A Virtual Reality Check

Just thinking about what I'm going to write about in this post is making me feel old, old, old (not related to the b-day coming up).

I feel like a "going on 30" equivalent of an old man sitting on his porch, complaining about how the weather used to be so much better when he was young, how the kids were more polite, life more simple and much more enjoyable, and all that despite the fact he had to walk to school 10 miles uphill every day and neither snow nor rain would stop him.

How to begin... ?

I teach English, as some of you might know. Most of the time I help students with their speaking skills, which basically means I spend a lot of time chit chatting about their daily lives, hobbies, interests, opinions etc. (which, as a shrink, I really enjoy, since it gives me a great opportunity to gain a better insight into their generation).

Recently in class, while trying to prep my students for the speaking part of their English exams, I asked a simple (fairly simple, at least) question, as a topic for conversation: "Many popular movies are based on books. Some people believe that the book versions are better than the movie versions. Which do you prefer? Why?". I also wanted them to support their answers with specific examples. Note that I am talking about students 15+. Not very hard, is it?

It took me more less a week to ask the same question in all of my classes as well as the students that I'm tutoring privately. That's altogether some 100 students, a sample that is fairly representative (I really hope that my "Research and Statistics" professor isn't reading this, lol). But, for the sake of argument, lets say that it is a representative sample :) Anyway...

The outcome was exactly what I expected to hear and hoped I wouldn't.

As far as literature goes, way too many kids (or at least my students) don't read books. Only maybe some 10-5% of them actually do, because they like to. The rest of the students only read when forced to and they sure as hell don't enjoy it. Sadly, I even have some student that have not read a single book in their life.

Now, the really disturbing part is this: Most of the kids don't like to read and prefer movies, because books have too many details = are boring AND, god forbid, you actually have to imagine things in your own head (I'm quoting here...), instead of having them nicely presented on screen. So, when push comes to shove, children and teenagers today don't like to read because they don't want to have to think.

Of course, when you ask about their hobbies, all you hear is PC, Playstation 3 (the "3" is very important), Wii, PSP and there are kids who actually list "Facebook" as their hobby, how sad is that? I have quite a nice idea about how most of them spend their free time, since I know for a fact that last year's most wished for Xmas present among the boys was Call of Duty: Black Ops...

Not surprisingly, most of the kids who like to read are excellent students and vice versa.

I love to read. By the time I was 15, I've read dozens, possibly even hundreds of books. I'm not talking about books for kids only. E.A. Poe, Shakespeare, Irving, basically whatever I could get my hands on, starting with my mom's library and working my way up. Of course, I was a bit of a geek, I give you that. By no means I expect the kids to read as much as I did, being well aware that my love of literature deprived me of many other things (well developed social skills, to begin with).

However, developing brain needs stimulation and exercise, and I really don't think that watching TV or spending hours and hours playing Call of Duty (or even worse, Farmville on FB), provides teenagers with either of those.

Regarding technology, our world has changed drastically during the last 20 years. Internet, superfast computers and smart mobile phones , all those things make our  lives much easier, but the price we pay is fairly high, unless we realize they are just tools, nothing more, nothing less. The kids who were born into this era, from the very beginning of their days surrounded by all these things, have no way of comparing "now" and "then".

So I'd say all in moderation. Let the kids play games on Playstation, let them watch TV and have a facebook profile, but teach them to love books and other things, too. TV and computer games don't really teach them much and the only thing they nourish is passivity.

I know from my own experience (of course I play games on Pc too) how spending too much time in front of the screen helps to grow detached from the things that really matter, e.g. real life...

You don't want to live in a world when 15 year olds don't know who Gandhi was and watching them to come up with any kind kind of opinion is more painful than watching a glacier move, do you?