A friend of mine told me a story yesterday about a former student who took her life recently, she was 14. It got me thinking, how many bullied kids have we heard about in the past couple of years submit the same vote of "no confidence" regarding our culture and society? Quite a few, I think, when certainly one is too many.
Kids killing themselves, each other, and routinely dying at the hands of violence is simply unacceptable.The "techno-revolution" has proven itself a charade in its inability to defend its young. What parent would not suggest the same of another who allowed such mistreatment of their own?
"You are losing your children, of what consequence is an IPhone?"
My now half decade of recent educational experience, time spent mostly with your kids and grandkids, has caused me to believe that the STEM of the problem is the pressure our culture has leveraged upon the barely-formed shoulders of a generation in conflict with itself.
The technological age has dramatically increased the level at which we can and do receive information and opinion. It's not like our children's brains were suddenly and magically prepared for the deluge of sensual content that we as adults were having little success in rationalizing, (I submit the fact that federal laws regarding technology are woefully behind the pace of technological innovation as evidence that we STILL have no idea what we are doing).
And yet, we gave no consideration to the evident evolutionary gap between the supply of information and the human ability to consume on a psychological, emotional, and cognitive plane. Even though the evidence was readily apparent in the cultural misgivings towards technology as a double-edged sword, which, if mishandled, or put forth to ill purpose, could result in cultural, perhaps even bigger, social catastrophe, we led our children to the computer desk and then, like a cultural arms race, we chased technology, with our kids in tow, hoping they would somehow understand the chaos around them that we had constructed as reality.
And now our chickens are coming home to roost and what are we doing? Shackling our educational system to the point that innovation is punished. Education is no longer about nurturing children to adulthood and citizenship, the development of the noble, Cosmopolitan. We are building children to compete technologically with our so-called, " global competition."
So what's the solution? There isn't one. There are millions. They have faces and they are probably somewhere close. Look at them and ask yourself, "if I was your age, what would I think of the world and what would I need to know, what intellectual and cultural foundation would I need to be able to reconcile and navigate the great technological sea?"
What's your answer? If it's, "a new Ipad," you totally missed the point.
