By skyforbes We all know about the dangers of ipads for kids (stunts the incredibly essential "exploring your environment" stage on top of shortening attention spans, enabling learned helplessness, exposing them to age inappropriate shit, etc.), with official studies coming out almost a decade ago. But on top of there being a severe lack of regulations, not even a national campaign, schools (and parents, but that's another massive conversation) are directly providing these technologies to kids as soon as they can physically hold them.
The other day, I came upon one of our undiagnosed but CLEARLY ADHD students just rapidly clicking whatever to get to the next question, on a test that was meant to discern whether he truly had an intellectual disability or not. No one had assigned me to oversee him or even alerted me that he was in the counseling center. I noticed his button mashing and ran over to TURN THE SOUND ON. Because there was NO WRITTEN QUESTION on the screen, just the answer options and an audio recording of the question. They must've deemed it unnecessary because some data had informed them he couldn't read (jury is still out, tbh). The first question he actually heard was "what is 5 + 5?" to which he said "10, duh! Do they think I'm stupid!?" meanwhile he'd just gotten every single previous question wrong, at least on "paper," because the admin had trusted a netbook to singlehandedly test a 7 year old (who is literally bouncing off the walls at all times unless they sedate him with ipad games in the middle of the classroom). Hiring enough qualified people for direct supervision would cost more money, or at least more than it takes to replace all the screen chippings and snapping-offs that somehow occur any time there's a relative lack of adults. Which is clearly often. I myself am an unpaid graduate intern.
The literacy rates are PLUMMETTING, no one knows how to write or even formulate sentences, and no one seems to care. I am not kidding when I say almost half of the neuroTYPICAL kids I work with are illiterate, and there's 10 year olds in there. According to the NAEP, even 33% of eighth graders are "below basic" readers, struggling to follow the order of events in a passage or even figure out its main idea. This is part of the steady post-pandemic decline, and I swear to god I am legitimately already seeing the issue getting worse in the comments sections on social media. I don't even want to mention how most of my MASTERS LEVEL classmates are clearly copy-pasting generated answers in the forum posts of my online classes, with scant edits (if any). Both cheapening our degree and gauranteeing that the certified professionals of the world will soon have no idea what they're doing.
A child with no concept of the rules of reality yet will either be completely fooled or misinformed by our latest technologies, or just never trust anything at all. They are already vehemently arguing with me that historical events they don't like the sound of just didn't actually happen (and I'm not just talking about the children of holocaust deniers). If knowing your history prevents us from repeating mistakes, we've just sent ourselves back to the stone age.
THESE KIDS are going to be the people who lose out on jobs, or a future in general, if we go as we're going. And it's our fault for just…letting it happen. WE are the adults. WE are the ones in charge. I wish governments would do all the work for us, but it's like they haven't cared at all for the past several decades. Because we LET them stop caring. Technology will take over maybe even BECAUSE it makes us collectively less capable, not because it's better. These kids certainly don't look like they'll be able to communicate well enough to organize, once they take on the mantle, even if they CAN somehow discern that a terrible event is actually happening. And we trust that they're going to be able to take care of us, or even build the robots who'll take care of us, in our old age…? The lack of regard for the next generation, even the ones that ALREADY exist, has to be somewhat intentional. Otherwise we really are just stupid.
This is a call to action post, but I'd also welcome some hope-ium.