The Screen Kids of the 21st Century

online learning

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  Since the early 20th Century, the place in which kids spent most of their childhood in have transformed from a school and into an indoctrination facility.  Its not important for them to be taught the things that matter like critical thinking, being independent, how to network, how to do a budget, understand taxes, civics, be creative and to follow your passion.  No, those things are not necessary.  A child’s creativity and passions mean nothing.  What is important is that they be brainwashed into being a good worker bee for the hive that is capitalism.  So, they are being spoon fed what’s largely meaningless information that teaches them nothing about life and discourages them from doing what they want to do to make sure they grow up to be a good bee whether they are sitting at a desk in a cubicle (now at home) or on an assembly line in a factory or warehouse. 

Education has been for a long time molded by a small handful of corporations and the quacks, like Wilhelm Wundt and B.F. Skinner, who do the dirty work of altering education into indoctrination, turning the student into a hamster on a wheel.

And much like how education was being guided and controlled by the robber barons of the turn of the 20th Century, today it is controlled by the tech industry.  Online learning was always going to become the dominant structure in the future.  The Covid-19 fiasco has intensified it by a significant margin.  Almost every school district in the U.S. had to go into remote learning at least for a considerable portion of the week.  It was bad enough that they were being programmed like robots at school.  Now, they are becoming a robot physically as they immerse themselves with their laptops for six hours a day, plus whatever amount of time they spend on it when school lets out.

There have been issues with kids diverting their attention from the screen with the teacher to the screen with Xbox or cartoon show.  Much like how kids were weakening their attention spans in school with all the cumbersome and largely meaningless work, with all the distractions at home, online learning should make a bad thing far worse. 

Of course, the elitist media like the New York Times praises the concept of digital learning always looking out for the corporate interest while throwing in a small thing or two about some of the negative effects but strongly emphasizing on the imaginary positive effects propping it up as a panacea for the school system.  Obvious to anyone paying attention, this was never supposed to be temporary.  The media and the government have used Covid-19 as their praxis to acquiescence society with this tech takeover.  The idea that the very tech giants that have been criticized and shamed, for, among other things, being too powerful, are the panacea for the school system is an absurd chimera.  Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook and all the rest have been allowed to be too constitutive and joie de vivre that the suzerainty the school system once had over children has been transferred to Silicon Valley.

The one silver lining in all this was that the kids took a break from the idiotic standardized tests. But individuals in the Department of Education have been crying out that we need to get cracking on them again.  The Department of Education has always been a lapdog for the corporations and non-profits that create the standardized tests.  The very epitome of what’s wrong with the American education system has always been viewed by the government as the materia medica for learning.  The empty suits of Washington cannot be more predictable.  Creating the education crisis via standardized tests and pointless learning to profit the capitalist class and then blaming kids and parents for the deterioration of the minds (and test scores) of American kids.  And now the solution to the education crisis in which they created should not come from the tax paying parents or teachers which the system has imputed the problem on but the very entities that have and still are causing the problem.

So, therefore, it is imperative that the standardized tests be acclimated into the new online learning Godsend of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.  By combining the accretions of two of the deadliest emblems for a child’s mind it is not hard to picture a future where an already mentally fragile world will be filled with suspicious, anxious, and frightened people.  Attention spans will continue to faulter.  Obsessive-compulsive disorder and control issues will flourish for many people have already become like this.  And it will be near impossible to find anyone who is able to think for themselves as common sense will be no more.  At times it seems we are already at that point now.  Even those of the intellectual class tend to mindlessly go along with whatever CNN or FOX or whoever their political affiliate is, tells them to do without question.

Their can be no legitimate solutions coming from the tech giants, governments, or Wall Street.  The fact that the intellectual class buys into the banality of the media and government snobs is ludicrous.  The academics are too easily cajoled into going along with the plan that completely disregards the child.  There is never any consideration of the kids and their future.  The technopolist have become far too superfluous and the taxpayers far too quiescent.  These two factors have brought the world into the Periclean Age of Tech where everything is owned and controlled by the digital lords including societies most precious emblem, the children’s mind. 

We live our lives on the internet.  Less and less time is spent in nature or with are loved ones or with us alone without the interference of our iPhone, T.V., or laptop.  The older generations at least at one time were able to do it before integrating into the digital world.  But the younger ones who are bathed in it at birth will never get the chance to know what life is like without it.  Forever being addicted to the artificial world where the façade is portrayed as reality and life is always on the fast forward button constantly trying to keep up with the latest trend that the never-ending ocean of ads on our newsfeeds and alerts, keeps telling us to follow.  Life is supposed to be enjoyed and savored just as learning is supposed to be fun and creative.  Instead, both learning and life in general are a constant race, always projecting into the future for the next trend, the next test, the next episode, the next paycheck, the next election etc. 

This “new normal” of schooling will only further intensify the already deadly issues facing students.  Suicide, depression, anxiety, drug use.  The isolation and lack of physical communication between students and teachers and students and students will increase these problems ten-fold.  Kids will become even more robotic and zombified by this new system than they were when they were taking the cumbersome, braincell killing standardized tests in-person.  And all for the sake of profit for the Gods of Money. 


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