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.
Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Miloβs tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.
Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
My goal is to get peace and my goal is to see education of every child.
The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.
Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
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