A special report on the excessive use of technological gadgets by teenagersHow can we get our children to "kick the habit" of electronic addiction and to being normal children again?
Alarmed by a study that said teens spend less time with books, which is helping to create a nation of poor readers, English teacher Brenda Durkacs at the Coral Springs High school in Florida challenged her students to step away from the computer keys for a full week as part of a project she began in November to get students to read, react and question.
During this project, she helped her class develop an awareness of technology's sometimes intrusive nature, pointing not just to the number of hours video games, text messaging or television can drain out of a day, but also to serious concerns about how technology can invade privacy.
Many students found it very hard to "kick the habit" because as one of them said "It just feels so natural to use technology for everything".
Brenda Durkacs got the idea last year when a friend e-mailed her an analysis from the National Endowment for the Arts. The study showed that as young people read less, their comprehension skills deteriorate. Part of the problem is that there are so many things vying for students' leisure time. Instead of picking up a book, students now turn on the computer, DVD player or iPod — maybe all three simultaneously, the study said.
As part of her program Brenda Durkacs had her students document every text-message, phone call and download they used for one week in November. During this exercise some students even found out they played Xbox, used the computer and watched the TV at least 10 hours if not more a day.
Soon Brenda Durkas got the class even more interested to abstain from using the electronic equipment after she made them read Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel, where books are burned, critical thought suppressed and television reigns supreme.
It was extremely difficult to for us to "kick-off" some of the students said, but despite their urges to check e-mail, they realized the benefits of occasionally disconnecting. Some students voluntarily deleted their MySpace accounts, put down their video games and turned off the television. Instead, they started playing football, soccer and other sports, but best of all many picked up reading again.
One student commented "If you can't read, then you can't write. And if you can't write, then you can't express yourself", as she looked up from a copy of 1984, the class' current assignment about the technological balance between personal privacy and state security.
In another assignment the students had to read George Orwell's novel about the peeping eye of "Big Brother". Following that assignment the students were told to chart the technology they could identify in their own local area, which was used to watch, spy and track them. Their lists quickly filled with items such as security cameras at the gym, toll-road transponders, ATM camera's, and personalized spam e-mails. As the program progressed the students also realized that they had been ignorant to the fact that all privacy is relative. Computer systems can match images caught by security cameras against digital mug shots of criminals. The ink from some color printers acts as a digital license plate, helping identify the machine. Some of them also heard for the first time that the US federal government and other countries in the world have secret wiretap programs.
For a generation of students who have been growing up on-line, logging off for a week seems almost impossible. Our hat goes off to salute Brenda Durkacs and her class of freshmen at Coral Springs High School in Florida. They managed to survive seven days of writing with ballpoint, pencils and paper, reading books, chatting face-to face and actually going outside to play. It is an example we should also follow in Europe, where the addiction of kids to electronic games and a host of other electronic gadgets has also gone totally out of control.
