Error—does not compute!

According to the results of two recent observational studies, technology impacts the way young people learn: Their attention spans are shorter, and the average quality of student work has dropped significantly in comparison to other, far-less-digital generations.

Miles Sanguinetti/VANGUARD STAFf

Conducted by the Pew Research Center and Common Sense Media, the studies asked public and private K–12 teachers about the ramifications of digital technologies on the way children process information in an academic environment.

Approximately 90 percent of teachers polled claimed that entertainment media—TV, cell phones, computers, video games—aided in the creation of “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.”

Educators say they’ve not only noticed a marked decrease in students’ ability to sustain focus, but also a burgeoning tendency to give up quickly when answers are not immediately obvious—a phenomenon some have termed “the Wikipedia problem.”

Of course, the findings are by no means conclusive. Both studies were of an observational design, which automatically limits their applicability, and the studies’ researchers caution that the issue warrants further investigation.

As a society steeped in media and electronics, however, we might want to start paying a bit more attention to the potential havoc we’re wreaking on the minds of the next generation.

After all, it’s been estimated that kids aged 8–18 spend nearly twice as much time in front of a screen as they spend in a classroom, so the potential consequences of digital overexposure deserve serious consideration.

Could technology literally be frying our children’s brains?

Many teachers fear this might be the case, especially in light of growing evidence that early and sustained exposure to electronic input may affect adolescent behavior in later life.

This kind of digital technology’s not going to disappear anytime soon, though.

Not to mention, parents will parent as they see fit, which just might entail plopping the little tyke down in front of the TV or handing her a video game controller. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Short of government-issued mandates controlling underage computer usage (something I would personally like to avoid) I can’t see a clear-cut way out of our current technological conundrum.

Honestly, have you ever tried to take away a teenager’s cell phone? Obviously not. It’d be pretty difficult to read this piece if you’d had your eyes clawed out by a hormone-fueled rage monster.

(On an unrelated note, can you tell that I don’t like teenagers?)

Anyway, getting back to the point: We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. Kids are bombarded 24/7 by virtually every kind of input imaginable. By the age of 6 or 7, most have learned to wade through the results of an average Google search—a task that would have flabbergasted even the savviest adults only 50 years ago.

Children live in a world of YouTube and Facebook and Wikipedia. Whatever they want to know or learn sits waiting for them, a mere keystroke or mouse-click away.

It’s no wonder they don’t want to listen to someone three times their age drone on about the War of 1812.

American culture has undergone a digital upgrade, but our educational system seems to be living in the good ol’ days, hoping kids will wake up one morning and realize that their civics textbook is actually more interesting than the latest Justin Bieber video.

Well, I’ve got news for you, fellow teachers, parents and school administrators.

It’s not.

And trying to convince our children otherwise will require a lot of effort and creativity. We might even need to make friends with the technological enemy.

I recently stumbled across one high school teacher’s World War II lesson plan, which just happened to take the form of an extended Facebook conversation between the Allies and the Axis.

(Can you guess where I found this wonderful example of radical curriculum development? Because it wasn’t in a textbook. Google it. Maybe you’ll find the answer.)

Apparently the teacher provided students with the Facebook example as a supplementary reading to illustrate some of the larger concepts they’d been discussing in class. A fantastic idea, if I do say so myself.

The moral of this story isn’t clear-cut. If technology is messing with our kids’ heads in a quantitatively harmful way, then I’m all for extreme measures. But until that point, we have a responsibility to educate the next generation in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed: digitally.