How to win the war
One of my students is putting persuasive writing to real-world use — they’re trying to get their parents to let them use SnapChat.
This emerged as an issue a few weeks ago, in a discussion of informative writing. Their pitch on that occasion bore no fruit.
Now, they’ve moved into full-fledged persuasive essay territory, they are reinforcing the argument to make a second attempt.
Each party is stuck in a justified subjectivity:
My student feels that without access to the app ‘all my friends use’ they’re socially isolated and missing out.
Their parents (as told by them) are worried that images and words entrusted to social media exist forever, making too high-stakes a game of teen banter.
My reflexive sympathy for his parents’ stance is weighed against specific and general caveats. Re the former, they are (at least on the evidence of our interactions) a good-natured, well-adjusted thoughtful young person.
As for the latter, grown-up efforts to prohibit social media reek
of Canute-versus-waves levels of futility.
Teen social media use
The Pew Research Center study ‘Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023’ reports that about 33% of teens are on one of the top five social media sites — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat and Facebook ‘almost constantly’. And 46% are online ‘almost constantly’.
According to Statistia, this amounts to about five hours per day on social media.
How can well-intentioned adults compete with that?
The simple fact is, we can’t. Just saying no never works: see also, Prohibition, the War on Drugs that isn’t the band, abstinence-only education, etc.
In my perfect world, smartphones would be licensed and restricted to over-16s, or maybe over-18s, if for no other reason than if a body is too young to go into an adult bookshop, they don’t need free, 24/7 access to online hardcore.
But this world is neither mine nor anybody else’s idea of perfect. So.
Channeling
Canute’s problem with the waves was that water does not acknowledge obstacles; it moves around them.
Trying to put a hard stop on social media use is about the same: youthful energy will simply find another way.
What one can do with water is channel it.
Edward Dolnick’s Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, which I read this week and tremendously enjoyed, centers on the rivalry between two would-be deciphers of Napoleon’s most famous stolen object: Brit Thomas Young and Frenchman Jean-François Champollion.
The former was a Renaissance-man type who made astonishing scientific breakthroughs in multiple fields; the latter was, not to put too fine a point on it, a massive Egypt nerd. Champollion was obsessed with the land of the Pharaohs and preemptively taught himself Coptic, a moribund language that was, nonetheless, the nearest relative to ancient Egyptian.
Spoiler alert: it was Champollion who cracked the hieroglyph code. He was, arguably, less clever than Young, certainly less confident and less well-funded, but he channeled all the passion and energy of his 41-year life into Egypt and so happened to make one of the great linguistic breakthroughs in all of history.
Preoccupations
How does this bear on social media?
Bear with me.
We can’t conjure more Rosetta Stones. But we can — teachers, parents, grown-ups of the world — make a conscious effort to foster kids’ healthy preoccupations.
Mine was reading and writing. Look where that got me.
My brother’s was messing with a Commodore 64; he’s a six-figure programmer.
Anecdotally, my students who seem happiest are those with active preoccupations: flute, swimming, robotics. What it is hardly matters; what’s striking is how they light up when they talk about what they love.
Balancing act
What I’ve observed is that too often extracurriculars become another box to tick with eyes glued to the so-called prize of eventual college admissions or some such.
This does not a preoccupation make (except maybe for parents). Some of the dullest, most jaded-seeming teens I’ve met have CVs that put mine to shame — but they are so painfully aware that every move is being watched, weighed and measured for its ‘benefit’ that they, quite reasonably, cannot see these activities as anything but another chore.
On the flip side, genuine preoccupations are often dismissed or undervalued because they’re not ‘productive’. I was astonished to learn one of my students is an accomplished competitive show-jumper. She’d never thought to mention it because she didn’t see it as relevant to her education. Shame on education.
Reimagining education
The conventional model of education: sit in school, or at a computer, for six to nine hours a day, having information about disparate subjects fired at you in 45-60 minute chunks — is breathtakingly stupid. No wonder the gifted and imaginative struggle.
Is it any wonder social media is teens’ drug of choice?
Lest anyone panic, I’m not arguing for less school. Patall, et al. (2010) reviewed 15 studies on the consequences of expanding school hours and they found that, overall, extending school time supported learning, especially for at-risk students.
What I am arguing for is thinking hard about how time is allocated within the school day/year, and reimagining education as a holistic experience that fosters intellectual, physical, social, emotional and even spiritual growth.
This would put an end to seven classes a day with 30 minutes for lunch, followed by a mad dash to the playing field or club HQ.
Surely, with all science has to say about neurodevelopment, all history has to say about society and culture, all psychology has to say about individuals, all research has to say about effective teaching strategies… we could do better.
Home school families have a huge opportunity; private and independent schools have a huge opportunity; families using blended or online learning have huge opportunities — if they’re alert to make the most of them.
Build the channel
One of the amazing opportunities of holistic education is giving students access to an array of potential preoccupations.
Maybe they’ll discover they love pole-vaulting, cell biology, engraving, guitar, horticulture.
Instead of being treated as either a) resume-fodder or b) a distraction, these preoccupations could be integrated into student’s learning pathways. They could be taken seriously as an important interest and lightly as another aspect of the curricula.
When interviewing winemakers for Oregon Wine Pioneers, I was struck by how many of them had come to wine from other fields — medicine, economics, education, psychology. But these weren’t blind veers. Digging deeper, it transpired that beneath their academic and professional credentials lay preoccupations rooted in family histories: parents and grandparents who tended, made wine, cultivated gardens.
These pioneering winemakers had allowed themselves to be drawn back to these loves. They’d had the courage to step away from socially approved occupations to embrace their preoccupations.
Let the water find its level
Right now, all my student’s attention is on (lack of) SnapChat. As it stands, there is zero chance of it ceasing to be an object of desire.
If there were another place for that energy to go, social media might lose some shine.