Technology and today’s kids

CEBU, Philippines – Two hundred years ago children were part of the adult world. You got born, you probably hung out with the animals and the milk nurse for a while, and then you were just underfoot. Your parents were on the farm, and you were there doing little things, carrying out the lunch pail or what have you. My great aunt went to work in cotton mill when she was four years old carrying spindles around.

Then we created this separate world for children with nursery schools and babysitters and special books and special kinds of clothes and a little fantasy world for children where everything was nice. Not all children were able to enjoy that, but there was a notion of a very separate safe world for children.

In the last 30 to 40 years, partly because of mass media and partly because of what parents let kids watch, children have become witnesses to the grown-up world. They watch adult TV, they may even see adult movies. It's all around them.

Until recently, when a child was in the adult world he was recognized as child, but now the child can go online, engage in conversation, and be treated as an adult. A child can start an online business or join a chat group and pretend to be 29 years old when she is only 11. It's all very interesting and I don't know what it's going to mean. I do know that families need to do a better job raising kids for this new world and schools also need to change.

By Alvin Toffler

If you are a peasant in a medieval village and life goes on the way it has for centuries, you'll always be a peasant; your ancestors were peasants, your descendants will be peasants, nothing changes.

Then the most valuable knowledge you can have is knowledge of how it was done in the past, because the past is the same as the present, and the present is the same as what the future will be. Where do you find things out? You talk to the elders.

Now change that around, go to a society in which everything's changing rapidly, and the consequence of that is the kids are saying, "It's going to be different. It's not the same. What do you know? Your experience is irrelevant. You keep talking about the good old days." The acceleration of change devalues knowledge from the past when you put a layer of technology on top of that, you get a pretty snotty bunch of kids - that's what you get.

--- from Fast Forward By Alfred Sikes with Ellen Pearlman