The Dilution of Kids' Experience

A recent commercial shows a boy commandeering his school's PA system to play a song (never mind that, in this era of zero tolerance, he would doubtless be suspended or perhaps even expelled for this prank).  It is not really clear whose voice he plays over the PA.  Is the bland rap about peanut and jelly sandwiches his own song?  A friend's?  A pop star's, improbable as that is?  All we know is that he causes the rap to be played, and his friends are impressed.  We see him looking on from another room, enjoying their reaction.  What interests me is that he is at least twice removed from his own experience:  Once by sharing his recorded voice, and again when he looks on from a distance as the other students react.

Alternatively, if the song he plays is not his own, his experience of authorship is diluted. He is like a frantic college freshman who is copying and pasting from Wikipedia, only the boy in the commercial goes a step further.  He is crowd-sourcing his own school years and social life.

A student who is consuming media or on the internet sits at the point of two prisms connecting.  An infinite amount of possible inputs stream in, and infinite possible creative outputs stream out.  At least, that is what we envision in the best case scenario.  Yet the sheer overwhelming force of that much input diminishes kids' real, stumbling, imperfect experiences.  Few middle school students will command a whole school's attention (to good effect, anyway).  Their experiences will rarely yield the regular wins of computer games, and their images don't compare to the airbrushed perfection of teen pop stars.

Does the flood of information and images discourage young people from engaging in their own lives?  Do young people take time to dwell quietly in thought, come to know boredom as a birthplace for action, and embrace their own experience as full enough?

Looking Back to Step Up My Game Going Forward

Out of the blue, just as he was going to bed the other evening, my nine-year-old son asked "Did they ever find Van Gogh's ear?"

"Ah..." I stumbled, recalling the story of Van Gogh's ear, but not the conclusion "I don't know, honey."

"What??? I thought parents were supposed to know everything.  You need to step up your mom game!"

Now, many things went through my mind at that moment, such as:  Where is the internet when you really need it, and, we should have gone with fear and intimidation as a childrearing philosophy, but we didn't, and now look what has happened... my younger son is smart, but he's also an incredible smartass.

Ultimately I didn't say any of this, but the exchange did amplify my self-doubt.  At work I strain to help 45 special ed students, whose needs stem from a wide range of conditions that include hearing impairments, learning disabilities and paralysis.   Apparently, this was my time for feelings of inadequacy at home as well.  My sons are twelve and nine and now fully plugged into a larger world.  This makes them aware of much this is good and educational, but it also dwarfs (by comparison) their parents' knowledge, even though we both have Master's degrees.

I recall that, when I was young, an argument that broke out at the dinner table would sometimes be resolved by a dusty volume of our encyclopedia set.  The set was out of date, as it had first belonged to my father's second set of children (he married three times).  By the time I could read he was long gone, however, he did leave the reference books, perhaps as a kind of salute to the values that he and my mother did share.  Those values are: Knowledge and education above all else.

At any rate, even then (in the 1970s) it was becoming apparent that there is more that is unknown than known.  Universities had long since ceased building in the cozy "quadrangle" design inspired by Oxford and Cambridge.  In this conception the academic buildings face inward, seemingly confident in the conviction that all that is worthwhile and knowable can be found within their walls.   

To return to the dinner table, however, I am reminded of the reminiscences of a woman I know.  Like so many of my older African American neighbors, she emigrated North to work and then returned to her birthplace in retirement.  When she was a child in the 1930s her father would lead the family in reading the newspaper, and then the children had to recite something they had learned in school.  She was not the only person I interviewed to mention this evening routine.  Before electric lighting, television, and certainly before computers carried a torrent of information into our homes, many families looked to each other for edification and entertainment.  

In my house we do eat dinner together, but being advised to "step up my mom game" made me wonder  whether the level of discourse is all it could be.  Sometimes questions or arguments arise, but now we reference an iPhone instead of a musty encyclopedia.  Admittedly, I was feeling a little low when something else happened:  My older son brought home a Humanities assignment about ancient Greece.  

"We were learning about the Odyssey in class" he told me "and I could answer most of the questions because I remember when you read it to us."

I guess my game is not completely lacking.