Are Electronic gadgets making our children smarter or even more foolish?

At the dawn of the techno age people believed that the internet would make children smarter and quicker at learning new things, but from the way we see things around my place, it may have done the exact opposite, it has made children more foolish, we are raising a generation of ignorant youngsters who believe they know everything about the world when they actually know nothing important.

I was in a waiting room with some people to see an advocate, then there was this kid who was sitting next to her mother with two others, he was kind of reading a red booklet with blue markings on the edges , with the words that read, ” Hawaii the land of ferocious fires,” he was wearing a navy blue uniform with red and white stripes at the wrists, I said, ”hello!” and he replied back gladly, then I asked, ”which school are you from?” he described it in rapid fire including the grade, he was in class seven, “wow! That’s good,” I mumbled looking at the magazine cover he was staring at, it was titled, “WILD AUSTRALIA, WHY MARSUPIALS WILL GO EXTINCT WITHIN THE NEXT FEW DECADES…” I then asked the kid this question, “do you know what a marsupial is?” “No!” He replied, “But you should have known by this age, you said you are in class seven right?” “yes of course, but I just don’t remember,” he said, “some teacher taught us a year ago and went away so I don’t remember,” then I thought it wise to keep the conversation going with another question, “do you know what rocks are?” there was no answer. I gave three more simple questions based on his primary school curriculum and each time came up with the same blunt replies, then seemingly utterly annoyed, he barked at me saying, “Why don’t you go and find that out on the internet? Our teacher taught us how to search the internet to learn more of the things we learn at school like last week we searched for vertebrates, birds and amphibians.” I didn’t ask him any more questions after this for I was shocked beyond belief. I wanted to say “hey what’s wrong with you kid?” but later saw this was no use.

I can’t imagine the kid is blaming the availability of the internet for his ignorance at school believing he can find everything there and does not need to remember anything at all. This is a sign of laziness and reluctance about to thrive instead of the desire for academic excellence.

Technology can teach children many things about the world but never teach them things a parent would do about life, about responsibility and about penance.

Primary school pupils no longer care about their handwriting or even the neatness of their works or books, because they know they will type it on a keyboard, the age of handwriting recognition and uniqueness, (identification) will soon disappear and be replaced by disarray of electronic writing.

death of grammar

Once school kids begin to do all their assignments using their mini pcs, word editors will automatically correct every word they misspell, and every phrase they misquote will quickly be corrected by the fancy machines. How then will you be able to test their grammar skills if they don’t need to do anything on their own? It’s like giving a third grader a calculator to use at every exam and then expect them to know simple calculations off head. What about creative writing and compositions? They can easily check-up thesaurus in the dictionaries.

The marginalization of the handwriting is inevitable.

Electronics boost learning processes in colleges and institutions of higher learning, that is a great benefit to the academic elite, but when it comes to juniors, it poses serious questions. Bombarding them with all these gadgets in their classrooms might interfere with their calmness and natural learning processes.

Furthermore it takes a long time to learn how to use these gadgets especially programs that come with them, probably six to twelve months of training is enough, so they won’t be useful for someone who doesn’t know how to read, secondly they rely heavily on power source and power supply, so they won’t be useful in places where there is no electricity. A vast majority of school going children around the world do not have access to electricity in both their homes and schools, in the meantime this program will only be available to a few rich kids who live in mega cities. Electricity is the father of all electronics, without it no gadget can be of use to anyone.

There is a group of enthusiasts who are very determined to distribute electronics to all primary school going children around the world, including grade one and grade two pupils. The important question is, do they teach children how to read and write because that’s what children go to school to do, “to learn how to read and write.” should those electronics boggle their minds with unwanted programs and applications, they will simply break them and ask for another one.

A teacher once removed all electronic learning materials from her classroom when she found out that children were playing more games when she goes out. All the time when she is in class they pay no attention to her, instead keep starring at the screens throughout the lesson and end up learning nothing.

For someone who knows what they are doing, then it becomes useful but for children who have no idea what the gadget is for will lose much.

Can they completely replace the role of the teacher in class? Books have been there for over a millennia, they are easy to handle, when you give child an electronic gadget, they stop listening to your words, unlike books, these gadgets appear to them as clumsy creatures, it raises their curiosity and want to experiment with them tweaking things here and there, they look strange and produce funny sounds, “these are exactly what we have been looking for,” they say unto themselves, a child’s plaything.

What was meant to be an educational tool ended up being used as a child’s toy. Electronics destroy a pupil’s interest in academic work, they look for something more exciting always instead of something of value.

Excessive information fed to them saps their energy and enthusiasm as they strive to acquire more.

little nerdy geeks.

You can’t send children into a computer laboratory then leave them to find things out for themselves without any guidance which could be dangerous for them. It’s a freedom only applicable to students in higher education. But for pre-school and secondary school going children that would be loading them with bulk of information which could possibly harm them. Their computers should come pre-programmed with their relevant subjects, if possible disconnect the entire library from the World Wide Web. Technology can teach children nearly everything, many things about the world around us, but never teach them things about life skills the way a parent or teacher would do, things about, virtue, hard work, integrity, responsibility, patience and so much more.

Grade 1 kids are not for electronics, let it be someone who knows what they are doing for the time being. You buy a kid a hundred thousand pounds E-gadget, and two weeks later they have smashed it, and they want another better than the first.

The easiness to flip though pages makes it also easy for them to ignore important content, the kids rapidly flip through the pages they were supposed to read in detail looking for interesting features, if your book does not have marvelous pictures then less likely is it going to be read.

The high tech class room atmosphere with all its resources will be in contrast with the immediate world outside where these gadgets would have limited functionality.

Children are tracking their parents’ activities online more rigorously and much swifter than their parents are, and they happen to be smarter in this field.

Technology raising kids with poor posture, a sluggish and soggy look with their eyes glued onto the screen of a tiny gadget held in their hands with some long plastic thread hanging from their heads, plugged deep into their ears, and once in a while laugh at themselves then go back to gaze at the small screen, people in the bus turn to see what the hullabaloo is all about only to see what looks like a disoriented kid making funny faces to a hand held gadget, as if something has gotten into his eyes, or talking to the plastic box, with probably an old friend behind the prehensile screen.