I want to share two stories.
The first story is about how we’ve lost our way.
The second story is about how we might find our way back.
Story One: Blue Light at the Symphony
The other night, I went to the symphony with my husband, and sitting in one of the last rows of the huge theater, within our line of sight, was a young boy, maybe 8 or 9 years old. He seemed to be in attendance with an older sister and his mother. And he was wearing headphones– the big ones that cover your ears completely like earmuffs. In his hand, he held a smartphone.
Surely, I thought to myself before the lights dimmed– surely, he will put the device down before the music starts. He wouldn’t be able to hear the opening notes of the Bartok Romanian dances, or witness the first sounds of a brand-new violin concerto. He wouldn’t notice the swelling of the brass in my favorite symphony, Dvorak’s “From the New World.”
He’d put the phone away…right?
The lights dimmed.
The device’s blue light glowed on his face as the orchestra began to play.
He did not put the phone down during Bartok.
He did not remove his headphones down during the passionate cadenza of the brand-new violin concerto by Raymond Liu, performed by the astonishingly talented Esther Yoo.
And he did not look up once while the notes from the “New World” symphony soared.
One of the founding philosophies of tech-intentionality is to replace judgment with curiosity. And I will admit– I struggled to do that while watching this boy. Perhaps, I thought, he has a sensory disorder and needs to wear headphones to minimize the volume. But that didn’t explain the screen in his hands. And his thumbs were moving, so it seemed like he was playing some sort of game. Perhaps the babysitter canceled, and this mother’s only option was to be able to bring her daughter– who was fully engaged in the music– to the performance.
Perhaps those were both true, or not true at all, or perhaps there was a different explanation.
But on more than one occasion during the concert, I also noticed that his mother held her phone in her hands, the blue light glowing on her cheeks, one finger tapping and scrolling. Not the whole concert– but often.
I am not shocked by much these days when it comes to children and screen use. But it was stunning to watch this scene unfold– this constant and silent disappearance into a tiny digital device when just below us played one of the greatest violinists in the world– in real time, in real life.
I didn’t feel shocked.
I felt sad.
Early in my tech-intentional journey, I developed three questions for parents to consider when they wanted to give their children a screen-based device:
What do you gain?
What do you lose or replace?
What do you model?
When I try to apply these to the boy at the symphony, I do not know how to answer all of these. What was gained? Perhaps a canceled babysitter meant the sister could still attend. He was, admittedly, quiet– though the light on his face was distracting to those around him. It certainly caught my eye.
What was lost or replaced…?
How can I answer this? I see so much loss in this scenario, yet without really knowing the whole story, I can only speculate.
What was modeled?
This is the hardest one for me. The parent-figure with the boy was on her phone for a good portion of the concert. Not the entire thing, but enough that I noticed it in her hands. (The daughter was focused on the stage the entire concert– no screen in her hand at all). Whether intentional or not, this parent was modeling that using a phone during a concert is acceptable behavior. Why would the boy ever think otherwise, when she was sitting beside him, doing the same thing?
But what this scene really made me think most about was this: Did this boy know what he was missing? Could he know what was being lost as he stared into the phone in his hands, headphones silencing the music around him? Or was his childhood structured around the virtual experiences in his device such that he could not– would not– know the external and real experiences happening directly in front of him?
On a visit with some high school students a few weeks ago, one of them told me that she volunteered as an after-school drama club with elementary school-aged children. “When I tell them, ‘Let’s pretend we’re flying,’ they say to me, ‘How? How do we do that?’ They do not know how to pretend.”
A child whose imagination is dependent on being told what to do and how to do it, instead of being nurtured through play and social interactions because it is in the nature of a child to be able to imagine is a child who cannot grow up to think creatively about the world’s problems.
A child who cannot imagine, cannot write nor think for herself. She cannot express her own ideas as unique to her sense of self and humanity. She cannot grow up to be a young adult who can advocate for herself and others, to work with those with whom she disagrees, who can face adversity with resilience.
When I write about screentime and parenting and education, I am doing so because I care deeply about it, yes. But I am also deeply concerned that if we do not protect childhood and a child’s ability to learn about themselves and the world around them by being a part of the world around them, we stand to lose something we cannot get back.
I found out last week that our district is telling ELA teachers to use AI to assess student essays because the teachers "can't keep up with the writing-heavy new curriculum” (which they received three days before school started). One student turned in an essay and had a grade 45 seconds later. In his recent excellent essay, Ben Riley of Cognitive Dissonance wrote about his experience at the the ASU+GSV conference, a huge EdTech gathering, where Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s VP of Education, said, that “AI will soon be able to know your hopes and dreams.”
Belsky's quote made me think of a conversation I had last week with an activist in Nairobi, who told me about how American technology companies are dumping all kinds of tech in schools there, including in rural villages that lack electricity, and Kenyan children are getting addicted to porn, YouTube, and online gambling. This activist told me, "Technology has stolen their future. Children cannot sleep because they are consumed with technology and children who cannot sleep, cannot dream."
So even if Belsky is "right", it seems like AI won't have much to predict about children's dreams...because they won't have any.
We cannot know what we’ve lost if we don’t know what we have.
Story Two: The Curious Generation
I recently started teaching again (as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy). I was immediately reminded that there is no greater source of hope than working with young people who want to make the world a better place. And there is no greater privilege than being able to show them how that could be possible.
On our first day of class, I showed them this picture:
These are kindergarten students in my city, sitting on the playground before school, hunched over their district-issued iPads.
My university students– mostly young adults in their late teens or early 20s– were shocked by this picture. In their “exit tickets” (an index card on which they respond to a brief prompt before class ends), they wrote the following:
“One thing that stuck out to me was the images of kindergarteners huddled around iPads before school. I would love to learn more about child development and what damage technology can have on their lives.”
“Seeing the photo of the children on the playground with iPads was very disturbing to me– when they have a whole playground in the background!”
“I had no idea elementary school students were getting school-issued iPads– this opens a new door for me in thinking about the scope of tech in our schools and lives.”
To replace judgment with curiosity is the starting point.
To provide information to inspire courage and effect change is the next step.
To be a teacher– and a parent– is to give us the opportunity to do both.
Story Three: Counterpoint
Composer J.S. Bach was a master of the “counterpoint,” weaving multiple independent melodies, often at odds with each other, into a single coherent harmony. This week I felt like Bach was at work behind the scenes in my life.
As my husband and I were leaving the symphony, delighted by the music we’d heard but also distressed by the intrusion of technology, we noticed that the crowd was a lot younger than we’d expected. In fact, at least in our section, there were quite a lot of young people– college students on a group trip and 20- and 30-somethings dressed up and out for a night of music. My husband even saw a high school student awkwardly try to buy M&Ms with cash at intermission (they only took cards and Apple Pay, another loss).
These students and teens and much-hipper-than-me-young adults were not glued to screens during the show. There was the occasional selfie and Instagram post during intermission, I’m sure, but these young people chose to spend their Saturday night doing something deeply low-tech: listening to practitioners at the height of their craft play music unaccompanied by visuals and without the aid of any form of AI or screen-based technology.
The pendulum has swung too far, so far that the string is at risk of breaking.
But if the students in my class or the young adults at the symphony on Saturday are any indication, momentum may be shifting and gravity may be about to have her turn.
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