What are we teaching and learning and losing along the way?

It’s all around us – more and more technology and less and less interaction with each other. I think that this, too, is a dynamic that has contributed to where we are in our world at the present time. I am often involved in discussions dedicated to how we get people to listen to and interact intentionally and meaningfully with each other and not shout each other down, which seems to be the preferred way to go for too many people in our world today.

Schools are increasing their use of technology, which has its obvious advantages, However, unfortunately, in too many cases this is done at the expense of teaching about how to be community – both what one gets from being part of a collective and the responsibility that goes into being a contributing member of a larger group of people.

According to a Nielsen report, adults in the United States watch five hours and four minutes of television per day on average (35.5 h/week, slightly more than 77 days per year). According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids ages 8-18 now spend, on average, 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment each day, 4.5 of which are spent watching TV. Over a year, that adds up to 114 full days watching a screen for fun and not interacting with other people, learning and honing social skills and participating in interactive athletic or creative activity. Conversely, numerous studies indicate that families spend a total of 34 – 35 minutes together as a family unit per day on average, and little of that is used for communication. The family was always the first social frontier for children and traditionally it was within the context of this social unit that children learned how to communicate, share space with others, have compassion for one another, listen and so on. At this point, this is severely compromised, though there is good news as more and more modern families are cutting screen time and other diversions significantly and intentionally planning family time and planned interactive involvements with increasing regularity.

Schools (including those considered to be some of our better ones) have in some cases become places where kids are left to their own devices with on line learning materials, and may end up doing nothing but playing and watching screens until they are caught (which has happened). This is now the main means of “interaction,” – programmed, distilled, biased and doing the thinking for too many people today. Again, while our motivated students can move faster and more efficiently with this delivery of their educational program, we must ask at what cost. This is consistent with so many observations and complaints regarding our present media- driven culture, including worries about our children’s communication skills beyond texting and IM’ing. How do we roll it back?

As an educator who has worked so hard to help students develop these skills of collaboration and cooperation through the decades of my professional activity, I am horrified and scared that in many ways, the hard work that my colleagues and I engaged in with great success is no longer valued. We have always held that the role of education was not to facilitate the production of automatons yet in some of our educational venues, that is what is happening. Individuals are so wrapped up with their own progress and trajectory, they do not stop to think about the other people around them; and then stop to consider how we can learn with and from each other, contributing to a self-centered way of viewing one’s world.

In collaborating and cooperating with others we are forced to go outside of ourselves, perhaps even, to move from our comfort zone to our courage zone. Doing so should be celebrated and valued at this point in our lives when so much is at stake as we watch in horror as basic skills of communication and being concerned about what you hear as much as what I say is being sidelined for the repeated loud and, often, offensive shouting we observe in our daily lives.

Is this really the world we want our children to grow up in and repeat for generations to come? I would suggest that we all insure that we work on communication skills and demand that our schools do the same. Otherwise all of one’s acquired knowledge will not be used for the potential good it can serve. This is not the first time we are confronting this dilemma; our history is riddled with it. It just seems that the stakes continue to get higher and unless we really care about and interact with each other in a meaningful way…. Well, we already see the other option too present in our world!