Gov. Mike Dunleavy is right. Increasing the Base Student Allocation funding for Alaska’s public schools alone won’t improve education outcomes for students. But I don’t think any school official or parent who supports the increase passed by the Legislature thinks it will. It’s a complicated problem that stretches well beyond the public school system. And we won’t solve it without addressing society’s ever-growing dependance on modern technology.
Any discussion about technology has to include scientists. They’ve been the creative geniuses behind everything from the light bulb to microprocessors. The tech tycoons who gave us personal computers, social media and smartphones were all computer science geeks. Like Richard Attenborough’s character in “Jurassic Park” said, they did things which nobody had ever done before.
But the fictional John Hammond marveling about the dinosaur park his scientists helped create didn’t impress Dr. Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum. “Yeah” Malcolm replied, “but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
It’s a line that could apply to the real-life scientists played by actors in “Oppenheimer,” the Oscar-winning film about the invention of the atomic bomb.
However, the decision to use those scientific creations resided with just a few individuals. With smartphones, it’s affluent consumers around the world who didn’t stop to think about the possible negative consequences of owning them.
Or, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, “We had no idea what we were doing.”
Haidt is the author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” The book will be released later this month. In an Atlantic article adapted from it, he argues that “Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board.”
He’s talking about the ease with which touch screen smartphones help them stay connected.
“Their phones are pinging constantly” he writes, referencing a study that found “the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day.” Even if they’re not allowed to have them in classrooms, their attention throughout the rest of the day gets “chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.”
That sounds like training for acquiring attention deficit disorder.
To be sure, Haidt isn’t placing all the blame on smartphones. Long before they existed, parents began imposing significant limits on their children’s unsupervised playtime. He believes that led to succeeding generations generally being less comfortable in situations involving risk. And risk aversion often serves as an impediment to ambition.
Then during late 1990s and into the early 21st century, our entire culture was infected by “a period of enormous optimism about digital technology.” It was during the excitement of that era when most parents instinctively assumed it would all be beneficial for our children.
Haidt was no exception.
“I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008,” he wrote. He thought the kind of brain stimulation he witnessed was superior “to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower.” And he added “I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.”
Now he believes smartphones disrupt the “sustained attention” necessary to accomplish “almost anything big, creative, or valuable.” We may not need his expertise to understand they can interfere with developing and maintaining real-life relationships. But we should pay attention to the evidence he presents that they’ve amplified or caused serious mental health problems for many teenagers.
It’s also important to take a step back and consider the positive role model we adults haven’t been for our youth. There’s probably very few of us who can honestly say we’ve never looked at our screens during a conversation with them or another family member. And it’s far too common to see a room full of adults with many engrossed in typing, swiping or reading something on the phone.
As Walt Kelly said through his Pogo cartoon character in 1971, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And it’ll take a lot more than the polices Dunleavy wants added to the education bill he vetoed to fix the mess we’ve created for ourselves and our children.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
