A New Approach to Technology

The dangers, challenges, and opportunities around technology for children has been a hot topic for years. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, the Tikvah Fund’s efforts to mobilize parents, and recent tech bans in schools in some states, have all made it clear that this issue is pressing at our schools, and our children’s mental and physical health is being impacted.

Background:
My goal here is to take a step back and try to explain where I stand, and articulate my approach to the issue, which I believe is consistent with our educational philosophy at SAR, and with Modern Orthodoxy as I see it.

Phones are everywhere, concentration spans are down, kids and adults are addicted to social media, our society is more polarized, cheating is widespread, and mental health issues are up. Schools should play a role in addressing this issue, delaying and limiting access to technology and ensuring its appropriate use, and they should be educating children appropriately on how to engage with others. Our policies and practices are open to reflection, and we are prepared to change or modify them when they are not working. Therefore, we are changing our personal device policy at SAR Academy, mandating a different level of enforcement, and changing policies as well as monitoring practices for our school-issued iPads. Also, we have and will continue to partner with parents who are working together to delay access to personal devices, by embracing (while not mandating) initiatives like “wait until 8th”.

At the same time, I am concerned about the language we are seeing around this issue, the oversimplified comparisons to things like smoking and drug use, the negative approach to dealing with technology the lumping of all technology use into one basket, and the temptation to ask schools to overreach when it comes to deciding what works for parents and their children.

I love and embrace an approach to most issues (dress code, bar and bat mitzvahs, play dates, etc.) which (i) recognizes nuance, and focuses not on removing the bad, which is important, but on increasing the good; (ii) acknowledges the reality of living in a world where the issue exists and will continue to be increasingly ubiquitous; and (iii) confronts challenges but spends proportionately more energy seeking positive and healthy outlets and outcomes for our kids.

Steps Forward:
As I experience it, conversations around children/schools and technology usually revolve around four issues, and at times it feels like they are conflated in ways that make it difficult to gain clarity. Those four issues are: (i) personal devices in school; (ii) personal devices outside of school; (iii) school-issued devices (in and out of school); and (iv) social media.

1. Access to personal devices: Delaying regular access to smartphones has very few downsides and many upsides for our children. These include more healthy interactions between children and their peers, removal of an unhealthy pull on the attention of children which can lead to unhealthy habits later in life, more avenues for healthy activities such as reading and outdoor physical activity, etc. We do not think elementary or middle school students need smartphones, and we support and encourage parents to delay access until the end of middle school. I am grateful to the individuals within our community who worked together to encourage each other to delay access, and the commitments of our parents to these efforts have been impressive.

We understand that some parents will decide that their children should have access earlier, and we recognize that this decision is theirs to make. 

2. Personal devices at school: Phones and personal devices are not necessary for healthy learning and socializing during the school day. Kids are in a safe environment, and they have access to adults if they need something from outside of school. We also know that when phones are near kids (and adults) that itself can be a distraction, and asking them to self-monitor has become more difficult and less realistic. It is for that reason that, while we have never allowed students at SAR to use phones in school, we are going one step further by requiring them to be in lockers or a designated office, not in pockets and not in backpacks. We will not be purchasing lock bags or the like, as we think that this approach is not consistent with the SAR value of trusting and empowering students, but we do think that this change will allow for a healthier environment and more accountability for kids and adults. We also encourage parents to make sure that children keep their personal devices in backpacks during carpool and bus rides to and from school and sporting events. 
3. School-issued devices: Technology as a tool for learning is real, but it is also complicated. Real, in the sense that there are so many examples of learning personalization, student accountability, and executive function in terms of note-taking and organizing, that we believe there is an important role for technology in the classroom as a skill and a tool that will be part of their lives wherever they go. At the same time, for many of our kids, this learning tool can also hamper learning, by serving as a distraction, or simply by the allure of other activities that make it difficult to compete for the attention of a child or adolescent. In general, as our no-walls open school model has ALWAYS suggested, we believe that good and engaging teaching, scaffolded and differentiated lessons, and strong student-teacher relationships, are the central keys to positive and healthy learning outcomes. We still feel that way. At the same time, we have decided to tighten up some of our in-school device practices and policies to be more aware of the potential pitfalls. These changes include (i) less time on the device for students; (ii) teacher monitoring of student activity via Apple Classroom; and (iii) having devices stay in school for students in grades 5 and 6, and stay in school for students in grade 7 unless parents request otherwise. I know (and our recent parent and tech surveys confirmed) that some parents would prefer to see school as a completely tech-free zone, and others would prefer to see more real-world engagement which comes with more technology. We think that these adjustments feel right for us, now, and we will continue to reflect on how they are working.
4. Social media: While clearly related to the first issue above of personal devices in general for kids, social media feels like its own category, and worthy of reflection regardless of when our kids have their own devices. Social media, which does have real examples of adding value to the world by giving voice to all and leveling a playing field of information sharing, is also a source of potential and particular harm for kids, as the words and images that are used can be used to hurt them, very publicly, at any time of day or night. Also, the self-esteem issues stemming from social media, the misguided perceptions and focus on the curated lives of others, and the yearning for “likes” and “friends” in an unbridled and tough world, is something that we should be very mindful of, should be parts of conversations between parents and children, and included in curricula in all schools that deal with health and social issues. We strongly discourage social media use before high school, and I also think it’s crucial we consider carefully how we guide our children whenever they gain access to social media. We continue to be committed to educating our students about social media use, while encouraging families to wait and think carefully about how to best introduce their children to social media.

Concluding Thoughts:
With the exception of the school-issued devices, the decisions around technology and children are made at home, not at school. A school community can make recommendations, and share best practices, but we cannot and should not be making decisions that fall out of our purview. The clothing our children wear, the food they consume, and the technology they use are the results of decisions that each family makes, as it should be. Relationships cannot be outsourced, facetime cannot be mandated. No matter what approach we each choose to take in regard to personal devices and social media, only healthy boundaries at home will ensure our children make healthy decisions as they mature and grow more independent.

Technology has been a source of positivity and progress in the realm of Torah learning, chesed, community building, and in every professional field from medicine to finance to art. Many of our Mishna Marathoners were able to continue learning at night and over the summer because technology facilitated the connection between students and teachers. The international Daf Yomi boon and the massive array of classes and content is similar. Our connection to Israel this year, and our ability to support people there in times of crisis have all been based on technology. The list is endless.

As with most things that are powerful, they can be used to proliferate bad or to increase good. As educators, and parents, our job, especially with our children, is to steer and model towards the latter. When children see how we act, when they learn about the potential to make a difference in positive ways, they will be inspired and empowered. It is our job, as parents and as teachers, to use these formative years to model for them how to make their lives kedusha centered- and kedusha is about taking everything in the world that God gave us and using those things to partner with him to make an imperfect world better. In this generation, that partnership will involve technology. The binary language of “good” and “bad” around technology is, I fear, messaging that is inconsistent with the worldview we believe in, which encourages us, as Modern Orthodox Jews to engage with the world, and serve as models for bringing light to that world through our values and our actions. We have not taken the understandable yet incomplete approach of cutting ourselves off from that world because of its potential pitfalls. I think this philosophy should be applied to our approach to technology as it is applied to other areas such as exposure to secular education, relationships between boys and girls, and interactions with the world outside of our Jewish community.

I think we need to think more about what we encourage and what inspires us than on what we want to take away and disturbs us. As a school, we can increase sports activities and options for movement, and we can think about how to get kids excited about issues, causes, and the world around them. As parents, we can focus on meaningful family time, eating meals together, and committing to interacting more. If we implement all of the restrictions but fail to replace them with meaningful interactions, I fear we have missed the point.

In general, as a strategy, coercion is usually not effective. We do not want to simply try to scare our children away from technology; we want to provide them with meaningful opportunities to connect and grow while internalizing the ways technology can hinder and help those connections and growth.

Finally, I hope that the conversations around this topic can be mindful of the importance of respecting each other, even when we disagree, rejecting scapegoating or personal attacks of any kind, and open to reflection and the possibility that if we listen to each other, we can learn. When things are important to us, we tend to forget what matters most, and that has the potential to tear us apart, whether it is about politics or about technology. Our community is big and it is broad, and we are better because we bring together different experiences and different perspectives.