Children learn best when engaged in the living world, not on screens

https://aeon.co/essays/children-learn-best-when-engaged-in-the-living-world-not-on-screens

by acconrad • 8 years ago

140 39 8 years ago

cheschire• 8 years ago

It's obvious that a balance is appropriate. Meatspace engagements will provide one level of training, but kids can't be exposed to everything. My kids will never have the experience of running a farm, but I can give them a shadow of the real thing by allowing them to play farm simulator.

oconnore3• 8 years ago

That’s not obvious. You are saying that “shadows of the real thing” have more value than other ways they could spend that energy, which seems unlikely.

If you want to let your kids play video games, fine, but the hand waving to support your personal intuition is blatant here.

SaltyMaia• 8 years ago

It's obvious because it's clearly a false dichotomy... not everything maps 1 to 1 from real world to digital world, and things you learn in one may not be learnable in the other.

Equating farm visitation to playing farming simulator is absurd, literally no one would support that the digital counterpart is more absolutely valuable, whatever that means (the onus of figuring that out is on you)

But sure, I'll go with an easy cookie cutter example just to fit your argument - letting a kid play flight simulator is much easier, faster, and affordable than enrolling them in a flight school. Maybe you're too poor to even consider a real school, but playing a video game is still a valid way to see if flight might be a genuine interest. Is it then a worthless endeavour?

Non-wasy examples would have you try to come up with direct alternatives to abstact thinking ( "obviously me making some weird DIY things will be better than playing a puzzle game" - absurd)

Attacking the digital medium is absolutely not the way we'll figure out how to move forward.

jorjordandan• 8 years ago

The fairly standard elementary school my daughter attends has little to no screen time. I'm more likely to play with 3d modelling software or Minecraft with my daughter at home - in addition to time we spend exploring tidal pools or petting farms or at ballet classes. My younger daughter is reading and writing simple words a full year before Kindergarten, thanks to engaging educational apps. This story seems long on nostalgia but short on data. The same concerns have been raised since Socrates (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...), and yet generation after generation learns to function. It's such a time honoured cliche that even this response is a time honoured cliche.

oconnore3• 8 years ago

Smart kids reading and writing a year before kindergarten is not a new phenomenon since the development of education apps. It’s wonderful that she’s doing that, though!

crazynick4• 8 years ago

I was spelling basic words and reading by the time I was four. So was my mom around that age, and from talking to her I wasn't exactly exceptional, many kids did back then (this was 1990 for me, in Russia, regular people didn't have computers at all).

jsilence• 8 years ago

I had my struggles with written language througout my whole school carreer, (but not dylectic level struggles). Yet I went from engineering into academics with 20 years of software development in between, where I am researching and teaching now with the firm belief that I have a much more concise grasp on language and being able to express complex thoughts much better than any student.

Let children be children. Let them play freely. Don't push anything onto them. If they love learning reading, ok. If they don't, that's ok too and practically meaningless for their future prospect.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 years ago

and yet generation after generation learns to function.

True, each generation learns to function, but one should also be careful not to minimize the negative generation-wide effects of technology.

The most recent and current generations have learned to function with a huge available supply of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods with the consequence that record numbers of them suffer from obesity and diseases that were previously termed "adult onset" or "old age" diseases. While they have learned to function, we shouldn't deny the huge negative consequences of what technology has allowed.

There are many other examples of this (many generations "learned to function" with an overabundance of lead). We shouldn't minimize some of the negative effects of ubiquitous 2 dimensional screens just because we are used to them.

konschubert• 8 years ago

My younger daughter is reading and writing simple words a full year before Kindergarten, thanks to engaging educational apps

This is going to be harsh, but I'm in the mood:

I don't think there is a strong correlation between the age at which somebody spells his first words and later academic success.

I guess if you put in the time you can teach any reasonably smart three year old a trick or two, but wouldn't they be able to learn that more quickly at the age of 6 or 7?

One of the things that helped me a lot during my studies was the ability to mentally vizualize complex topological situations. I don't think that's a skill you get from educational apps or from being able to spell your name at 8 months.

sbov• 8 years ago

Overall I agree, but maybe the person you're replying to just enjoys it.

My mother in law was a preschool teacher. Parents would ask when they would learn to spell, math, etc. She would say: after they learn to wait their turn in line and stop eating the paste.

My mom's favorite story is my oldest brother could read going into kindergarden. She told the teacher, who then asked: but does he know where he lives? Nope, he didn't.

mmt• 8 years ago

One of the things that helped me a lot during my studies was the ability to mentally vizualize complex topological situations. I don't think that's a skill you get from

I'm not convinced that's a skill you get from anything, as opposed to an inate talent (or set of talents). I'd want to see pretty strong evidence that it could be taught to someone without the inate talent.

I'm pretty sure I'm someone with that talent, since I was never taught how to do it.

jriot• 8 years ago

Can she play outside with other children without adult supervision? Do those children require adult intervention when a problem arises? Can she ride a bike without training wheels? I find these to be far more important skill-sets than being able to read prior to starting school.

I have two children - one going into 3rd grade and the entering kindergarten. Both of them up and outside by 9am playing all day without adult supervision. We can see them from our kitchen in the field and street playing; we are monitoring them.

dvtv752• 8 years ago

My younger daughter is reading and writing simple words a full year before Kindergarten, thanks to engaging educational apps.

So was I. I was reading books to my parents and grandparents by the time I was three years old. By 8 years old, I had the reading age of an adult, and when my father eventually regained legal access to us (edit: when I was 9 years old), I was correcting his spelling, pronunciation, and grammar.

My entire family thought I was some kind of genius, but it turned out that I have a moderate-to-severe learning disability, and this was an early symptom of it.

I'm not trying to diagnose your daughter, don't even imagine that. However, I am suggesting that there may be other reasons for your daughter's apparent advancement.

diogenescynic2• 8 years ago

Finland is like this— they allow kids to come to school and sort of pick their interests and follow those interests to develop skills by actually working on that craft/trade/subject in great detail. I think people would pursue knowledge if it was more customizable to allow kids to follow their passion.

kohanz• 8 years ago

Perhaps not the same, but reminds me of the Waldorf education philosophy [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education

diogenescynic2• 8 years ago

I looked it up and it’s actually Finland I was taking about. Michael Moore did a good piece on it: https://youtu.be/XQ_agxK6fLs

aqsalose• 8 years ago

While there no doubt has been great deal of changes in our schools since I was a kid (00s) and teachers have a great deal of freedom when it comes to planning how they teach, I'm fairly certain this kind utopian student freedom is not ... what happens. For example, Ministry of Education [1] provides a pdf of distribution of lesson hours (and if you are curious about the details, you can buy a digital version of the national curricula, which is a bit silly: such documents should be publicly distributed). Whatever the kids' true passion is, 6 lesson hours in a week are allocated for mathematics in grades 1-2.

edit. There's a drought of suitable official documents available in English, but see this [2] helpful document by City of Helsinki Education Department from 2014. It describes the picture about the daily life in schools the Education Department wanted to present to foreigners. Granted, things may have changed in 4 years, and such official documents should be taken with a grain of salt, but I'm inclined to believe that mandatory classes in Swedish still include grammar lessons about possessive pronouns.

[1] https://www.oph.fi/english/curricula_and_qualifications/basi...

[2] http://www.hel.fi/static/opev/virasto/opevsivuten/koulututuk...

SketchySeaBeast• 8 years ago

I absolutely believe that there should be physical elements to a child's development, and that the world holds a lot to experience, and I get that touching a cow is going to leave more of a lasting impact on a child than being forced to learn what an adjective is, I just don't know a better way to teach an adjective than rote memorization or a screen.

al_ramich2• 8 years ago

depends on what is defined by a screen. For example, you can imagine that kids in school will be able to fully immerse themselves into education scenarios (like being on a farm) through virtual or augmented tech. Smells and feel will also be simulated. From an education perspective will it be much different. Depends on how good AR/VR get... but also think of all the possibilities that kids and students will get that they couldn't in the real world e.g. as quoted in the article... kids will be able to go on virtual field trips, as well as traveling back in time for history lessons or meeting Albert Einstein

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/what-is-the-future-of-virtua...

ska3• 8 years ago

   For example, you can imagine that kids in school will be able to fully immerse themselves into education scenarios (like being on a farm) through virtual or augmented tech.

You can imagine that, but not really for anyone who is a school age kid now. Maybe their kids.

al_ramich2• 8 years ago

You are right, not today's kids but much sooner than their kids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cQbMP3I5Sk

hjek• 8 years ago

For example, you can imagine that kids in school will be able to fully immerse themselves into education scenarios (like being on a farm) through virtual or augmented tech.

I agree. We do really need to teach children farming is like, and VR can be a great tool for that. iAnimal[0] has apparently been a bit of an eye-opener for many people.

[0] https://vrscout.com/projects/ianimal-360-vr-film/

pnathan3• 8 years ago

The gestalt of a farm transcends what pixels and speakers can convey.

Humanity has historically fled from working on farms (note the % of farm workers over the last 300 years). Maybe before writing this sentence, question your pastoralist presumptions.

I will also remark, without proof, that retreating from the contemporary world gives your children a tailwind that they will need to overcome. The notion of teaching computers to children is a notion, at its core, of guiding children into engagement with the contemporary, preparing them to deliver their full potential within the world we live in.

Assumptions that "nature is better", or "sweaty work is more moral than brain work", or "face to face is better than distance" are founded upon certain assumptions about the world that are not per se true. Just because one might feel better, or feel more trusting, in certain environments does not make what you feel to be rational or correct. Much like "wellness", juice cleanses, or antivaxxing.

And, as counterpoint to the inevitable - it's also true that f2p mobile games and video short video recommendation systems are finely tuned addiction engines that prey upon children - the mental & physical health issues are not to be ignored. The author isn't going into those issues. And, limiting screen time is a very common practice in recognition of that reality.

jdhendrickson2• 8 years ago

I'm replying to you as someone whose children attend coder dojo twice a week, and they both have gtx 1070s despite being 7 and 9 respectively, this is relevant as evidence that I truly believe giving my children the best leg up in our society, requires them to have a a deep understanding of computers from a young age.

Face to face is better than distance. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance requires you to physically be in the same room with someone. We are creatures who can transmit a tremendous amount of information in everything from subtle facial expression to smell. All of that goes out the window over remote work.

Nature is not better, but it is important. I spent every waking moment from the time I got a computer at 19 until I turned 40 doing nothing but learning about computers, be it networking, programming, or system administration and the devops mutation that really just encapsulates a lot of what the grey beard sys admins were already doing. It consumed my life.

I've taken time off thanks to my wife and her patience, and the boot strapped company we started. Having gone camping now on state and federal lands, there is something there that we need. I realize this is anecdata but I think the reason these fallacious ideas have such appeal is a tiny kernel of truth.

Sweaty work is not more moral, but many times for me it's been more satisfying, there is a reason I have a wood and metal working shop setup. The moment when something I programmed works is absolutely euphoric, I've woken my wife more than once with a war shout of victory at 4 am. It's ephemeral though, there is always another problem nothing is ever truly done. When I walk into my shop and see the work bench I made, it fills me with deep satisfaction. A level of satisfaction I always found missing from my work no matter how elegant or satisfying the design.

Apologies for the maudlin, meandering discourse, I'm on the ++ side of the Balmer curve today.

pnathan3• 8 years ago

You're coming at this more nuanced and from a somewhat different angle than OP.

I largely agree with you, given this angle. But, it's Friday after noon...

The physical provides a certain sense of satisfaction that is not obtainable with the intellectual - and, frankly, vice versa. The OP makes a hard claim for monism, which tends to be a very difficult sell to people who think very hard about the notion of perceptions. Or, curiously enough, working psychologists - they tend to be intensely dualistic, whether they profess it or no. We exist within bodies, will we or nil we, however. And those bodies tend to feel good after running, or working out, or showering - or a wide variety of other things, such as a glass of a fine Scotch.

I have... great doubts about face to face for many things. It's a hotter medium in the McLuhan schema than, say, an email. You can forget what is said. People get angry at each other. People can read emotions that are there - and aren't! It's a slippery medium, and it's not a repeatable one. It's the best medium for a date with your partner, however. And in a sense, what we're really discussing here is media - and its effect upon a society. If, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message - what is the medium that tablets teach? What is the medium that a laptop teaches? A book? Face to face instruction? And, finally, a farm? If we break this down to a media-message-instruction approach, I think that is the educational question. It is no use to say, "well, a bookish person is drawn to books" - you might as well say "people who read books become bookish", and still tell the truth - it's a circular cause and effect. What is the nature of the tabletish? That's an interesting question we haven't answered. My opinion is that the Tablet as constituted today, for children, teaches constant interaction, constant focus, and destroys the body via bad posture & physical inactivity. Now, the Tablet can also be used for other things. Note taking. Drawing. Reading. And as adults, we find these less gamified things more powerful to our desires often.

I want to very carefully interrogate the concept of nature. I grew up approximately 1 mile from B.L.M. land, near towering mountains and inscrutable high mountain desert, and in my teens I hunted. Once I even shot a deer, gutted it, and hauled it out with my dad. My mom loved her gardens, and I was expected - and did - help out. I reference this to note that I literally had my hands deep in, "nature". Is it more natural (better?) to shoot an animal in the forest or to buy your meat from the grocery store? Or is it more natural to raise your cow, butcher, then eat? What qualifies as the natural? Lettuce from the forest? The garden? The roadside stand? the grocery store? Where do we draw this line? Historically, we learn that "nature" itself is a somewhat newer concept - it's not something standing outside of culture and time. The idea of wilderness itself is conceptualized differently between 2018, 1950, 1900, 1850, and, say, 1700.

Let's interrogate further. Are you in nature in your front yard? A small park down the street with a few trees, groomed grass, and a playground? What about a large park with a stream and many trees? What if we stop grooming grass? Take out the playground? What's going on here - when do we feel that we are in nature - and when are we not in nature? But - at some point we can say that "we are in nature", and people who "spend time in nature" to some degree actually generally report being healthier and happier, apparently. Well, okay, sure.

So this idea of "nature is beneficial" is really saying - this experiential concept that relates to embodiment is beneficial, but we haven't nailed down what that concept is - only that we agree that this undescribed concept is useful. Is this porn? Is this art? Do we know when we see it? Or can we actually define what is going on here.

I propose a mildly contrarian concept: humans are natural; ergo, what we create is natural, and thus we need to really tighten down what we're trying to say here.

Perhaps what we are saying is that an experience oriented around sense experience & focused embodiment in a setting without buildings is pleasurable and generally beneficial.

And now back to debugging a misbehaving system....

xkcd-sucks• 8 years ago

Active, unstructured engagement with the physical environment is absolutely necessary for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning is important for "STEM-like" learning, and also for safely navigating the physical world.

Children use fewer senses to engage with visual simulacra, and there is less diversity in the visual data provided by a screen than there is in a physical object.

Consider that holding an object allows a child to explore what happens to (sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, temperature) of (the object, their own body) when they (eat it, throw it, change its angle re: sunlight, tear it apart, bang it with a rock, draw on it, draw on something with it, etc). A really excellent simulation might encode some of those behaviors. Most, especially "educational" things, do not. No simulations deal with texture, taste, smell, weight, or effects on the user's own body.

This has been common knowledge in the developmental psych community for decades.

Also obvious that "sweaty work", as exercise, is really quite beneficial to mental health and ability. This is also common knowledge in the psych/medical communities.

pnathan3• 8 years ago

OP did not make those points, and I am not rebutting them, because they are true. :-)

Diaznash• 8 years ago

That title can make a good pitch for AR/VR.

loourr• 8 years ago

This feels equally true of classrooms as screens

madrox• 8 years ago

In my childhood, it was television that should be avoided. I arguably learned more about nature by watching Lorne Greene's New Wilderness than I did in my semi-rural home town. Argumentum ad antiquitatem is a real thing.

I've heard arguments like this my whole life. Not once has it turned out to be true for me. That either means I'm an anomaly or this topic is widely subjective.

CharlesW• 8 years ago

I've heard arguments like this my whole life. Not once has it turned out to be true for me.

I'm with you, and I'm surprised by the downvotes given the explicit caveat "for me". I wouldn't have thought that many HN folks would think of this as universal dogma.

guessthejuice• 8 years ago

I've heard it my entire life too and have come to the same conclusion as you. But I don't think it is argumentum ad antiquitatem though. I think it's the media's version of "publish or perish". Journalists have to constantly publish something and fear sells. Whether it is tv, radio, books, social media, pools, halloween candy, etc, there is something we have to be worried about.

jupp0r• 8 years ago

The whole article seems like a straw man. Nobody is proposing to replace real-world experience by technology. People are proposing to replace

* going to a library and not finding a book by wikipedia

* learning glaciology not by reading about it in an outdated school book, but by increasing snowfall in a simulation and seeing the glacier grow

* not learning a huge amount of useless facts, but being able to look them up like the rest of society does

DmenshunlAnlsis• 8 years ago

Those unfortunate children would be robbed or the valuable skill set based on learning how to learn, how to seek knowledge when it’s not just a Google search away. Learning facts may seem useless, but again, it teaches you how to learn, how to study and synthesize new ideas then show you’ve learned them.

I like the glaciology bit though, and they should learn how to use Wikipedia and a library. Just don’t pithe your kids based on some wrongheaded notion of expediency or everyone else doing it.

ska3• 8 years ago

The funny thing about this is I think I get where you are coming from, but also think all of your examples are at best problematic.

Wikipedia is a reasonable replacement for an encyclopedia - which remains a terrible replacement for a library.

Simulations are never a replacement for what they simulate. At best this can be a great supplement to more concrete learning - at worst they replace it with facile misunderstanding.

Finally - while students absolutely should be able to leverage the vast amount of information we have available, a lot of it is misleading or just intentionally wrong. We should be working hard now on figuring out how to give kids tools to evaluate and analyse this. Raw information is easier than ever to put your hands on, but that's never been particularly useful by itself.

So absolutely, let's leverage technology But lets not pretend that we have viable replacements (yet?) for what we don't. A vital skill to teach these days is the ability to sanity check whatever you are reading on line against reality and multiple sources. If you don't become somewhat sophisticated about navigating this sea o f information, you will be taken advantage of. That is one thing we should be concentrating on teaching - real skills, not parroting the first thing you find on Wikipedia. Nobody learns those on screens alone.

The facts you came away from an education with have never been the point. The point is to learn how to learn, how to test new ideas, how to verify information, etc.

Children learn best when engaged in the living world, not on screens

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