Prof Sugata Mitra on Jonathan Haidt
This is taken from the Facebook of TED Prize winner, Prof Sugata Mitra: on Jonathan Haidt book: The Anxious Generation.
“The Anxious Generation” is a recent book by Jonathan Haidt that has sold millions of copies. It has also caused a lot of anxiety amongst parents, teachers and school administrators. I recently read (or listened to) the book.
Haidt’s book contains well-researched facts that describe two problems:
- Social Media, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, mainly used on smartphones by children and teens, is causing mental illness. What Haidt dramatically describes as “rewiring”.
- There is a severe reduction in play-time – time that children can spend in unsupervised, self-organised groups.
His data is about children and teens in the USA, the UK, parts of Scandinavia, and Australia. These countries, particularly the USA, have lifestyles, norms and cultural values that would be inexplicable to the rest of the world. That is another story.
Haidt suggests that smartphones should be banned from use during school hours and that smartphones should not be given to children before the age of 16. He further suggests that no one should be allowed to create a social media account before the age of 13. Mercifully, he does say that these suggestions don’t mean that the Internet should not be allowed in schools, or that children should not use the Internet.
Next, he suggests that unsupervised play time should be increased.
There is a major omission: If unsupervised play time is to be increased and the Internet should not be banned from schools, then access to the Internet on shared public computers, in unsupervised and self-organised groups, should be encouraged. I know that such access improves learning, problem solving, collaboration and communication; there is plenty of evidence of that.
Haidt leaves this out, maybe because his book needs to be a story of despair, gloom and doom. Nobody buys optimism.