Tech Bros and Hos Beware: The Learning Counterrevolution is Here

From an excellent essay in the NYTimes on the impending demise of gamification in schools and the return to learning:

. . . . Ms. Drygas [NC history teacher] is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screens came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.

This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education. . . .

. . . . Researchers have begun to correlate falling test scores in wealthy countries around the world with aggressive adoption of devices in schools (88 percent of American public schools now follow what’s known as the 1-to-1 policy, providing one laptop or tablet for every student). In the United States, math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 and have declined since. . . . .

Big Data and Small Junkies

If you are a reluctant teacher or parent now being inundated with reasons you should embrace more computer screen time for school kids, there are good reasons for your skepticism.  Here's one:

Most people are shocked to hear that a video game can actually be more potent than morphine. While this is a phenomenal advance in pain management medicine and for use with burn victims, it begs the question: Just what effect is this digital drug—a digital drug that’s more powerful than morphine—having on the brains and nervous systems of seven-year-olds who are ingesting very similar digital drugs on their glowing screens?  And, if stimulating screens are indeed more powerful than morphine, can they be just as addicting?

As I discuss in my book, Glow Kids, screen tech can affect the brain just like a digital drug: Gaming raises dopamine levels by 100 percent and activates the H-P-A (the Hypothalmus-Pituatary-Adrenal Axis, otherwise known as the "fight or flight" response). Shockingly, recent brain imaging has shown that excessive gaming negatively impacts the frontal cortex—the executive functioning region of the brain which also controls impulsivity—in exactly the same way that cocaine does. This is why Peter Whybrow, head of neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, calls screens "electronic cocaine" and other researchers call video games "digital heroin."

Many of us who research tech addiction and work with screen-addicted kids understand that screens can be addicting. We didn't know that they are so powerful that they can be used as digital morphine. Do you want your child digitally ingesting something that has such a powerful neurobiological effect?

The People that Games Play

If you know anyone who takes the Facebook game seriously, please share this with them so they can see how "social" media works.  Or if you have ever been ostracized, lost "friends" or "followers" based on sharing a minority viewpoint or saying something you knew was true but unpopular, you might find this report interesting.  

Or if you think this dystopian system laid bare here is somewhere in the foggy future or in another part of the world where bad things happen, think again.  

And if you are allowing your children to be hooked up to screens at school where their intellectual, behavioral, and moral data are being collected, then you really need to see this.