Paula Poundstone, comedian, has advice for parents: break your children’s addiction to electronic devices. Is she right or wrong? Who made the decision that all the tests had to be taken online? This leads to a need to teach keyboarding schools in kindergarten or earlier. Shouldn’t children spend time making things, not just consuming what someone else has made? Shouldn’t they have time to use their own imagination, not just imbibe the products of someone else’s imagination?
She writes:
Screen devices wreak havoc with the brain’s frontal lobe. Diagnosis of ADHD in our children has taken a steep rise since the proliferation of screen devices.
Yet, even when presented with that information, parents often won’t hear of protecting their kids from the harmful effects of screen devices. “Kids love them!” they say. Yes, they do, and kids would love heroin if we gave it to them. I’m told that after the initial vomiting stage it can be a hoot!
We didn’t know this when we first brought these shiny new toys into homes. But, now, we do know. Still, adults aren’t doing anything about it. Why? Because we’re addicted. Addiction hampers judgment.
You see it. Everywhere you look people are staring at their flat things. We’re terrified of being bored. No one drifts or wonders. If Robert Frost had lived today he would have written, “Whose woods are these? I think I’ll Google it.”
Screens are tearing away our real connections. Ads for “family cars” show every family member on a different device. Applebees, Chili’s, Olive Garden and some IHOPs are putting tablets on their tables. These restaurants claim they are providing tablets just to make ordering easier. Well, gee, if saying, “May I please have chicken fingers?” is too difficult for our young ones, wouldn’t we want to work on that?
The tech industry has profited from the “Every child must have a laptop in the classroom” push, but education hasn’t. Research shows that the brain retains information better read from paper than from a screen, and students who take notes by hand are more successful on tests than those who type their notes on a computer.
Yet, art, music, sports, play, healthy meals and green space — things we know help the developing brain — are on the chopping block of school districts’ budgets annually.
Even knowing this, at the suggestion that we get screen devices out of our classrooms and away from our children, people gasp, “But they’ll need them for the world of the future!”
Our children will need fully-functioning brains for the world of the future. Let’s put that first.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Great advice from Paula.
I love Paula Poundstone’s comedy and enjoyed seeing her on stage recently when she was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. However, I think it is important to contextualize her comments about technology. She is a comedian. Based upon her on-stage comments, where she said these same things about children and technology, I believe she read ONE book on the topic. Now, I have my own concerns about the need for balance in the use of technology by children, but I do not shape my understanding based upon the work of a comedian!! Let’s leave these matters to those who study them and whose expertise has a foundation in research, child development, etc., and to a complete review of the literature done by a scholar.
I found it much more upsetting (and insulting) that a semi-pro basketball player became the Secretary of Education and set damaging policies for 50 million children and their parents,
The great majority of research “suggesting” that Wi-Fi can be harmful to young
children and pregnant woman is not to be found in the USA.
While not familiar with Poundstone’s work, I certainly have far more trust in a George Carlin, Richard Pryor or Louis CK than I would your run-of-the-mill academic, captive to his/her funders.
Maybe it’s because we’re addicted, too! http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/addicted-to-distraction.html
Oh dear, she’s only a comedian.
I completely agree with her, but I’m only an old Luddite.
“Addicted To Phones”c (minor changes to Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love”
Your lights are on, but you’re not home
Your mind is not your own
Your heart sweats, your body shakes
Another text is what it takes
You can’t sleep, you can’t eat
There’s no doubt, you’re in deep
Your thumbs are tight, you can’t tweet
Another text is all you need
Ohh oohh
You like to think that you’re immune to the stuff…oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it
You’re addicted to phones
You see the signs, but you can’t read
You’re thumbin’ at a different speed
Your thumbs tap in double time
Another text and you’ll be mine, a one track mind
You can’t be saved
Oblivion is all you crave
If there’s some left for you
You don’t mind if you do
Ohh oohh
You like to think that you’re immune to the stuff
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it
You’re addicted to phones
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to phones
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to phones
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to phones
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to phones
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to phones
This is a nice story about parents demanding recess in Florida:
“Now parents are creating similar online petitions around the state. More than 2200 people have signed a petition to make recess mandatory in Pinellas County, This fall, Parents in Osceola County also started a petition demanding recess. And a similar effort in Orange County last year led to a school board resolution recommending that schools provide the breaks.
And that’s the way change might happen, says Judy Stockman, who teaches at Sykes Elementary school in Lakeland — when parents get involved.
“Teachers have already voiced their opinions about this and nothing happened,” Stockman says.”
https://stateimpact.npr.org/florida/
The American Academy of Neurology agrees with her, their guidelines suggest limits that our schools exceed. I’d post the link, but I can’t from this network.
1. For people interested in the recent history of US technology policy for education see: “A Retrospective on Twenty Years of Education Technology Policy” (2003) prepared for the US Department of Education (USDE) by American Institutes for Research (Douglas Levin, Project Director). https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/20years.pdf
This report shows the role of “blue ribbon reports,” from CEOs of tech and testing companies, McKinsey & Co., the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups in putting technology front and center in K-12 education and teacher education. The push is illustrated by the dates and titles of publications included in this “retrospective” report that begins in 1983 with “A Nation at Risk,” from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. (In the 1960s USDE thought 8mm closed loop videotapes were the hot new technology).
2. In one of the first of several USDE technology plans, issued during the tenure of Secretary of Education Rod Paige, we see one of the first claims that proper policies on technology will revolutionize education. Notice the long and grandiose title (caps in the original) “A New Golden Age In American Education HOW THE INTERNET, THE LAW AND TODAY’S STUDENTS ARE REVOLUTIONIZING EXPECTATIONS: National Education Technology Plan 2004.”
One of many predictions:
“With the benefits of technology, highly trained teachers, a motivated student body and the requirements of No Child Left Behind, the next 10 years could see a spectacular rise in achievement – and may usher in a new golden age for American education.” p. 46. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED484046.pdf
3. The follow-on technology plan from USDE, 2010, has the same theme: “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology: National Education.“ This report calls for “revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering.”(p.ix).“ Specifically, the integrated technology-powered learning system should be able to:
• “Discover appropriate learning resources;
• Configure the resources with forms of representation and expression that are appropriate for the learner’s age, language, reading ability, and prior knowledge; and
• Select appropriate paths and scaffolds for moving the learner through the learning resources with the ideal level of challenge and support.”
Further,
“As part of the validation of this system, we need to examine how much leverage is gained by giving learners control over the pace of their learning and whether certain knowledge domains or competencies require educators to retain that control.
We also need to better understand where and when we can substitute learner judgment, online peer interactivity and coaching, and technological advances, such as smart tutors and avatars for the educator-led classroom model. (p. 78).
Part of the marketing pitch for this envisioned learning system, with a minor role (if any) for a human teachers, it a request for federal investment in a national “mission” comparable to that of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is credited with “the birth of the Internet.”
The DARPA-like mission for education? “Identify and validate design principles for efficient and effective online learning systems and combined online and offline learning systems that produce content expertise and competencies equal to or better than those produced by the best conventional instruction in half the time at half the cost (p. 80)
In other words, “conventional instruction” is inefficient, ineffective, amateurish, takes too much time, and it costs too much. “Learning systems” can produce more learning, in less time, at lower costs…and with more content “expertise” …and real-time sentiment analyses for a feed back loop to the recommendation system, for personalized praise, or admonishments, or you can do this cheerleading consistent with the Dweck theory of mindsets that favor “success.”
If this “mission” succeeds, face-to-face encounters with wise and caring human teachers are likely to become a luxury, a frill, a bonus, an enrichment. For the masses, algorithms contrived and organized to function as depersonalized learning systems will do the job of transmitting knowledge, deciding what questions should be presented, what forms the answers may take, and whether particular responses are satisfactory.
Orwell smiles, along with Bill Gates and all of the CEOs who have marketed this vision, and cynically advertised such systems as “personalized.”
Click to access netp2010.pdf
If you want to see USDE’s latest enthusiasms for technology, go to http://tech.ed.gov/files/2015/04/Developer-Toolkit.pdf and look especially at page 9, a project to change student “mindsets” with the link to USDE funding of this “at scale” project.
agree with much of what you write here, especially the bit about children needing meaningful, extended contact with wise and caring teachers…
my issue around that statement is that i am wondering how many wise and caring teachers there are, when they:
A: wont ACT against ed deform and they allow their unions to lead them further and further into the belly of the beast, despite knowing the harm they are doing to their students and
B: support idiots like Donald Trump and the other republican morons currently costuming themselves and parading as presidential candidates…
i cant tell you how shocked i was to realise that some of my teacher social media connections are Trump followers – seriously… the first time i saw a pro-Trump tweet from a teacher (who i know is fighting parts of ed deform) i just about fell off my chair…
which kinda raised the question for me whether there should be some sort of screening process for teacher training candidates as to their political/religious affiliations – are they progressives and committed to social justice work? are they evangelicals (of any religious persuasion) who have prejudice against certain people and beliefs etc….
which also raises the question — are teachers servants of the state, doing the work of the state in indoctrinating children with the values of the state (regardless of whether they make any sense or are just) or are they change agents, servants of their students, teaching them to be critical thinkers first and encouraging them to challenge the dysfunction of society so that they might help change it for the better?
and if they are the second, shouldnt that start in elementary school? what is the point in filling children up with lies about the state/society in their early years, brainwashing them to be “good citizens” (of a corrupt patriarchal plutocratic society), only to have to help them take the blinders off when they get older, have to help them unlearn all that rubbish?
How on earth does Paula Poundstone know the effect of “screens”-cathode ray, LED, LCD, plasma, etc etc- on the human frontal lobe? Or the etiology of ADHD? I’ll read the rest right after watching her Nobel prize for medicine acceptance speech on You Tube.
Russell,
I take your point, but you could say that about any parent or teacher or concerned citizen. You don’t need to have a Ph.D. to express your concerns.
Tony Schwatrz had an interesting op-ed piece in the Sunday 11/29/15 New York Times dealing with “Addicted to Distraction” that addressed both the addictive and distracting nature of “screen use”.
“The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
He concludes with a cautionary tale that most of us have observed.
“Occasionally, I find myself returning to a haunting image from the last day of my vacation. I was sitting in a restaurant with my family when a man in his early 40s came in and sat down with his daughter, perhaps 4 or 5 years old and adorable.
“Almost immediately, the man turned his attention to his phone. Meanwhile, his daughter was a whirlwind of energy and restlessness, standing up on her seat, walking around the table, waving and making faces to get her father’s attention.
“Except for brief moments, she didn’t succeed and after a while, she glumly gave up. The silence felt deafening.
Why are we as adults so eager to have our children share an addiction that we are only now beginning to realize let alone cope with.
Paula Poundstone may not be an expert but her comments may help to get the attention of politicians who are neither reading journals nor consulting experts.
I understand why we should listen to non-experts on topics like this. However, I’m willing to give up listening to what Paula Poundstone thinks about topics she knows almost nothing about if I can continue to ignore Bill Gates for the same reason.
The fact that people defend one non-expert and rail against another gives us very limited credibility and makes it seem like we are picking and choosing the arguments that require experts as they fit our agenda. To think that this goes unnoticed by the (mostly uneducated about education) public is a mistake.
Sadly, ‘they’ are right. We do pick and choose because there is a desperation over how to fight back against the current nepotism, greed, money, and lack of expertise that run rampant in education today. We name call and act in a way that we’d jump upon the other side if they did the same. There is very little principled opposition anymore and I think that it hurts the cause of education.
Wilbert, I agree: People should ignore Bill Gates when he talks about stuff he knows nothing–and is deeply uncurious–about, no matter how much money he has to spend.
And Diane, the issue isn’t the the spokesperson (parent, teacher, concerned citizen, radio comedian) or their academic achievements. The issue is whether a dramatic, scary claim is substantiated. Paula Poundstone’s pseudo-neuroscience isn’t. In fact, some research suggests she’s fundamentally incorrect (see Daphne Bavelier’s work on executive function and video games). This all makes nuanced, realistic policy-making more difficult.
Poundstone is on stronger ground with respect to learning on paper vs with electronic media (and I agree with many on this site about the pernicious infiltration of costly computer-based corporate control in classrooms). But she’s not interested in determining the appropriate role for electronic media in formal educational settings. She (and commentators like Nicholas Carr, who also pontificates with scant recourse to data) is simply fear-mongering about the role of media in children’s lives as a whole. It’s a strain of fear-mongering that goes back as far as Socrates’s hostility to the written word–and it’s just as deeply uninformed.
Technology has its place, but should not be used to replace teachers, or a foundational curriculum. Children are addicted to devices so it’s not surprising that teachers have to deal with more disruptions and behavior issues that come along with them. It makes children almost nuts from the constant stimulation. Then there is the Wikipedia syndrome where students get a constant barrage of content, but can’t analyze it correctly. Certain subjects, like writing, need some pencil on paper time, to outline structure and lay out thoughts. Good writing skills cannot be learned on an iPad mini. Math also requires pencil on paper. Its ridiculous to see the justifications for technology as a replacement for the core math, reading, and writing skills.
I watched her on Sunday Morning saying, “Yes ! Yes! Yes!” I have seen so many changes with my elementary students. They come to school and can’t click and turn the teacher into something fun. They have to wait in line and do what they are told, not what they want. It has to be difficult and frustrating to no longer have the controls. Students react to everything and everyone. “Educational games” are just another place students click, click, click to make something, anything, happen. What a waste. Parents who won’t buy a book or read to their children will plop them in front of a technological device and leave them for hours. Fancy that.
My opinion is that we have a general over-dependence on technology in society. The chance that this will change in my lifetime–about as close to ZERO as you can get.
But to pretend that if it weren’t for technology that students would all be ‘making’ things is pretty ridiculous. Before technology, worksheets filled the role of mindless work to torture students with. At least now the ‘worksheets’ are entertaining and not on par with medieval torture. The idea that technology is keeping a teacher from requiring thinking of their students is a good case for needing a new teacher.
The good old days weren’t so good, as some who’d love to return to the past will tell you. The good old students weren’t so good either, which refutes the claims about how poorly ‘the kids today’ rate.
Well said!
This post is the best thing I’ve read all day!
“There’s this idea that we’re addicted to our phones. But we’re not addicted to the device, we’re just addicted to information.”
One of my good friends tweeted this over two weeks ago, and I thought it was really clever. And she’s right, we’re only addicted to information because we carry it with us everywhere we go in the form of smartphones.
danah boyd, one of our preeminent Internet scholars, notes that “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other. They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.”
” Shouldn’t children spend time making things, not just consuming what someone else has made? ”
yes. they should!