Are We Doing Enough to Keep Our Students Safe?
The Internet: For me, it was a positive thing. Nowadays, as a mum and step- mum, I feel passion and burden in equal measure to educate myself. The more I do, the more worried I become. However, I do advocate supervised use of Internet
in schools. It’s fascinating how much our kids can learn about the world and beyond because of time spent researching online.
Technology, a tool which helps teachers educate students, has consistently been
introduced in classrooms since the 1800’s. Chalkboards were once considered
revolutionary and the introduction of ball point pens once described as, “the ruin of education…” by Federal Teachers 1950!
What concerns me are the growing numbers of children I observe in school playgrounds attached to smartphones. Why? Canstar Blue refers to a study which shows 84% of children in New Zealand have phones. There are several negative impacts of smartphones and all people, especially children and teens.
The urge to check a phone is uncontrollable. Studies have shown dopamine hits are experienced upon receiving a message or alert. The same hit we receive when
we drink, smoke and gamble; all things with age restrictions. There’s no such age
restriction on smartphones and they’re causing compulsion disorders in our
children. Try asking a teenager to give up their phone for 24 hours.
Within seconds we can access whatever we want on a smartphone. From horrifying images and videos to the cutest. On platforms like Facebook, these vastly different images can be seen one immediately after the other. Dissonance, rewiring of the brain leads to desensitization. If it affects fully formed adult brains, what is it doing to the developing brains of children?
How are empathy levels going to change globally over the next couple of generations? This is growing concern because our children are so busy with their
faces in their phones, they’re not present in where they’re at. They’re not learning
to read body language, make eye contact or form deep meaningful connections with others and the world around them.
Instant gratification is King, but life is a journey which includes long, hard lessons
that teach us coping skills. How will our children cope in the real world if they expect things to happen on demand?
Philip Zimbardo talks about teenage boys experiencing arousal addiction, a need for variety, from watching free, inappropriate images and videos, up to 50 clips a week. There is plenty of variety: they can swipe the screen to find a plethora of different images. They don’t depict romance, love or even kissing. What they are learning, instead, is at the opposite end of the scale. I worry for my daughter and step-children and their future relationships.
What about self-esteem in our girls? How many are taking self-worth from the
amount of likes and shares they get on a photo? Photos they spend ample amounts of time, only to keep one out of fifty photos, only happy with the best angle, a duck face or a provocative look. They only use a photo that’s been filtered to look better than they do in real life. What if that photo falls short of the expected adoration? How do they deal with that? Try googling hashtags on social media such as #thinspiration, #dropdeadgorgeous or #fitspiration. This
is what our girls are trying to live up to. Instagram is said to be amongst the leading cause of depression in teenagers. It’s not hard to see why.
Kids dating status online is the new norm among tweens and teens. I learned firsthand that ids can consider their status “in a relationship” after a few texts with someone, despite having never met face to face. I have watched videos of girls sneak off to isolated places to meet boys they had never even seen in real life, only to discover the boy was in fact an undercover adult trying to highlight this problem.
If Steve Jobs himself would not allow his children to have iPads or iPhones because he knew the negative effects, particularly regarding compulsion disorder, you have to wonder why so many of our young children are permitted to have them. Justifi cation by parents and guardians seems to be the “in the event of an emergency” scenario. Given that schools have been around for centuries with adequate emergency protocols, I can’t help but wonder if it’s something to do with
our generation of mollycoddling parents. I googled “how to bypass school’s internet security” and was met with an abundance of articles and videos showing me how. If I know this, surely our students do as well. Can we minimise kids accessing social media and harmful sites during school hours? All schools have different policies. Some encourage an outright ban on smartphones and some allow them as part of the ‘bring your own device’ to school policy. Could that device instead be a laptop? Laptop screens are far easier for an adult to see and less likely to be used sneakily by a student. The more we allow kids to have unsupervised time on the Internet, the more likely they will encounter negative effects by using it.
Can more be done to monitor Internet security? Parents and schools have to work
together. The Internet can be a wonderful educational tool, but it comes with real
dangers. We need to be fully informed to give our children freedom to learn and grow in cyberspace, within boundaries set to keep them safe.