Month: January 2018

Denver, Colo., Jan 31, 2018 / 05:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Not long ago, introducing more technology into the classroom meant allowing third graders to play 15 minutes of Oregon Trail during recess time.

In recent years, particularly after the emergence of smartphones and other mobile devices circa 2012, for many schools it has meant an iPad for every student, laptops in every classroom.

However, new research has begun highlighting the detrimental impacts of excessive screen time, particularly on developing brains and on education, sparking concerns among educators and parents. Even tech industry giants are starting to speak openly about the dangers of internet addiction and the need to monitor children’s screen time.

For Catholic schools, the issue is especially pressing, some school leaders say, because Catholic schools are concerned with the human and spiritual formation of their students.

Michael Edghill, principal of Notre Dame Catholic School in Wichita Falls, Texas, told CNA that his biggest concern is a tendency to let technology become the main driving force of education, rather than a tool of support for teachers and students.  

“For a Catholic school, that is a bad paradigm to fall into because it takes a rightly formed person to undertake the task of human formation, which is the mission of Catholic education,” he said. “No machine or technological tool can appropriately engage in the formation of the soul.”

Jean Twenge is a psychologist and the author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”

Twenge told CNA that her research found the “sweet spot” for screen time for teenagers should be about 2 hours per day “for mental health, happiness, and adequate sleep. Beyond that, the risks increase, topping out at the highest levels of use.”

Notably, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, most US teens report average daily screen times well over the recommended two hours.

In 2015, research group Common Sense Media reported that more half of US teenagers spend at least four hours a day on a screen, while 25 percent of teens reported even higher uses – more than eight hours daily – with the potential of detrimental effects.  

“For example, teens who use electronic devices 5 or more hours a day are 71% more likely to have a risk factor for suicide than those using devices less than an hour a day,” Twenge said. “They are also 51% more likely to not sleep enough. Teens who are online 5 or more hours a day are twice as likely to be unhappy as those online less than an hour a day.”

As for educational impacts, research has also found that smartphones can impact a person’s ability to think simply by being within reach – even if they are turned off. Another study found that students taught in computer-less classrooms performed significantly better on tests than their counterparts taught in classrooms with iPads and computers. 

The human, relational and educational concerns are why some Catholics schools are taking steps to limit, if not completely ban, the use of smartphones and iPads in the classroom.

St. Benedict Elementary in Natick, Mass. is one Catholic school that has taken the approach of not using electronic technology in the classroom at all, except for very limited ways in the higher grades.

Jay Boren, headmaster of St. Benedict, told CNA that this is because the classical academy was founded by parents who had a desire for their school to be different.

“There are studies that show that (student) memory retention is better when they have written the information as opposed to having typed it. There are also benefits to learning cursive,” Boren said.

“In addition, an environment that is not inundated with fast-paced technology…allows students to cultivate the ability to sustain attention, develop concentration, and appreciate silence, which are the necessary dispositions to ponder truth, beauty, and goodness,  We feel that those skills, are more important at this age level than mastering a screen that they will certainly be exposed to throughout their life at other times.”

On the other hand, Fr. Nicholas Rokitka, OFM Conv., teaches at Archbishop Curley High School in Buffalo, New York, which implemented a 1-to-1 iPad to student program four years ago.

“My major concern about technology in the classroom is the inability of the students to focus on the topic at hand and listen to the teacher,” Rokitka told CNA. “It certainly has changed the way teachers and students interact.”

Rokitka said that games and entertainment are always a potential distraction with the iPads in the classroom. While he has his room set up in a way that allows him to monitor his students’ iPad use closely, such monitoring “takes up a lot of my energy.”

There have been some positive impacts, Rokitka noted – the school has saved a lot of paper using digital homework and tests, and performance trends can be more quickly and easily recognized and addressed.

However, he added that without intentionality behind its use, technology negatively change the way students relate to one another and the world.

“On a very fundamental level, technology changes how people interact with each other. If technology is accepted wholesale without and intention, it will do more harm than good. When digital communication and social media replace face-to-face interaction, the students lose their ability to communicate,” he said. “This problem is way larger than just schools, but ultimately teachers and schools can have a dramatic input on how children learn how to use technology.”

Twenge said that she recommends schools ban the use of cellphones not only in the classroom, but during lunch as well, in order to give students a chance to interact with each other without a screen.

In interviews with students for her research, Twenge discovered students who would feel depressed and left out while their fellow students ignored them at lunch, favoring their phones instead, she wrote in the New York Daily News. “A no-phones-at-school rule would also help teens develop invaluable social skills. More and more managers tell me that young job applicants don’t look them in the eye and seem to be uncomfortable talking to people face-to-face. If our students are going to succeed in the workplace, they need more practice interacting with people in person,” she wrote. “They can get that right there at school – if they aren’t constantly on their phones.”

Edghill said that his biggest guiding principle in the use of technology in school has been intentionality – which is exactly why the school banned cell phone use in school during the school day.

“It was an intentional decision based on the fact that there was little to no educational benefit and a whole slew of potential and real problems,” he said.

“The unplanned side effect is that the students actually talk to one another before school in the mornings now instead of just staring at their individual screens.”

A father to four children between 14 and 3, Edghill noted that he and his wife try to implement the same intentionality with technology use at home, by enforcing limits and being consistent with them, though he admitted there has been a learning curve.

“I do think that the more time that they watch screens, the less creative and the less curious they are. But it is a constant battle. It may be one of the most counter-cultural things that we can do for our kids,” he said. “And that is saying something as a Catholic.”

It’s also important to note that technology is simply a tool, and “not an evil,” he said.

“The pope is active on social media. My bishop is active on Twitter. But it is for the greater good of reaching out to people in order to create the opportunity for an authentic encounter with Christ,” he said.  

“If the technology is replacing humanity as opposed to being used as a tool to advance humanity, that is the problem…If we miss the human element of the teacher, of person-to-person dialogue and debate, of human experience, then we can’t fully do our part to cooperate in the formation of the human person.”

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New York City, N.Y., Jan 30, 2018 / 05:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Hungarian cardinal has said that free societies must depend on the wisdom of religion to address the moral and social problems of the modern world.  

Cardinal Peter Erdo, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, delivered the Bampton Lecture at Columbia University on Monday, Jan. 29.

Addressing Columbia students and faculty, Erdo warned about the dangers of moral relativism, and discussed the necessity of the Church in a secular state.

The cardinal said that relativism— the inability to declare something as objectively right or objectively wrong—is a “grave crisis” of modern secular states. Without a foundation in natural law, he argued, societies become unstable, and moral evil becomes permissible.

“It is difficult for the state to decide what is good for man,” said Erdo, without some foundation in natural law and a religious worldview. Absent natural law and “by a weakening of belief in the rationality of the world,” societies lose trust in democratic institutions.

”Even the majority can end up with wrong or harmful decisions, especially if the concept of the common good becomes uncertain, because there is no consensus even on the anthropological foundations of law,” explained the cardinal.

Erdo said that until the philosophical Enlightenment, societies were effectively governed with an understanding that moral law was based on transcendent realities.

“Law, morals and religion prove to form an organic whole, which is characteristic of Western society right up to the age of Enlightenment,” Erdo said.

But in the modern era, relativism has separated legal norms from the natural law, he said. “The idea of relativity and the unknowability of the natural law, or the rules of upright human behavior based on its connexion with nature, gains ground, as also does the separation of law from so-called natural morals.”  

Due to the rise of relativism, the relationship between religion, the state, and a person’s worldview became “a problem.”

The separation of morality from law has led to the creation of immoral laws, such as the ones that existed in Nazi Germany, said Cardinal Erdo.

“The trials of Nuremberg showed where the separation of law and morals can lead. It was not easy to convict people whose actions were based on current, but immoral laws.”

The cardinal said that in the era of the Soviet Union, religion and morals were, in theory, replaced by Marxist-Leninist ideology. When the ideology fell, a “moral vacuum” was formed. Seeing this, leaders of formerly communist countries began trying to recreate a religious and moral framework for society, and are not bothered with “relativist ideologies.”

He mentioned that many former communist countries countries specifically mentioned the importance of religion in their new constitutions. For instance, Erdo’s home country of Hungary explicitly recognizes “churches, denominations and religious communities […] are entities of prominent importance, capable of creating values and communities.”

The cardinal noted that in the West, humanity is witness a “shaking of the anthropological foundations of democracy.”

“Western democracies presume that politicians and parties present and defend their political programs on a rational basis and that mature and responsible citizens make their choices and elect people using rational arguments,” he said.  

“Today, this sounds like a utopia…the picture of reality has become very complicated.”

“There has to be a lot of trust for someone to believe the basic premises of a political program, so that the elected body, based on a democratic majority, can count on the trust of that society. It seems to be a vicious circle. We have to place our trust in somebody in anticipation, in order to let such a decision pass, in which we can trust,” he added.

Erdo expressed concern about the effect that scientific advances will have on human rights without a religious moral framework regulating society. He said that technological advances are moving quicker than legal morality can keep up, and that this is a new challenge humanity will be facing.

“But the discoveries open new levels of reality, so the description of facts needed for moral evaluation and legal treatment are falling behind,” he said.

Despite this, Erdo believes that humans “cannot grow weary” of maintaining “basic moral values,” and that these need to be applied to new situations as well.

Erdo said that the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage is centered on a belief in a benevolent God, and the hope that a Creator seeks to communicate with humanity. That communication drives trust.

“And this, beyond giving a basic moral point of view, gives something extra, which is even more important. It generates trust both in the individual and in the community,” said the cardinal.

“It generates trust that even though our cognitive abilities cannot keep up with the fullness of reality, we can always somehow reach the necessary knowledge and cognitions…the weakness of our recognition is not a reason to give up our pursuit of the truth.”

The Bampton Lectures in America were created in 1948, and feature talks from theologians, scientists, and artists.

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Washington D.C., Jan 30, 2018 / 02:09 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic organizations applauded the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Jan. 29 announcement that it is lifting the ban on refugees from 11 high-risk countries, with the condition of … […]