On Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation'
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxiety Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is making a lot of ‘noise’ at the moment, and this is good: as a society, as parents and as teachers we should be thinking about the issues he addresses. I’ve been following his arguments for quite a while, but this book, which I read during the recent holidays, is the first time he has gathered everything together everything on this topic. There is an accompanying website which offers further material and resources.
Haidt writes punchily, backs up his arguments with evidence, and never holds back. His central argument is that what he calls ‘the Great Rewiring’ of 2010-2015, following the widespread distribution of smartphones with front-facing cameras, changed everything, and we have not responded sufficiently strongly. Just as we were becoming over-protective in the real world, we allowed children open access to the technological Wild West. About tech companies he writes:
By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.
There is a lot of debate at the moment in the media (including of course the social versions) about the book, and especially about Haidt’s belief that the connection between use of social media and mental health problems in young people is causative, not merely correlative. You can read about this elsewhere. He and others in his team are responding and debating further on his Substack After Babel.
My tupp’orth here is as a long-time teacher in a secondary school, who began his career well before the current tech-saturated world. The later points are from the perspective specifically of an English practitioner: what can we do in our very small corner of the universe in a situation in which, as Haidt says, concerned people can feel ‘helpless’?
One of his four battlecries, along with 1) no smartphone before high school, 2) no social media before 16, and 4) Far more unsupervised play and childhood is the key one here: 3) phone-free schools. In Ireland, primary schools still are (despite the Minister of Education’s performative call to ban phones at that level, even though schools don’t permit them anyhow). The real battleground is at secondary level. There are plenty of sound reasons for a school to insist on phones being put in lockers for the whole school day and not used at breaks, including their damaging effect on socialisation with their peers, and safeguarding issues. But overwhelmingly the reason, which requires no academic studies or Randomised Control Trials, is that their presence in class is disastrous for attention, the most precious currency in education. We know this is the case even if the phones are turned off and in a bag. No-one has come up with any substantive positive reason to allow phones in a class beyond something feeble like ‘But they need to be able to do Kahoots.’ It is true that in this multi-device world machines like laptops and tablets can serve many of the same functions, but those are so much easier to control/manage and are fundamentally less corrosive than phones. Whatever minor disadvantage there would be in banning phones in classrooms would be overwhelmed by the massive advantages. Thankfully, it does seem that the force is with this movement, and there is a document from Haidt and his team which summarises the effects in phone-free schools.
Anyone associated with the educational system has to do their best to ensure that teenagers get time outside as much as possible, play as much sport as possible (this is not always easy for schools, particularly under-resourced ones) and take part in as many communal activities as possible: drama, music groups, clubs. Thankfully Ireland is a sports-mad country.
Haidt:
Can anyone doubt that a school full of students using or thinking about their phones almost all the time—texting each other, scrolling through social media, and playing mobile games during class and lunchtime—is going to be a school with less learning, more drama, and a weaker sense of community and belonging?
And now some things from the perspective of an English teacher, with the full acknowledgement that our tiny corner of the world may make little difference to that firehose of addictive content. But as with climate change, each of us must do what we can in our own individual lives and jobs, as well as part of more widespread civic movements:
As Haidt writes:
We are not helpless, although it often feels that way because smartphones, social media, market forces, and social influence combine to pull us into a trap. Each of us, acting alone, perceives that it’s too difficult or costly to do the right thing. But if we can act together, the costs go way down.
English is the very opposite of the online world: it deals with nuance, depth, meaningful narrative. What we do in our own classrooms can be particularly valuable for children who are now bombarded with a maelstrom of cognitive and emotional overload from the online world.
We must deal with the highest quality material we can, within the bounds of our curriculum. We should resist any temptation to ‘dumb down’. We are wary of the tendency in some jurisdictions to choose butchered texts rather than whole ones. We hold the faith with the great literature of the past, however you define that in your own mind, as well as the best literature being written today (see below for Claire Keegan).
I recommend you read Carol Atherton’s recent book Reading Matters: this is just as English teaching should happen, in all its complexity. Here is my essay on it. See how her classroom opens up Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’ and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for complex discussions on misogyny and race. This is how English still remains ‘relevant’. I have recently been teaching Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These, and that fine short novel set in the pre-technology Ireland of 1985 really grips schoolchildren, just like Foster does, and opens up interesting angles on that world, and thus on our own.
Great literature is about complexity: think of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Children have never needed more to explore complexity. Social media crushes nuance. Exposure to the crudities of online discourse and - even worse - to pornography, poisons children’s ability to think empathetically and build relationships.
Nothing is ever more important than attention to language, even more so now. We can do no better service than to help our pupils be hyper-sensitive to the ways language is used, particularly online, and in the new AI world. A little while ago I wrote a slightly tongue in cheek piece on why poetry is the most ‘important’ subject to study in class: nothing else sharpens pupils’ awareness of how language works.
And facilitating creative work by pupils remains vital. They must learn how to craft their own writing and express themselves as individuals, not cogs in a tech-universe.
When we use technology in class it must always be judiciously directed, and only when it is purposeful and cannot distract. And definitely never a phone.
We should look at ourselves: we know adults are also terrible at managing attention, at how tempting it is for us to doom-scroll, or just scroll. As English teachers we need to read extensively. We too need to put our phones in a different room at night and set aside some time for reading. If our pupils have reading time in class we must be models: it’s not a time to catch up on marking. Read Maryanne Wolf’s important Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world: my essay on it.
Reading is central, and a challenge nowadays, but we must keep trying with our pupils and not give up. Teenagers have always fallen off in reading-intensity from their Primary school years, but often they come back to it. Kenny Pieper and Donalyn Miller have written books with practical suggestions for teachers.There should be books on our classroom shelves. I ran our school library for some years, before the technology ‘firehose’ really got going. Lots of pupils borrowed lots of books then. Those days may be gone, but children have a hunger for narrative, and nothing is a better corrective to the fractured distractions of online media than being swallowed up in a book. Many primary level children still experience this (I can see it in my own daughter), and here is another reason as parents to delay smart-phones as long as possible. As teachers, we should recommend books as much as possible, and we should harness an even more effective angle, peers’ recommendations (one good use of social media: BookTok. The books may not usually be to my taste, but that movement has genuinely fired up reading enthusiasms).
A post yesterday on After Babel by Freya India called ‘A Time We Never Knew’ is poignant. She writes as a member of Gen Z about nostalgia for a time which they never experienced, and how
There were hard times, of course—the ‘90s weren’t all bliss; no era is. But the world we inhabit now is so markedly different. New technologies cheapen and undermine every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world: by constant connectivity, by apps and algorithms, by increasingly solitary platforms and video games. I watch these ‘90s videos, and I have the overwhelming sense that something has been lost. Something communal, something joyous, something simple.
How catastrophic it will be if this becomes a permanent condition. As Jonas Salk famously said,
Our greatest responsiblity is to be good ancestors.
Right now, as adults, as parents and as teachers, we need to do everything we can to counteract the cheapening and undermining of human value we see all around us. We need to be better ancestors.