Modern Childhood > Articles
Screens Versus Brains:
Are We Robbing Our Children Of The Ability To Think?
Have you been in a primary school classroom recently? Did you notice that a large white screen has replaced the old-fashioned blackboard? And have you any idea how much of the day the children spend staring at it? In the classrooms I’ve visited, the ‘interactive whiteboard’ features in almost every lesson. Children sit, with blank zoned-out faces, staring at brightly coloured shapes and figures zooming around the screen.
Add to this daily dose of screen-based education many hours of extra-curricular screen-time. Recent surveys of children’s leisure time suggest they spend between five and six hours a day on TV and DVD-watching, computer gaming, web-surfing, MSNing and social networking.
In a screen-saturated society, many British youngsters now spend more time staring at flat, flashing rectangles than they spend in the real world, engaging with real people. At home this means they’re not hanging out with their parents, learning life skills through example, or playing out with their friends, learning independence and social skills. And in school, this means they’re spending less time reading real books and writing for real purposes than ever before.
So no wonder the eminent neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has expressed concern that this sudden change in children’s lifestyles might interfere with the development of their brains. As she says, ‘We cannot park our children in front of screens and expect them to develop a long attention span.’ She’s particularly worried about the effects of technology on children’s literacy skills.
‘Language reflects the sequential nature of human thought,’ she says. ‘So learning to read helps children learn to put ideas into logical order. On the other hand, staring at a screen puts their brains into suspended animation, staring at images just there for the moment. Facts don’t hook up with each other into ideas and meaning.’
Dr Aric Sigman is another worried scientist. As a psychologist who specializes in how technology affects human learning patterns, he’s amassed a huge database of research linking children’s screen-based activity to ADHD, autism and emotional and behavioural disorders. He too points to the conflict between screen-based activity and reading.
"As children engage in more screen activity, they definitely read less - and the effect is likely to be permanent. Screen activity prevents children from having to infer, to paint pictures using words alone. And unlike screen images, words don’t move, make noises, sing or dance. Just because adults revere ‘multitasking’ and divided attention doesn’t mean this is beneficial for the developing child who must first master sustained attention before he can go on to divide it up between windows on a screen. Ultimately, screen images render the printed word simply boring, at a crucial phase when the child’s brain and mind are developing."
As for me, I’m a specialist in literacy, and I couldn’t agree more. Over the last decade, the government has invested countless millions in literacy strategies and initiatives (including those interactive whiteboards), but every year fewer children learn to read at length for pleasure and information. And even less of them learn to write at length, using logical written sentences to explore and express their ideas.
Instead, to vindicate government efforts, and keep their statistics on track, teachers are now obliged to train their classes to tick boxes on ‘literacy’ tests. Recent moves by the headteachers’ union and NUT to boycott these tests are born of the profession’s frustration at being forced to participate in this travesty of education.
So far, however, most of the teaching profession has failed to recognize that, by increasing reliance on screen-based technology in the classroom, they’re adding to children’s problems with reading and writing. Like most other adults, they’re still dazzled by the wonders of 21st century multimedia gadgetry.
I know how they feel. In the late 1990s, I waxed lyrical in the Times Educational Supplement about the wonders of interactive whiteboards. I also worked for Oxford University Press on one of the first CDs to teach early reading skills, for the BBC on educational TV and CBeebies programmes, and for many other publishing companies on computer resources.
Of course, the whiteboard revolution hadn’t happened then – primary children got to use the ‘computer room’ once a week if they were lucky. And there were far fewer technological distractions in the average home – most families didn’t have broadband and social networking sites hadn’t even been invented. The present alarming rates of screen-saturation have crept up on us over the last decade, and children now live in a multimedia technological environment from the moment they’re born.
I’m now convinced that, unless we remove those interactive whiteboards from nurseries and infant classrooms and convince parents to limit screen time for the under sevens, we’ll create a generation of children many of whom cannot control their conscious thought processes, express their ideas in clear logical language, or follow reasoned argument.
Don’t think this is a rant against information technology in general. I’m still a huge fan of our technological revolution, and its mind-blowing potential for enhancing human thought and progress. But to take full advantage of it, children first have to learn the basic lessons that come from first-hand interaction with their world and face-to-face communication with other human beings. They also need to settle down to the painstaking process of learning to read and write, to increase and enhance their conscious control of their own logical thought processes.
It’s already known that regular frequent exposure to digital technology rewires the human brain in ways that enhance visual memory and processing skills. ICT enthusiast Ian Jukes points out that the current generation of teenagers already process information differently from their parents. ‘Digital learners’ prefer to access information from multiple media sources (pictures, sounds, colour, video) rather than old-fashioned text, operating at what he calls ‘twitch speed’.
They use parallel processing and multi-tasking techniques, applying ‘continuous partial attention’. They develop expertise in randomly accessing hyperlinked multimedia information, and their reward is ‘learning that is relevant, active, instantly useful and fun’. But as Jukes himself points out, if we encourage them to adapt to the digital bombardment too soon, ‘the downside is that children may find it more difficult to follow a logical train of thought.’
So, yes, digital learning is great once children can read, write and think. But when very young children are encouraged to rely on continuous partial attention, flicking here and there at twitch-speed, they to find it hard to settle down to more effortful tasks. It takes self-discipline and focused attention over several years to crack the reading code, and even more to learn to write coherent English sentences. It’s hard work, but the long-term advantages are worth it – both to the children and to society as a whole.
I now believe that by fast-forwarding our children into the digital age, we hazard the capacity of a growing number to read, write and follow a logical train of thought. Which may be great news for any prospective totalitarians, but not for the adults those children will become.