Growing up with Technology

Growing up with Technology: Helping Children Resist the Seduction of the Mediated Experience
A Lecture by Dr. Lowell Monke, PhD

Last week Hubry and I went to the annual Charlotte Mason conference, and while there we had the pleasure of attending a lecture about technology in our homes by Dr. Lowell Monke.  Monke has been researching this topic and presenting his ideas for over 30 years now, mostly to crowds who champion the Waldorf school movement.  Most recently he's been in communication with some Charlotte Mason folk and made his debut conference appearance this past week at Gardner Webb University.  I have a feeling, after his standing ovation (which was actually not that unusual at this conference), that he'll be asked to return and continue the dialogue about the effects of technology on our society and what to do about it.  This is my effort to narrate his talk, as I hope to continue to engage with these ideas in the future.

Monke began his talk with a distinction: technology doesn't work the same way for both children and adults.  Children are in the process of developing their internal capacities, and for them technology can easily become a substitute for first-hand experiences.  Whereas adults have already built up a library of first-hand experiences, allowing technology to enhance (rather than replace) their internal capacities.  There has been a substantial change in childhood over the past 60 years - within 2 generations, children have shifted from having mostly first-hand experiences to having mostly representational experiences mainly through screens.

Monke says that first-hand experiences create schema in our brains, allowing us to later make sense of symbols.  When children experience symbolic representations for things they don't already have first-hand experiences with a number of things can begin to happen.
1. They can make mistakes and have trouble with comprehension
2. They can end up feeling and caring less because they aren't actually interacting with real things
3. There may experience "delight" to a lesser extent (It's almost impossible to delight in symbols to the same extent we can delight in real objects and experiences)
4. They can assume ownership or "first-hand" experience with things they only have symbolic experience with (for example, saying they've been to China b/c they watched a movie called Wild China).

The next part of his talk deals with our "souls" (albeit in a broad sense of the word), and it was my favorite part.  He begins with this quote, "It's like eating the menu instead of the meal... No one ever prays over the menu."  Symbols can not inspire soulful capacities such as love, kindness, compassion, etc.  Charlotte Mason actually has a great quote about this in reference to citizenship. (Look-up later)

Monke says that community may be suffering more than anything else.  "Disembodied, abstract information allows us to learn anytime, anyplace, from anybody."  It makes it less likely that our kids will feel like they belong to anybody or any real community.  As a result, many children are experiencing a deep numbness.  If one of the main goals of education should be to sharpen our senses, then the opposite is happening when on average our children spend between 8 and 10 hours behind a screen a day (a statistic from some big research group, but I forgot to write it down).

According to Monke, all evidence indicates that social media also has an alienating impact primarily due to the fact that it is barren to intimacy and real community.  Social media teaches our children to receive temporary enjoyment out of what they can get from others, instead of how they can be with others first-hand, which leaves them stunted in their growth.  This is a toxic social environment seducing us with its lure of easy external power, and convincing us that there's truly a way to have community and avoid pain.

And here's the kicker for adults.  Monke says that our culture (and us as parents in particular) model for our children that there's some powerful external tool (phone, facebook, computer) that will fix our problems, but more often than not it's not God that they are seeing as the solution.

So what we can we do?  He offers 3 general recommendations (though he offers more specific data and advice in some of his essays and books if you're interested).
1. A Personal Recommendation - Model the behavior we expect to see in our kids (especially when it comes to frequency and duration that we are spending on our devices).  Show your children that technology is meant to enhance, not replace rich, first-hand experiences
2. A Recommendation for Parents and Teachers - Help our children to rely on their inner capacities and feed their hunger for quality, first-hand experiences as much as possible
3. Conceptual Recommendation - As a society we must stop looking at education as machinery and pierce through the worldview that children are machines.  

After his talk, someone asked how he's been received by the public at large.  Sure, these ideas are applauded by the Waldorf and Mason communities, but what does the rest of society have to say about them?  His response was marked: at first he was largely ignored - even scorned. But now, 2 generations into technology, something very interesting has begun to happen.  It is the children who are beginning to ask what they can do about their parents "always on their phones and computers."  It is the children who have been missing time with their parents, feeling unsafe in the car, and wanting to see a societal pull away from technology. Now when he goes to speak to different groups of people, including children, they are the ones who notice that something isn't right.  And so he's beginning to see a glimmer of hope...
(Kelly)