Consumer Electronics Causing 'Death of Childhood'? 758
An anonymous reader writes "Top children's authors, including best-seller Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), have written an open letter to the British Government claiming that consumer electronics have brought about the death of childhood. They say that children desperately need 'real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in'. The letter writers also state that children have lost their imaginations because they are, 'pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.' The article asks, 'is modern life too fast for the supple human mind? Do children have a rev counter we're red-lining by exposing them to so much input?'" So what does Slashdot think? Are kids growing up too fast nowadays because of them new-fangled technologies?
Re:I've seen this first-hand (Score:2, Informative)
Read this book [amazon.com] and if it seems to describe your son, give it to him after you're done with it.
link to the actual letter (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, (Score:3, Informative)
Which of course means you are exactly right.
Re:No real programmers either (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Think so?
Here is the course catalog [umich.edu] for a very well-respected, nationally reknowned computer science program at a Big 10 school.
Other than "Computer Organization" and "Design of Microprocessor-Based Systems", neither of which is truly a programming class, show me another class which even mentions assembly language in the course description. Those two courses are it, and neither one is really focused on assembly language, but are more or less computer architecture classes.
Re:Growing up too fast? (Score:2, Informative)
Like anything, it depends upon specifics... (Score:3, Informative)
I got an Apple ][ back in 1978 when I was 10. It had only a couple of crappy text games on it, and I wished I had more. So I taught myself to program.
Fast-forward 28 years, and I am still programming, making mid-six-figures in salary, and I never finished college.
Would I take away my early exposure to computers? Um, hell no. Will I give my 3-year-old a computer when he is ten? That depends upon whether or not I can "restrict" his usage to "productive" tasks and harmless media. So, probably.
But will I give him a Nintendo when he is ten? Absolutely not. My parents would never buy me an Atari console as a kid, making me save my lawn-mowing money up to buy one when I was sixteen. And you know what? By the time I bought that thing, I really didn't even play it that much because programming was so much more engrossing.
And I still thank my parents for being so discerning between types of electronic media. It makes all the difference. There's a good chance that if they had bought me an Atari at age ten instead of an Apple ][, I'd probably be a college dropout working at Starbucks instead of a highly recruited UI engineer.
So, like anything else, it depends. Bottom line: parents are around for a reason. Namely, to make the correct decisions involving the upbringing of their children. Sure it's easier to just buy them a console and plug them in for a few hours a day. But that's not what parenting is about at its core.
They aren't growing up (Score:1, Informative)
Children are infact taking longer to mentally mature than ever before, and positive adult behaviors are appearing at ever higher ages, or increasingly never at all.
A sexually active, dressed as a prostitute 12 year old of today is almost certainly mentally less grown up than a playing with dolls never been kissed 12 year old of 100 years ago.
fostering apathy in children (Score:4, Informative)
The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.
I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt [holtgws.com] realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.
Holt wrote a couple books [holtgws.com] - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.
I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.
Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher [newciv.org]: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."