The Second of the New 3’R’s

Remove!

This is an informed and thoughtful call to action.

First, what it’s not. It’s not simply a call to restrict the individual use of digital media. It’s not a call to more self-discipline.  It’s not a call to simply go back to using a flip phone. It’s not a call to set a limit for how much time you or your children spend on a device each day.

What it is, or at least what the intention is as expressed by Ruth Gaskovski in her article, The 3R’s of Unmachining She wrote:

 If we can remove or radically reduce digital technologies in the places where they shouldn’t be, then their destabilizing impact on our minds and relationships should with time, diminish.

About 8 or 10 years ago, we began to experience a big uptick in the number of cell phone showing up and being brought to our campus classes at Basic Skills. My knee-jerk response was for Basic Skills, everywhere and anywhere in the building, to be a technology-free zone. That, of course, proved to be unworkable and impossible to enforce without turning our staff into policing agents.  What we did settle on was allowing the students to have their phones, but if they went off-a notification, a text, a call- the teacher was free to confiscate them. This happened a lot initially, then not so often.  The embarrassment and the need to stay after class to visit with the teacher in order to receive a phone back very quickly led to a change in “classroom culture.”  If parents needed to reach their student, they could contact the school secretary who was always available to take their call on our land line. This system worked the same way it had worked for decades.

The idea, then, behind removing or reducing technologies is to do so where doing this will promote and facilitate relationships.

This principle/action could be applied to:

social gatherings

co-ops

church gatherings

family get togethers…

There was a time when restaurants permitted smoking. Many of us remember this. There were booths where smoking was permitted, and booths where it wasn’t. Overtime this changed. One could argue that this standard shouldn’t have been forced on restaurant owners, but that’s not my point here. The point is that such changes can and do take place. Standards or expectations that seem over the top and too radical to implement are attainable.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

Want to read more about limiting social media in school contexts? Johnathan Haidt makes the case here:  https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-free-schools. What he writes has application to home schooling.

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