THIS week let’s talk about a subject that is not as seemingly hopeless as the CNMI government’s financial condition. I’m referring to the education of our children in this era of smartphones — and earbuds.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal featured Mitchell Rutherford, a high school biology teacher who quit because “he’s tired of trying to engage students who are lost in their phones.” “Schools are losing teachers for a variety of reasons,” the Journal reported, “and phones factor into decisions to leave. Dozens of teachers [said] they spend more time policing kids’ phone use than they do teaching. For Rutherford — a 35-year-old teacher who once embraced technology — seeing kids checked out and, in his view, addicted, robbed him of the joy of teaching.”
In his latest book, which came out last spring, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt expressed grave concern about the smartphones’ effect on kids. His book’s title says it all, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Not everyone is convinced, and the debate on Haidt’s thesis is still raging among the experts.
Regardless of what they are saying, however, many parents are aware that smartphones are messing up their children’s ability to focus on their studies.
I was in high school in the 1980s. If anyone of us brought a portable 3.7-inch Sony TV to the classroom, the teacher would have immediately confiscated it. The teacher would readily admit that she could not possibly compete for our attention with whatever was on TV (which, incidentally, was used to be known as the “idiot box”).
A smartphone connected to the Internet is to TV what a Formula 500 car is to a plastic toddler tricycle. So why are smartphones allowed in the classroom?
In the states, where school shootings occur, parents want to be able to quickly and directly contact their children in case of an emergency. Perfectly understandable. But at the Tucson, Arizona high school where Mitchell Rutherford used to teach, half of his students, at one point, were failing in class, and he is sure that the smartphone was the culprit. The kids are addicted to the gadget, he said. According to school policy, phones shouldn’t be out during class, but it’s a rule that teachers must enforce. “You can ask them,” Rutherford said, “bug them, beg them, remind them and try to punish them and still nothing works.”
“He voiced his frustration to teachers and administrators every chance he got. Other teachers agreed something needed to be done about phones, and some shared methods they’d tried. One teacher deducts participation points for students who use their phones in class. Another tells students to leave their phones in their backpacks, which are to be placed at the front of the classroom. The methods work so long as teachers are on top of it. ‘If at any point you stop policing it, it backslides immediately,’ ” Rutherford told the Journal.
In the CNMI, surely schools can ban smartphones — and earbuds — from the classroom or their use during classes. The students can have their phones back during breaktime or after classes. But during class, the phones should be in their backpacks, which should be placed somewhere near the teacher. And yes, a teacher must constantly enforce the rule.
If given a smartphone, many kids will end up staring at or playing with it for hours. What they’re learning from school is boring and tedious stuff compared to what they’re getting from a smartphone.
There is also a pressing need to reevaluate if not overhaul the current school curriculum, which seems to be tailored-made…for my generation. Kids, to be sure, should learn how to write on paper, and be familiar with basic arithmetic and all that, but after a certain grade level they shouldn’t have to be writing everything in a notebook. Why do they still need a notebook when, in the “real world,” they will certainly use a laptop or a smartphone to “write”?
And what can a parent tell a child who declares, “Why do I need to learn this when I can look up the answers on Google or an AI app?”
This reminds me of the story (as told by Napoleon Hill) about Henry Ford, who had little schooling, and his libel lawsuit against the Chicago Tribune. In its editorials, the newspaper called him, among other non-endearing things, “ignorant.” During the trial, the newspaper’s lawyer asked Ford “trivia” questions such as “Who was Benedict Arnold?” and “How many soldiers did the British send over to the America to put down the rebellion of 1776?” Hill said when Ford became tired of the questions, he told the lawyer, “If I should really want to answer the foolish questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question I desire…. Now, will you kindly tell me, why I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I required?”
Today, everyone with a smartphone and an internet connection has the ultra-high-tech equivalent of Ford’s electric push-buttons. In most schools, however, it seems we are preparing our kids either for a quiz show or a post-apocalyptic world where there is no electricity or internet connection.
Parents should raise these issues with school administrators.
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