This things happened gradually. At your days the smart phone is still at its infancy where social media are probably text based and at most image based. Nowadays, the social media are a mix of text and videos and probably the quantity of short video the youth consume are far more than the text consume. The phone itself also becoming the extension of our brain (not only youth). And this brings two consequences.
- Many feels that there's no need to learn the basic. The wisdom they had, together with the reasoning given by the tools are enough. - The youth also prefer shorter content than long form content. They don't even have the patience to sit through a 30 minute youtube video and prefer a whole story unfolded in a few minutes that fit in tiktok, youtube short or similar.
Combining these two means that a lot of the students in this generation will not have the patience to go through a 40 min - 1 hr classroom section/lecture.
Also as other have commented in a different thread, the parents of this generation simply does not side with the teacher, and this happens in many countries as well.
I still think of myself as a ‘digital native’, as in this technology has existed my whole life, but in many ways yeah I agree with your perspective that it was not as pervasive during my formative years and I guess that makes all the difference here.
And is happening continuously over time. It is the deleterious effects of this accretion that is so insidious about the digital/social/internet media.
I have experienced/am experiencing this same problem in my own mental functioning in spite being "old" (am in the middle 50s), don't use phones much, don't do social media much and yet with just browsing and consuming all types of content on the Internet; my attention span, focusing ability, time spent on continuous concentrated study all have declined (well beyond what can be attributed to ageing). Add now a sedentary lifestyle entailed by the above activities and you have your physical body deteriorating in all parameters too. This sets up a vicious cycle where the mind degrades the body which in turn degrades the mind and so on.
Thankfully since i have memories of my mental functioning from before the Internet era i can discipline myself when needed (but getting harder) but i shudder to think what it is doing to the developing and growing brains/minds of kids/teens growing up in this environment.
It is really important that Society as a whole wakes up to this insidious problem and involves Neuroscientists/Biologists/Psychologists/Scientists and Political Policy makers to focus on and find a solution to this epidemic.
Social media.
Social media.
The whole culture around teaching needs a hard reset.
eg: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-27/historical-abuse-alle...
Perhaps not.
Sufficiently large schools will have at least one staff member doing something inappropriate with at least one student, there are literal Royal Commisions on that kind of thing.
Particular specific institutes of the past have gone further with large numbers of the staff abusing large numbers of the students.
There's a middle ground between always deferring to teachers as absolute authorities and not.
Taking a child's phone away is not abuse. It should be expected and desired by parents wanting their child to actually learn in school. Unfortunately we have normalized suspicion towards teachers to such a toxic level that they are now powerless to enforce a learning environment, and it has resulted in a mass exodus of talented people from teaching.
Parents threatened, possibly assaulted, teachers over this just yesterday in my area: https://www.l1nieuws.nl/nieuws/2661710/grescollege-in-reuver...
The kids never had a chance.
Why have kids seemingly become unable to leave their phones silently in their pockets, and why have teachers seemingly become unable to confiscate them when needed? Is social media these days that addicting? Are teachers exposed to consequences for managing their classrooms?
Anyway, as a student I would have been reluctant to leave my phone at home when I’d demonstrated my ability to not fiddle with it in class, so for many ‘normal’ students I can see why they’d push back.