I remember the first guided tours in primary schools. Parents were concerned about how many hours a day their child would spend on screens and were reassured when the Chromebooks remained in the closet for most of the day. After the tour we left for work, where we would of course spend the whole day behind a screen.
One thing we didn’t want. That our children would lead lives just like us. We want our children to eat fruit and vegetables, play outside (with children from all kinds of backgrounds), live a stress-free life, enjoy reading, drawing, crafts and above all, without that deep dependency problem with that damn screen.
It will work for ten years at the most. After that, our attempts to create a better world for them prove futile and they become just like us. On average more than three hours a day staring at our phone, switching and snacking between WhatsApp, email and socials full of short tasty impulses.
Strangely enough, schools themselves seem to be convinced that there is no way to teach against the big bad outside world. That you can teach children at school to read and love books again. Ask the experts where that bad reading of our youth comes from and they point first to themselves. Education must change: reading comprehension less superficially, but really learning to understand a text. Write more about it, talk about it, test less stupidly and learn tricks. Other books, better books, more personal choice, through if necessary influencers on BoekTok, where children recommend books to each other.
It sounds unanimous: education must solve the problem. And education minister Dennis Wiersma is throwing another 108 million euros at it to reverse the declining reading skills. I really think there is something that can be done right at school. Just like you can give children in poverty a sandwich, and in the fight against obesity you can only allow water at school.
But it’s going to take a huge effort. We have to accept that, as with poverty and obesity at school, we only see the consequences, the reflection of the problem, but not the cause. The cause is not in the Netherlands and not with our children. It’s in all of us.
Read also: ‘Let it sink in: a third of teachers don’t read’
Our children don’t read because we don’t read. And we don’t read because we don’t like it anymore. And we don’t like it because we can’t do it anymore. We simply lack the ability to keep our attention on a text. In 2004 we concentrated on the computer during work an average of 150 seconds. That had dropped to 45 seconds in 2016. Reading a text is slow, and our hyper-diffused, lightning-fast 21st-century brain searches for new things to focus on as it reads. That is how we have been programmed in recent years, by our computer, by our telephone.
The optimist in me finds that our brains have now simply become good at other things. But honestly I hate that thing in my hand from the bottom of my heart. I look at my kids, who are still in those few years of a lifetime where they live relatively phone-free. That short phase of life without social media, with just some Netflix interfering with playtime. The teacher wrote in their reports that they can concentrate well on one task. What a pity, I thought, that will be over in a few years. Then they become just like us, goldfish.
I catch myself getting jealous of students who may soon have to deal with a smartphone ban in schools. I wish I had a phone-free day imposed on me by some authority. By a European government that decides that all the Samsungs, Googles, Apples and Facebooks follow you too much. I crave an employer that bans social media apps because otherwise China would steal data or something. If necessary, God intervenes. The pious life of the Orthodox Jew is starting to look more and more alluring just for the one screenless Sabbath.
Education is not the problem. The children are not the problem. Our neurological functioning is the problem. And it takes more than education to solve that.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 8, 2023