Raising and Educating the Wired Generation

A report on a 3-hour seminar held last January 2019..


Digital technology, the aid we thought could assist our children acquire a better understanding of the world, appears to be now part of the formidable challenge it was meant to help resolve in the first place. It is developing at an ever-accelerating speed and we owe ourselves the responsibility to watch out and be in pace with it, so we can mitigate its side effects while exploiting its benefits.

I must admit, every session that brushes on the negative effects and abuses of technology would always grind on my gears and I anticipated that this seminar was no different, so I came prepared. In the 3-hour session, we were made aware that a lot of parents and even educators are at a loss on how to help their students/children avoid the traps and snares of social media and the internet; that it is no longer safe for us to just depend on our common sense and practical wisdom; that we must recourse to the advice of experts on how to raise and educate the so-called “Wired Generation.”

The solution that the second speaker presented truly caught my attention. It was to go deep. My mind was hooked on the idea for the entire session. I could not help but imagine the following scenarios:

•  Families eating together while clutching on their gadgets.
• Parents handing over a fully charged tablet with videos of pepapig or minecraft just to keep their children pre-occupied thus docile.
• Teachers who very much prefer that the students would just submit their assignments and reports online for ease and convenience (fed partly by laziness).
• The parents who rely on stalking their children’s Facebook account as a way to get updated with their lives and ultimately failing to recognize that face-to-face connection is still the best option for checking-in on them.

People rely on technology so much that the word “connection” took a different connotation. To most people nowadays, connection means having a fast mbps wifi or 4G broadband. If you have it then you are considered to be still alive and part of this world. You do not have Facebook or Instagram account? Well, then you are disconnected from the rest of the world and people will not prefer to be close to you as you are far beyond their reach – meaning, they already find it hard to communicate with you and know you better. Everything now is shared and available in social media accounts and you are missing out. The effort needed to get to know someone in a deeper (personal) level is considered to involve struggle and turmoil and most people now would not want to endure that. The effort has been taken for granted that the value of a person now depends on the likes and number of followers in their social media accounts.

This kind of connection made us devalue the chance to go deeper and authentically explore and appreciate the true beauty of every creation in this planet. And our children in this generation? They are unknowingly suffering from lack of deep and real connections even in the comfort of their own homes.

What the speaker meant with to go deeper is for parents to not forget spending quality time with their children and instill in them its importance in the family. Establish a real connection that does not diminish the efforts and undermine its sense in many aspects of life and most especially in education.

-Shik