There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
Interpretation
Excessive digital screen time is negatively impacting children's attention and memory during reading.
Maryanne Wolf highlights the concern that overexposure to digital screens is altering the way children process information, particularly in their capacity to focus and remember what they read. This shift suggests that prolonged reading on digital devices can hinder their cognitive development, requiring parents and educators to be mindful of screen time and its effects on learning.
In practice
In a discussion on the impacts of technology on youth education.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
Over the past five years, I've met several presidents, several secretaries of education ... and there is no plan. If you want to save your children, you're going to have to do it yourself. It's just us.
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
What we seek to advance, what we seek to develop in all of our colleges and universities, are educated men and women who can bear the burdens of responsible citizenship, who can make judgments about life as it is, and as it must be, and encourage the people to make those decisions which can bring not only prosperity and security, but happiness to the people of the United Sates and those who depend upon it.
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there's no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.
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