A new UN report raised concerns on Wednesday about the excessive use of smartphones, calling for them to be banned in schools worldwide. According to the UN's education, science and culture agency UNESCO, the over-use of mobile phones impacts learning.
It’s not that their brain explodes or anything.
But focus and attention span are skills that need to be practiced to be developed. If you never get that practice, the scope of problems you’re able to solve shrinks substantially, because a lot of big problems need sustained attention to make a real dent in. Coming in from a lateral angle with ideas from other areas are great, and a lot of problems are solved that way, but you need to be immersed in the problem space at some point before you get that stroke of insight.
You need to be able to sustain attention, though, and that takes practice.
I get you, it’s just that I feel like this conversation might end up swirling into a “what is normal? Who gets to define what normal is and what are their motivations for defining those parameters as normal?” sort of deal.
With the current world the way it is at hand though, yeah, kids do need to be forced to focus for long periods of time so they can operate when they get into the world on their own.
In an ideal world, whatever shape that takes, I’m not so sure that would be necessary, but we don’t get to work with ideals, so your stance seems the most realistic.