Start From Scratch Languages Institute

From Los Angeles to New York, parents are rebelling against school-sanctioned Chromebooks, education apps and Google Docs—tools they say undercut their own efforts to reduce kids’ tech time.

In one community outside Philadelphia, tensions boiled over recently as the school board weighed a major policy shift: whether to repeal a policy that contained language saying parents could opt their children out of one-to-one use of school-issued devices.

When the board voted 7-2 to repeal the policy with the opt-out language, the audience erupted.

“Shame on you!” they shouted. Some parents stood, throwing up their hands. A board member asked security guards to remove one mom who was yelling the loudest, but she stayed put, defiant. She had come that night because she didn’t think her son’s school should have given him an iPad to use in kindergarten.

Jim Hausman, 59, a real-estate entrepreneur, attributes his sixth-grade son’s myopia and prebedtime anxiety, in part, to the Chromebook the boy has used in school for years and brings home daily.

“These electronics have ruined parenting. It’s a whack-a-mole game,” he said. One game his son was able to download resembled poker. “Even he says it’s so addictive I can’t stop playing it,” said Hausman. “It’s like the electronic fentanyl.”

🔗 Read more: https://on.wsj.com/3Sy2CsT

Psychologists and economists have spent decades demoting gratification to a sin—but they were wrong, Ian Bogost argues. https://theatln.tc/3JtmQEQo

Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of researchers conducted a series of experiments on preschool children in which they told the kids they could choose between having a marshmallow immediately or bigger and better treats later. Their enormously influential experiment, which became widely known as the marshmallow test, “came to represent the levers one might pull to encourage delayed gratification and to quell its presumably dangerous opposite, immediate gratification,” Bogost writes.

Over time, researchers claimed that those who could adopt delayed gratification at a young age were more adept, competent, and successful across a wide array of metrics. But in reality, the marshmallow test seems to demonstrate exactly nothing about an individual’s success, short- or long-term. More recent studies have cast doubt on the test’s findings, Bogost reports.

Moreover, “gratification is good—even though it gets a bad rap,” Bogost argues. “People find the enjoyment that gratification offers suspicious, because it became associated with indulgence.” Such indulgence, critics argue, can distract us from our goals or take us on selfish pursuits. “But gratification can be pointed toward the world—the sensory enchantment of everyday life,” Bogost continues. “The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.”

Read more at the link.

🎨: Joanne Joo

Why science needs the humanities more than ever From AI to biotechnology, today’s scientific breakthroughs raise ethical and social challenges that technical expertise alone cannot solve.