Nearly twenty years in the field of education have allowed me to arrive at two reasonably certain conclusions. The first is that even a very good school can only have a limited influence upon the character of a young person. Do not misunderstand me: a good school, and a good teacher in particular, can make a decisive difference in the form of life a young person is bound to live. But that difference is entirely contingent upon a prior formation bestowed upon the child. A young person cannot receive what it is that a good school has to offer unless they have already been prepared in some manner for that reception. That preparation they receive at home, at the hands of their parents.
Over the years, I have had the privilege to work with a number of truly extraordinary young people, whose intelligence and maturity at their young age have made me marvel. What was obvious, in every case, was how evident were the marks of their careful rearing upon their personalities: the diligence, the serious-mindedness, the amiableness and courtesy, that were consistently displayed by my most outstanding students were all traits they had clearly acquired in their early childhoods from their parents. When I have had the opportunity to meet those parents, I was always struck by how unmistakably they appeared as the source of their children’s excellencies.
A fad has developed recently among a certain segment of our chattering classes of calling into question just how much say parents should have in the education of their own children. Put aside for the moment the nakedly dictatorial ramifications of suggesting that some claque of functionaries can ever have a greater concern in the proper development of children than their own parents. The insinuation is absurd on its face. It is not a serious question if parents should play the primary role in their children’s education; they do play that role, simply by virtue of being the earliest and most consistent influence over their children’s personalities. I cannot imagine how anyone can spend a week in a classroom without coming away convinced of their total reliance as an educator on the prior efforts of the parents of their students.
A due modesty on the part of all educators, then, requires us to acknowledge that none of the success we achieve with our students is possible without the more basic labor undertaken by their parents at home. But this modesty also requires a candor from us as well. If our efforts as educators are reliant upon the foundations laid by parents, it follows that our efforts are liable to prove ineffectual in the absence of such foundations.
The second thing I have learned with certainty in my time as an educator is that the ubiquity of technological distractions (smartphones in particular, but also video games and streaming services) throughout the developmental years of American children is quite obviously eroding their ability to speak, read, write, or reason properly. There is considerable data to support this intuition, but to be honest, I have seen too much evidence with my own eyes to need additional confirmation, and I suspect most educators who have been in the field for over a decade would agree. It would be astonishing, quite frankly, if the opposite were the case, if children who spent hours and hours a day from the time they were toddlers in a state of passive distraction did not come to find it surpassingly difficult to muster the sort of thoughtful concentration necessary for interpreting and articulating language at an advanced level. Were we to raise a child on a diet of Cheetos and Yoo-hoo, we would not be surprised to discover them growing a bit flabby. When we subject children’s attention to a diet of Instagram and Netflix, why shouldn’t we expect an analogous mental unfitness to result?
It is resulting. The mental abilities of our children, and their capacity to excel at and prosper from their studies, are unquestionably deteriorating as a result of the prevalence of electronic screens in their youth. One readily observable measurement is sustained reading focus; a remarkably large proportion of high school students cannot maintain focus on a text for more than five or ten minutes at a time, a phenomenon which is completely inexplicable in the absence of some external force impinging upon the mind’s inherent capacities. The consequence of this is that many of these same students abandon the attempt to keep up with their assigned reading with anything like regularity, choosing instead to spend their time – how else – by playing video games or checking social media. Over time, this basic lack of acquaintance with text stifles any burgeoning writing ability, since that ability results from an internalization of the rhythms and structure of text as it is encountered on the page. A drastically curtailed academic potential is almost always the result of this process.
In their very popular work, The Liberal Arts Tradition, Ravi Jain and Kevin Clark assert that the goal of the grammar stage of learning (by which they really mean something more like literary studies in its entirety) is to make students “at home in language.” The effect of prolonged screen time is to inhibit the development of this acquaintance. Little by little, hour by hour, the flickering, facile world of the screen absorbs the child; little by little, hour by hour, the demanding yet rewarding page grows more and more alien to him, until a complete estrangement takes place before he has even completed his formal schooling. In the end, language itself is rendered a foreign country to the child.
When I find myself in public spaces, and see parents pushing their children in strollers with iPads strapped to the front, or in a restaurant where children are sitting at a neighboring table, each consumed by the screen of their own phone, I wonder if those parents grasp the monumental consequences for the development of their children’s minds. I doubt they do. Even within the world of education, it is not clear to me that everyone appreciates the deleterious effects of this pervasive technology. I have had several conversations with colleagues outside of the humanities who do not perceive anything like the kind of crisis I have described - considerable evidence that it is in fact linguistic abilities that are the primary casualty of our screen-saturated culture.
Someone needs to be blunt with the American public about the disastrous effects of screen culture upon the mental development of our children, and it seems clear to me that that someone should be classical educators. Our project stands or falls with the ability of our students to receive the written wisdom of the past, and to acquire the linguistically-grounded ability to reckon with it. No one has at much at stake in promoting our children’s fellowship with language and all of its powers. No one should be so forthright in combating any and all impediments to that fellowship. If there is a powerful force in the world threatening our students’ potential to become lovers of truth and beauty, then we should stand on the front lines resisting its advance.
In this battle we need allies, and our most potent allies are our parents. We must recruit them with zealous candor. We must be explicit about the effects that screen culture are likely to have upon the mental and spiritual development of their children. We must urge them to support the mission of the school by drawing boundaries at home regarding what sorts of media their children consume and in what quantities. We should say: the aim of our school is to lead young minds towards the truth – we cannot do this when those minds are so impaired by long distraction that they cannot follow the articulation of wisdom when it is presented to them. The aim of our school is to lead young souls towards goodness; we cannot do this when those souls are relentlessly exposed, for the duration of their formative years, to the kind of degrading behavior that is all too common to find online and in our culture. The aim of our school is to lead young hearts towards beauty; we cannot do this when those hearts are constantly allured by the meretricious glare of the screen. Nothing in our curricula is designed to counteract the massive influence of adverse moral and intellectual forces exerted at home. To the contrary, everything in our curricula presupposes a prior and consonant formative effort on the part of parents, upon which it is our duty as educators to build.
I am certain that all classical educators reject the faddish notion that we are “experts” who know better than their parents what is best for our students. To the contrary, the only possible way of conceiving of the project of classical schooling is as a partnership between the school and the home, in pursuit of a shared understanding of our students’ flourishing. Given the state of our times, that partnership now requires a mutual determination to resist the very worst effects of screen culture upon America’s children. Unless we are explicit and tenacious in requesting this form of cooperation from parents, our efforts in the classroom will never bear the fruit they might otherwise bring forth.
Excellent points, Mark. What's happening is an eroding, in fact an undermining from the very start of a child's life, of the development of inner resources, an inner life.
There is something in human nature that craves distraction and diversion, that makes it hard to sit alone in a room by oneself, as Pascal pointed out (I think he would have allowed the solitary sitter some books). Whether or not this is the misery of man without God, as Pascal thought, from which we seek constant distraction and diversion, it's a common enough fault, one that takes training and deliberate upbringing to overcome. Human beings are, to quote the behavioral economics literature, "satisficers" rather than utility maximizers: we will always, unless goaded or trained, prefer the cruder, easier to digest pleasures and achievements over those that are more refined - it's easier to chase achievements in an online game, an environment designed for hyperstimulation and precisely calibrated rewards, than to sit down and do the hard work of learning to enjoy and aspire to higher things.
I think the best a teacher can do is, for a few students, model that aspiration.
On the impoverishment of language, I am still haunted by this this paragraph from Theodore Dalrymple's City Journal essay, "The Gift of Language" (August 2006), describing his experiences as an inner city and prison psychiatrist:
"With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.”
Dalrymple was writing about his experiences in the 1980s and 1990s, among the culturally impoverished (important distinction), slums of London. My worry is that this level of linguistic and cognitive impoverishment is going to spread further and through more strata of society.