Torrents of texting and paying attention

It being December, Poor Elijah went to the mall. He stationed himself on one of those benches provided for men who don’t want to be there. His perch was inadvertently opposite an Apple store, filled with tables and counters arrayed with phones, tablets and screens of various sizes.

The place was packed. Poor Elijah is one of those rare 21st-century characters whose only phone plugs into the wall. Yet here were hundreds of people actively buying new little screens to replace their old little screens when he was managing to survive without a little screen. He smugly looked to his right and then to his left to share the irony with his bench mates, but they were all looking at their screens.

He felt like another species of mammal. It occurred to him that you can’t tell who’s crazy anymore because everybody seems to be talking to himself. Not that staring at a little screen is necessarily crazy. Crazy would be staring at a little screen even if it’s doing you harm.

Guess what? Little screens are doing us harm.

That’s the conclusion drawn in an Education Week commentary appearing under the unnerving banner “Digital Technology is Gambling with Children’s Minds.”

Technology fallout is hardly a new concern. Experts have been warning for years that the blue light from computer screens interferes with adolescent sleep patterns, which is why many reformers insist that schools should start later in the morning. That’s usually just before they insist that students should spend more time in front of computer screens during and after the school day.

Building on “considerable research” into the “psychological impact of digital technology,” the new report focuses on children’s “cognition.” According to the author, “writing, reading, focusing and remembering have all been transformed” by technology, and not for the better.

For example, a Pew study found that as early as 2012, adolescents were already averaging 100 texts per day. Text messaging lacks both the “precision” and “nuance” of conventional written thought or conversation. Texting’s accent on speed leads to “oversimplification, “decontextualized opinions,” and an overall “dumbing down of content” as writers endeavor to “squeeze the most into unrealistically short sentences.” The physical challenge of typing on small screens also conspires to shorten and oversimplify messages.

While boosters laud the modern efficiency of texting, it’s worth remembering that a grunt takes less time than a soliloquy but hardly qualifies as an improvement in expression. Patrick Henry was known in his day for his “torrents of eloquence.” Today, we have torrents of tweeting and texting.

The report also finds that “reading is similarly transformed” for the worse. Eye-tracking experiments demonstrate that “people read a page differently online.” Instead of reading systematically from top to bottom and left to right, readers’ eyes “scan, flick, and power-browse” digital content, often because they’re distracted by other features on the video “page.” This hit-and-miss approach is increasingly common as students are introduced to, and submerged in, online media earlier in their schooling and preschooling.

“Early and very frequent screen exposure” appears to “compromise” attention. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the increase in screen time correlates with a nearly 50 percent rise in cases of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The CDC concluded that “severe symptoms of ADHD” are more common in students exhibiting internet addiction.

The internet’s glut of information has long prompted reformers to discourage, or even exclude, the systematic teaching of content on the dubious grounds that there’s too much information to learn. This fallacy taints how students are taught everything from science and history to the times table. Students are told they can download what they need to know instead of “retrieving” it from their “internal library,” a capacity formerly known as memory. The report foresees a detriment to students’ “capacity to remember if we stop exercising it.”

The author concludes that the escalating reliance on technology may leave students, meaning future adults, too “distracted to truly benefit” from the information the internet purports to provide them. In the end, the rise of technology may leave our students with limited vocabularies and attention spans, and without a working knowledge of grammar or the capacity to fully develop ideas.

None of these tendencies and consequences should startle us, and all are consistent with what I’ve observed in my students over the years. That’s not to say that computers should be banished from schools or contemporary life, or that there’s anything inherently evil about the internet or telephones that don’t plug in to the wall. There’s simply a difference between prudently using technology and being infatuated with it.

The problem is public education has a habit of chasing after the latest shiny new thing, whether it’s standards-based grading or smartphones, regardless of the hazards that should have been predictable, and even after the harm inevitably becomes apparent. When it comes to smartphones, advocates cite an additional reason to incorporate their use during class — it’s too hard to keep students from using them during class.

It’s sadly standard practice for school officials and reformers to chase after bandwagons and bad ideas in pursuit of fashion. It’s worse, though, to make curriculum and program decisions based on our inability to manage our classrooms.

If you can’t keep students from doing something in class that impedes their education, you don’t solve the problem by letting them do it.