Op-ed piece by SF writer Robert J. Sawyer, illustrating very well the real conflict between 21st Century education and the “last gasps of the couch-potato generation.”
“All Screens Are Not Created Equal”
We have an epidemic of attention deficit disorder — or, at least, we have an epidemic of diagnoses of that condition. And the culprit most often named: the use of computers.
But is there really something wrong with huge numbers of young people today? Has computer use rotted their brains? Or is it — perhaps — that there’s something wrong with how we’re defining normal?
Our psychological tests for measuring attention were developed between the 1950s and the 1990s. But that was an aberrant period in human history. It was the era of the boob tube and couch potatoes, of people sitting passively in front of television sets for hours on end. Now, in a world in which young people constantly shift their attention from one thing to another, we brand them as ill if they don’t sit still in class.