China has vowed to end the use of electroshock therapy at the special camps it runs for those who are addicted to the Internet.
“HONG KONG — At the Addiction Treatment Center in eastern China, more than 6,000 internet addicts — most of them teenagers — not only had their web access taken away, they were also treated with electroshock therapy.
“The center, in Shandong Province, made headlines in September after one of its patients killed her mother in retribution for abuse she had purportedly suffered at the camp during a forced detox regimen.
“Now China is trying to regulate camps like the one in Shandong, which have become a last resort for parents exasperated by their child’s habit of playing online games for hours on end.
“The government has drafted a law that would crack down on the camps’ worst excesses, including electroshock and other “physical punishments.” Medical specialists welcomed the law, announced this week in China’s state-controlled news media, as an initial step toward curbing scandals in the industry.”
Well, I for one hope that such camps are never introduced in the U.S., as I might be among the first to be sent there. If there is a Twitter Addiction Camp, I won’t be there, but the President-elect would be.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I plead guilty to playing “Diamond Dash” for an hour this morning.
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I plead guilty to playing “Words with Friends.”
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Old fashioned Solitaire and Hearts on the computer for me!
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But you can not fry his brains, he has none.
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Give that man a cigar!
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There is a disease called “Internet Addiction Syndrome”. There is even a website for it.
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There are some retreats in the USA to treat internet/computer games addiction .There is a movie worthwhile for parents along teens to watch “Screenagers “
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If there is a Twitter Addiction Camp, I won’t be there, but the President-elect would be.
You won’t be there becaue you are not a twit.
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Like!
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I wonder if these camps in China were public institutions the CCP controls, or they were private sector for profit businesses like KIPP and Success Academies in the U.S.
China does have both public and private sectors.
http://www.economywatch.com/features/Measuring-Chinas-Private-Sector-Success0504.html
China is also home to thousands of Pizza Huts, McDonalds, Starbucks, Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc, and GM’s Buicks are considered the car to buy if you want to show off your wealth, not BMW or Mercedes. China also has Walmarts and IKEAs, and IKEA has become a popular place for single, retired Chinese to find someone to date for romance.
There are a few Hooters in China too.
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Who needs Lonely Planet China when we have Lloyd?
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Thanks to that American fast food, China has a growing obesity problem (with private sector, for-profit fat camps that are probably similar to those camps that use electric shock treatments that are being used to break bad internet habits) and a diabetes epidemic.
The Chinese are passionately in love with America’s middle class consumer lifestyle. For an alleged totalitarian state, the Chinese, who have money, are free to travel and see the world, and more than 100 million do it every year and then fly home. The Chinese middle class numbers about 300 million and the CCP’s goal is to have an educated middle class of 600 million or more.
In addition, more Chinese attend colleges in the US as foreign students than any other country does. In fact, China’s current president’s daughter graduated from Harvard, but he won’t stay China’s president for life, because after Mao, the CCP changed their Constitution so no leader could serve more than two 5-year terms (they didn’t want another Mao), and there’s also a mandatory retirement age for all public officials. I think it is 65. In China, Turmp could not be the president at his age. Hillary Clinton would also be unable to run for president there.
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Lloyd,
The New York Times has a front-page article today about the hottest new trend in China: Butlers. There are training schools for butlers to serve in the mansions of the new user-rich. They want to mimic Downton Abbey, down to the wine glasses and silverware, all in the right place.
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Yep, The new Chinese middle class is going over the top with consumerism and luxury items, but they don’t trust products made and bought in China. When the Chinese come to the U.S. as tourists, they have a shopping list, and lots of cash, for their friends and family back home, and end up buying expensive consumer goods in the U.S. that were often made in China, because the quality is considered higher when a product is made in China for the U.S. market.
A few numbers and facts going forward, not back.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has more than 80 million voting members, and they are scattered all over China. Most govenrment corruption is in the provinces and not at the top.
600 – 800 million rural Chinese are allowed to vote in village elections (only in village elections), but urban Chinese, that do not belong to the CCP, don’t get to vote in any elections.
There are about 300 million Chinese in the middle class, and the CCP plans to increase that number to 600 million or more in the next decade.
A good book to read to help understand what’s going on in China is Peter Hessler’s memoir “Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip”
Hessler started out teaching in China as an English teacher.
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The digital learning that is taking over American schools is probably more aversive than electroshock.
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Give that man a Kewpie doll.
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This was about addictions. I think you have an addiction to putting Trump into every subject matter, even if it has nothing to do with him . . . like this subject. Just sayin’.
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Linda S.,
At this moment, I can’t think of anything more important to the survival of our society and the world than having a loon in the White House.
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Those of us who are bird watchers consider loons quite beautiful and fascinating. Soon we will have a Trump in our national home. If he is able to Trump clean water, there will be no loons.
I would suggest a southern term. My good friend and teacher used to say “crazy as a Bessie bug”. My own family used crazy as a bed bug. Of the former I know little. Of the latter, there are many stories from rural America discussing these pests in my parent’s day.
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Roy,
I meant loon as short for loony-tune or lunatic but you knew that. My family said crazy as a bedbug but that insults bedbugs.
I was just on Twitter and taken aback by the ferocity of Trump supporters, esp the racist, anti-Semitic tweets.
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I knew what you meant. I was just being silly. I am sure you know that crazy as a loon is a reference to the ancient belief that the moon causes mental illness. Got nothing to do with a bird.
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Roy,
There is a bird called a loon. I didn’t mean to insult the birds.
The loons or divers are a group of aquatic birds found in many parts of North America and northern Eurasia. All living species of loons are members of the genus Gavia, family Gaviidae and order Gaviiformes.
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I don’t think Internet addiction is anything to joke about. It is ruining the lives of several teen-aged males I know, and causing great pain and financial hardship to their families.
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Indeed, it’s nothing to laugh about. One must admit, though, the reaction of China’s internet addiction boot camps is — shocking. An electric subject. Well, when working with adolescents, No Excuses, right? Kids are no laughing matter, with their rock and roll, their long hair, their shirts untucked. This is serious. You know what they need? Grit. And shocks. Shock grit. And no recess. They definitely need more online test prep screen time to help with their screen addictions, not a little time outdoors to talk freely with one another. What is this, Finland?! Jeb Bush, they want your reform miracles in China! They want punishment! Accountability with consequences! They choice-choice choose you. Go!
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*specifically, video gaming addiction
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Montana is correct, we should be serious about addiction. Any behavior is addictive. Surely we all know that addiction is a behavior. Many people are addicted to exercise, and this is not a horrible thing except where it causes stress injury.
The most important aspect of curing addictions is changing the environment we live in. Believing strongly that we manage our own destiny, humans always try to do this. I feel that this lies at the base of what is wrong in education. For years, teachers have complained that they cannot get their kids to read and do the extra work it takes to get an education. In 1983, Sizer’s report formalized this venting, the first mis-step to modern criticism of public education. Since then we have been trying to change the environment of education. Unfortunately, several addictions get in the way. It will kill us.
It used to be that we were addicted to school activities. We wasted mountains of time having pep rallies and building posters that said “beat the Vikings” while fewer than half of the students could tell you who the real Vikings were. This has come to us in modern day as a “measure” of how deserving a student is of entry into a college or a scholarship. Students are pushed to work on extra curricular activities so their resumes look promising to colleges. Thus our addiction to “measuring” is making changing he environment impossible.
It used to be that we were addicted to sports. This is true to an extent nationally, as it is a billions of dollars business that stretches from six year old tee ball to competitions of the highest caliber. Teachers used to suggest that sports got in the way of doing homework. But teachers were powerless to define a balance of sports and learning for the same reason that our society cannot define a balance between learning and test scores. Being addicted to measurement gets in the way. We could not stop children and parents from investing too much time in sports because they keep a score in sports. Addiction to competition is just a symptom of addiction to keeping score and winning.
So we will never be able to get the genie of testing back into the bottle. We are addicted to measurement. Like the Americans described in Twain’s Jumping Frog of Calaberous County, we are addicted to competing. This is why Diane’s Billionaires Boys Club is so enamoured of quantifying learning. They are the ones who are competitive and live in a quantifiable world where money is the tangible evidence of their own worth.
Our acceptance of the idea that we can measure education is just a part of the human wrestling match with his addiction to measurement. Our belief that we can change the environment and cure this addiction should be accompanied by a realistic understanding that this will be a long and arduous process.
Maybe we should all just play mine craft .
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“We are addicted to measurement.”
Not exactly. Measurement is a symptom not the addiction. The addiction is to a pseudo-scientific, what I call scientificity, reliance on supposedly “objective” assessments and evaluations which supposedly lend credence, then, to the abuse of one human by another.
“Hey, those educational measurements are objective natural characteristics of the learner and obviously she/he cannot continue in the course of study of his/her choosing because, well, you know, the measures show not enough is there in the individual’s makeup/being to warrant spending scarce (sic) resources on them.”
And that is what happens daily. The GAGA Good German teachers and adminimals make sure it does.
How does that square with the constitutional mandates for public education which we can summarize as “”The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, their pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”?
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Circa 2003, there was no name or resources for the this addiction in the all-encompassing social service referral guide, Rainbow Resource Guide, for OC, LA and Ventura Counties. Parents were losing their teenage boys to the one-eyed demon in their dark bedrooms and to online interactive gaming “friends.” They would play for 12 hours straight through the night, sleep all day, some even dropping out of school. This has lead to psychoses and substance abuse in some.
Since then, we have done little to explore the nature of this addiction towards treatment, beyond exploiting it for commercial purposes. NPR has run some stories about teachers asking teens to voluntarily turn in their phones for 24-48 hours to see if and how they could live without the machines. They expressed clear withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, paranoia, even involuntary physical gestures as they reached for the phones. No longer is it only socially awkward teenage boys being affected but children, pre-teens, male and female, from all socio-economic statuses.
I agree with those who have observed that the adults in the school room have had to dance faster and bring the power of the screen into the classroom to lure children into learning, since mere conversation between teacher and pupil and books are no longer enough. Their minds need constant visual stimulation, being situated in a permanent state of partial attention. Then there is the matter limitless funding of this last commercial frontier with taxpayer money for the tech industry to infiltrate the halls of knowledge, because screen addiction, I mean access (literacy?), has been neatly packaged as the great equalizer, the panacea for all walks of life to have a shot at success.
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