Ridiculous Opinions #233!
Sometimes, you feel defeated.
Of course, I feel more defeated than normal today, because I didn't sleep well last night. I didn't sleep well because I had a big, fat, peach-flavored iced tea at about 8 PM and I went to bed at 9 PM, which meant that I had a lovely nap before I woke at 12:30 AM. And thus, I just tossed and turned until basketball came on and I watched that for a while. Such is life. If you look at the picture above, you will see that I was asleep from 4 AM to 5 AM. It's the little victories.
But I think people feel defeated overall. It's hard not to, if you just look at the headlines...
Those were the four headlines as I wrote this. You wonder why I was reading Stereogum? That's why.
But honestly, that's not why I feel defeated. I can handle all of that. This is just the same song, second verse. It's the FOLLOWING headlines that kind of did me in for the day...
Just when I think that humanity can't stoop any lower, this comes across my news feed. I have no response to this, other than to say that THIS is why I have little hope for humanity.
But I am a teacher, and I want the world to do better.
I am involved with the Student Council at my school and we had a discussion the other day about phones. I am firmly convinced that the generation that is currently moving through school is measurably dumber than the previous generation. They seem to be unable and unwilling to actually think. They allow others to do the thinking for them.
Note: I must add the caveat here that not ALL of them are dumb...but there seems to be a prevailing majority of students that are.
I attribute this to phones, which are attached to our current generation of kids like an extra appendage. There's a lot of "old man yells at cloud" verbiage here, but our discussion centered around the notion that kids nowadays just don't think. They don't allow themselves quiet introspection. Their minds are always occupied with trivial nonsense and they are addicted to the dopamine of social media. Rather than be trapped alone with their own thoughts, they pacify themselves with a constant consumption of mindless tasks...the endless scroll, the vacant tapping of the screen, the shallow need for the perfect selfie.
What I found interesting in the discussion I had with my students was the notion that none of them disagreed with me. All of them felt that what I was saying was correct. They lamented the fact that students get on their phones during their breaks rather than talked to each other. They spoke of the FOMO that social media perpetuates on a daily basis. They nodded their heads in agreement when I brought up the notion that students have these devices in their hands at too-young of an age.
To make them all mad, I suggested that we get rid of phones in school. None of them thought that was a good idea.
Addicts.
Continuing to be deliberately provocative, I said that parents shouldn't allow their kids to have phones.
One student replied, "They would be social lepers. It would destroy their self-esteem if all of their friends had phones and they didn't."
I said, "Raise your hand if you think social media contributes to good self-esteem."
No one raised their hand.
I said, "So, you think that the stigma of not having a phone would destroy self-esteem more than social media?"
The room remained silent.
As a teacher, I would REALLY like to ban phones in schools. Not just for students, but for teachers as well. I tell my students that if it's something you can't do on a computer, then it's not worth doing.
And I feel this way because I really feel like the generation moving up through the system has been infantalized by phones and social media in a way that has stunted their growth. We are raising a generation of children who seem to me to be either too lazy or unable to formulate an independent thought. They refuse to be bored. They must be occupied. And they are HIGHLY susceptible to the outside influence of bad actors on the internet. Highly.
But hey...I'm a fifty-one-year old man. What do I know?
I don't have the answers to this. As I see the proliferation of AI deep fakes on the internet and an almost gleeful desire to cause chaos by fascists around the world, I realize that the social contract might be irrevocably broken. Would banning phones in schools solve all of these problems? Absolutely not.
But we have to start somewhere, and I think that all of us know that what we are currently doing will not end well.
SEE WHAT I WRITE WHEN I DON'T GET ENOUGH SLEEP?
