March 2006 — School Perspective
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Can Generation M Learn Its ABCs?
From resistance to acceptance to integration: the ultimate education struggle for the 21st century, played out in one teacher’s grudging embrace of new technologies.
ONE
PURPOSE OF the Kaiser Family Foundation March 2005 report “Generation
M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds” (www.kff.org/entmedia)
was to help spur a national dialog on the role that media play in the lives
of our children.
Consider me spurred. It took about three sentences of this report to make my head start to spin. As the report so clearly demonstrates, today’s students live in a world unlike any that preceded it. What effect on the education process does this have? A profound one.
Consider this description of our kids’ world from the Kaiser study: “New homes come complete with special nooks for oversized TV screens and home entertainment centers, while new cars come with personal TV screens in the back of each seat. The amount of media a person used to consume in a month can be downloaded in minutes and carried in a device the size of a lipstick tube. Today we get movies on cell phones, TVs in cars, and radio through the Internet. Media technologies themselves are morphing and merging, forming an everexpanding presence throughout our daily environment. Cell phones alone have grown to include video game platforms, email devices, digital cameras and Internet connections.”
What’s the result of having so much technology to do our bidding? Simply this: Our kids are spending 6 1/2 hours a day using some form of media. That’s 44 hours a week plugged in. That, as the report points out, is the equivalent of a full-time job plus a little overtime. And don’t forget to factor in the overlap: About 25 percent of that time is spent using more than one form of media at the same time. TV takes up most of kids’ attention, occupying almost four hours of their day; music almost two hours. They spend a little over an hour a day listening to radio, CDs, or MP3 players. Time spent on the computer unrelated to schoolwork nets a little less than an hour a day, which is the same amount spent playing video games. Now picture the average classroom. Thirty kids. Desks. Books. How does the typical teacher engage, motivate, communicate with, entertain, and instruct a generation of children raised on 40-plus hours a week of media recreation? How can teachers develop the ability of students to think critically and thoroughly, to speak with clarity and organization, to write with depth and reason, to simply participate in the intellectual process at all when these kids essentially have turned the act of being electronically stimulated into a full-time job?
