by the Macomber Center's teens.
She noted that to an outside observer, all stages of that process looked identical.
She was so grateful that her parents had given her the space to move through those stages...it was an important part of her journey.
Delusional. You think kids are going to tell you the truth in every instance. Watching a horse or martial arts performance is not academic. Delusional
Being a Professor of Electrical Engineering, I guess I had early access to the Internet when I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s. We didn't have smart phones but would spend hours on internet Relay Chat groups. But I don't think I or others were addicted (maybe a few were). I think the smart phone is simply the tool of the moment. 20 or 30 years later it will be something else (humanoid robots perhaps?). So I think as a tool it can be used and misused. I don't have any experimental data to back this up, but my opinion is like any technology, there will basically be a Bell curve. The majority use it in a fairly good way and are not addicted. Some don't use it at all. And some are actually really addicted and just wasting time. But for the majority it is just the useful tool of our era.
This lines up with what I've experienced with my homeschooled students and my own children. A couple of examples:
My autistic son was on his computer a lot when he was in school, playing video games. We were concerned and tried to get him outside and involved in hobbies. He had a terrible experience in school and eventually dropped out. After that, he almost completely lost interest in video games. He now (age 25) uses his computer to research and learn new things, and has gone back to reading books a lot.
My students are not fully self-directed, but their parents and I aim to follow their lead and interests while covering skills that would benefit them. When the topic of phones or social media comes up, they express relief at not having to cope with social media. Most have iPads for schoolwork (with parental restrictions on apps and sites), and can do video calls with friends and relatives who live far away. They are far too busy with classes they take for enjoyment, anyway.
I completely agree that public school students are using social media because they already feel hopeless, not the other way around. Banning is an authoritarian move that can only make things worse. We need to do what Ben did and talk to the kids. If they were offered a better way to learn and connect, I'm sure they would choose it.