Know-how is Destroying Our Minds
It appears like everybody has their scorching tackle 1) smartphones and a pair of) AI, most of which fall into the class of “they’re destroying our minds.”
I’ve little question they’re destroying our minds. That is what expertise does. It enhances our lives by taking up some facet of what our minds (or our bodies) as soon as did for themselves.
For many of human historical past nobody knew what time it was. Round 1275 mechanical clocks had been invented that would chime to let folks know the hour. That is as exact because it bought. The minute hand did not seem till the fifteenth century with in-home grandfather clocks turning into widespread round 1675. And private clocks — pocket watches — did not actually turn out to be widespread for an additional 200 years . . . Adopted by the second hand.
The clock with its relentless tick-tock-tick divided up our days into smaller and smaller models, externalizing the tempo of our days from our minds to machines, making us slaves to effectivity and punctuality. They disconnected us from the pure rhythms of life, the arc of the solar, the phases of the moon, the cycle of the seasons. Clocks destroyed the simple, particular person tempo of routines with standardized schedules, making us extra machine and fewer human.
In the present day, simply 250 years into the mechanical clock experiment, most of us cannot conceive of life with out clocks. And we undoubtedly do not see how they’ve destroyed our minds. We put on them on our wrists, carry them in our pockets; they’re on our microwaves, pc screens, automobile dashboards, and beside our beds. There’s hardly a second of our lives when a clock is not measuring our progress, prodding us, chiding us, making us merchandise of the Industrial Revolution.
But it surely’s not simply clocks.
The phonetic alphabet destroyed our minds.
The printing press destroyed our minds.
Tv destroyed our minds.
Smartphones are destroying our minds.
And it is solely a matter of time earlier than AI destroys our minds.
I am not saying I need to do away with or cease any of it, solely that your complete level of expertise is to externalize one thing that was beforehand a perform of our minds and our bodies, theoretically liberating us up for “extra vital issues.” We not have to make use of our minds to memorize Homer as a result of it has been written down and printed onto pages and sure into books . . . The place few of us ever learn it. We not must waste our time going out in public as a result of we will deliver “the general public” into our houses. We not must navigate our means world wide, look issues up within the library, or write our personal essays.
In his e-book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Company, Douglas Adams conceived of the Electrical Monk: “The Electrical Monk was a labor-saving system, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the hassle of washing them your self, video recorders watched tedious tv for you, thus saving you the hassle of it your self; Electrical Monks believed issues for you, thus saving you what was turning into an more and more onerous activity, that of believing all of the issues the world anticipated you to imagine.
The actual query is not what expertise is doing to us, however reasonably what we’re going to do with our minds and our bodies now that they’re freed as much as do different extra vital issues.
That is one thing these of us who work with younger youngsters see extra clearly than the remainder of the world. We spend our days with people whose minds haven’t but been destroyed by literacy, clocks, smartphones, or AI. They spend most of their time doing what comes most naturally to people whose primary bodily, social, and emotional wants are met, which is to say fart round by exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing. That is what play-based studying is all about and it is why most individuals merely cannot grasp it: their minds are too far gone to grasp the world during which our youngest residents exist, a world with out all these applied sciences which have usurped elements of the human thoughts.
The encroachment of the expertise of “teachers” into preschool is destroying our kids’s minds. After we drill two-year-olds on phonics, we’re destroying their minds much more fully than any smartphone. Am I exaggerating? I do not suppose so. One of many essential issues we moderns use our “freed up” minds for is to stress and fear. Psychological issues are at disaster ranges. However most annoying to me is that we’re as we speak experiencing anxiousness and melancholy in preschoolers at charges by no means earlier than seen. Practically 10 p.c of our kids are on medicines to deal with their psychological sicknesses. I am not exaggerating.
We’re not going to cease expertise, however we will fortify our youngest youngsters, these unique people, with a time throughout which we permit them to know what it means to fart round, which is to say, to play.
The antidote to childhood anxiousness, certainly, the antidote for anxiousness basically, is to be free to fart round. It is after we’re farting round — exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing — that we’re really free to be ourselves, to observe our curiosity, and, most significantly, to make our lives personally significant; to seek out our personal, distinctive, and fantastic objective, to witness marvel and awe in our lives. That is the inspiration of what it means to be human.
The unfulfilled promise of each expertise is to free us up for extra play, which is to say, to return alive. The world wants extra individuals who have come alive. And if they’ve any hope of ever coming alive, our youngest youngsters want us to guard them from applied sciences that may destroy their minds, together with the expertise of teachers.
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