"Screen-obsessed schools are ruining our children" - Hugh Grant campaigns against laptops and tablets in classrooms

Actor Hugh Grant is on a new mission, he has joined hands with social psychology expert, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, to lead a campaign to ban tablets and laptops from school classrooms. Tablets and laptops have increasingly become part of the educational setup. This trend has been on the rise for a decade, and the habit of using technology in classrooms has risen exponentially ever since the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic, when longer periods of lockdown and social distancing made the use of communication technology imperative for the smooth functioning of children’s education.

As per a report by The Telegraph, Grant, while evaluating the role of technology in the educational system, said,

“Screen-obsessed schools are ruining our children”

The same report gave details about the Heretic actor’s strategy for the campaign. The British actor, while speaking at a campaign event in a London school, reportedly revealed,

“Do you lobby the schools and if you do, what’s the weird, sudden, frozen, sepulchral silence from them on this issue?…Do you go to government?…I don’t think politicians ever do anything because it’s the right thing to do, even if it’s the right thing to do to protect children. They’ll only do what gets them votes. They only care about their career.”

Continuing, Grant shared what he thought was a more effective way of approaching the issue. He said,

“Therefore, I think the third option on this, which is to go after parents, is the right one. Because I think that once you get a critical mass of parents who are outraged by EdTech, as well as all the other issues, the phones, etc, that is when politicians listen because they’re scared of that…That’s also when schools start to listen because they’re scared of people leaving their schools and losing business.”

What is Hugh Grant’s campaign partner, Dr. Haidt’s theory?

As per Dr. Haidt’s website, in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Dr. Haidt argued that there has been a tremendous rise in the cases of mental health problems among adolescents. According to him, this trend rose sharply at the start of the 2010s.

As per Dr. Haidt’s research and argument, there has been a complete overhaul in the way childhood is spent by children born after the 2000s. Dr. Haidt further argues, that as opportunities for real-life interaction and socialization decrease, children have turned to the use of phones to gain gratification. Such a dependence has structured the gratification process of children towards activities that are solitary and screen-based.

According to Dr. Haidt’s work, screen dependency is the leading cause of sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and the experience of loneliness in children.

Dr. Haidt was also one of the speakers alongside Hugh Grant at the London event. As per The Telegraph, Dr. Haidt, while strongly being dismissive of the strategy of using digital games for education, said,

Trending

“If you gamify a quarter of a child’s school day with these quick rewards, the child’s dopamine neurons will habituate to that constant stimulation and will become less responsive, needing more stimulation in order to make the child feel normal…What that means is that the child will now find anything that’s not gamified painfully boring. That’s what we’ve done to our kids, by giving them devices in school.”

Dr. Haidt, who was has been working alongside Hugh Grant in the actor’s campaign to distance technology from learning, currently holds the position of the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

×

Was this article helpful?

Thank You for feedback