The Internet is corrupting our youth!

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Or so says celebrity brain expert, Baroness Greenfield. After all it has been a few weeks since her last national news headline! Children are being damaged by Twitter she says:

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

She criticised the “unhealthy” addiction to Twitter among some users who resort to increasingly nasty outbursts under the “sanitised and often anonymous guise of the web”. 

Did someone have a go at the Baroness on Twitter? Or is she merely surfing on the Twitter brand - after all, her main beef is about the social development of children. And Twitter is full of children!

Baroness Greenfield quoted figures showing that more than half of 13- to 17-year-olds now spend more than 30 hours a week using video games, computers, e-readers, mobile phones and other screen-based technology. 

Apparently all this stuff is making children less well-behaved, is turning them into a bunch of narcissists and creating a generation of cyber-bullies. Doubtless something must be done!
 

“To have this ultimate beauty contest showing how much better you are than everyone else can only lead to sadness because there will always be someone who scores higher than you," she said. "It means you are constantly lacking in self-esteem, over narcissistic and, at the same time, in constant anxiety.”

Baroness Greenfield also warned that social networking websites were fuelling bullying, adding: “The anonymity of the web can make it easier to do and also removes the constraints that would normally apply for what one might regard as human nature.” 

The good Baroness presents no evidence at all to support her contentions - not a single study, nothing that has been through that pesky peer review process. This is just comment made in an interview ahead of Baroness Greenfield presenting her "findings" (also known as her "opinion"). The only piece of "evidence" is a report of an opinion survey of English teachers who think kids have shorter attention spans. Now I love opinion polls but this isn't evidence of anything other than the informed prejudice of one set of teachers.

What seems to be bothering the Baroness is that children are less likely to sit like supine sheep awaiting the latest dollop of whatever their elders and betters believe they should be fed. The choice and liberty that "screen-based technology" provides makes it harder to socialise young people into a particular set of behaviours. It seems to me that young people can (and do) pay attention but that having alternatives to hand means that they are less tolerant of boring lectures.

Finally, Baroness greenfield seems to think that children are spending the sixty-odd hours of the week when they aren't looking at a screen or sleeping doing absolutely nothing. Perhaps gazing blankly into space or wandering zombie-like round the house. Funnily enough those children are spending that time in a social environment surrounded by and interacting with their peers, their parents and their teachers.

The Internet  - whether its Twitter, Facebook or something with penguins - isn't corrupting our youth. In fact it might just be liberating them!

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So when will universities cotton on then?

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Technology is changing how we learn:

Live online learning technologies - such as virtual meetings and classrooms, and video-conferencing - are becoming increasingly popular, with more than three-quarters of employers using them in 2011.

This is according to the benchmark study carried out by learning-technology provider Towards Maturity, which found that e-learning courses were the most popular learning technology this year, used by 80% of employers.

So when will universities start using these methods?

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Should small children be made to work?

Shocking I know! But Meredith Small thinks so - and he's a professor of anthropology!

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children.

By doing these chores, they also master life skills, like caring for a baby or how to herd goats, and with that comes proficiency and responsibility. 

It's an interesting point of view and Professor Small goes further and suggests that our approach to the development of children demonstrates a different - not necessarily better - cultural attitude to them:

In non-Western culture, parents expect children to learn about what it means to be an adult by doing adult work. When we were an agriculturally based nation, American children used to work just as hard and contribute in the same way. But now, Western children are trained intellectually, in school, where they are taught to think about things as the entree to adulthood, and few contribute anything to the household economy.

That cultural expectation is now creeping earlier and earlier as 3-year-olds go to preschool and 4–year-olds start kindergarten. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

An interesting view that is worth thinking about (while we tend the cows of course).

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Put the books down, look out the window and think for yourself.

Once upon a time there was a blank page – Locke’s tabula rasa. We couldn’t lean on some other persons thinking as a replacement for our own consideration of the truth. We had to look, listen, poke at, pull apart and generally fuss around at the world so as to get some information – followed by thinking about what it all meant.

Somewhere we’ve lost this – not entirely but mostly. Rather than craft our own arguments based on the evidence we’ve found, we turn instead to Professor X or Doctor Y and say, “look at the very clever person and what they say, I am clever too because I’ve read their writing and cleverer still for telling you about its wonders!”

Essays, articles, reports – even dissertations – are constructed through the careful rewashing of someone else’s work. This isn’t plagiarism, nor is it entirely without use but such an approach reveals in us a lack of thoughtfulness, a craven adherence to the status quo presented by our betters. We comply with authority’s bias and prejudice for fear that disagreement would mark us apart and down.

The creation of entire philosophies through the recycling of others' opinion – I quote someone, someone else quotes me quoting that someone and so on until the original someone quotes me quoting him! Replacing that blank page we have a vast wall covered in scribble, indecipherable as a whole but interpreted by a select group who understand the occult nature of that graffiti. As a result we learn nothing but that some acolytes are granted the great privilege to interpret the myths for us lay supplicants. And woe betide those who question those acolytes.

Perhaps we should start to question the basis of our policy-making – the pretence that the evidence it uses is real, the fiction that its processes allow for genuine review. What we need isn’t just a politics of doubt but a rediscovery of autodidact questioning and the questioning of authority. We need an end to telling people their opinion is worth less than some other person clutching a piece of paper from one university or another.

Above all we need to promote and champion people who doubt – who start with that tabula rasa rather than with someone else’s – be it Marx, Keynes or Rothbard – prescription for perfection.

Put the books down, look out the window and think for yourself.

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