Silicon Valley is an area south of the San Francisco Bay, in Palo Alto, California, United States. Its name is commonly associated with digital technology giants: companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have their offices there, and life here is highly tech-related. Although in a very unexpected way.
And it is that while their fathers and mothers create the vanguard of applications and devices that the rest of the world uses daily, their sons and daughters attend schools without screens. There are no computers, no tablets, no mobile phones until high school. Wow, there are not even calculators, just simple wooden abacuses.
Journalist Pablo Guimón has closely explored this trend in the upbringing of «digital gurus» in schools like the Waldorf of Peninsula, whose annual tuition amounts to $30,000. In private institutions like this, the parent committee is often made up of engineers or programmers who are extremely strict about their children’s screen time.
Pierre Laurent is a computer engineer and father of three children, as well as president of the Waldorf board of trustees. In his own words: «What triggers learning is emotion, and it is humans who produce that emotion, not machines.»
According to his reasoning, children should learn to draw a circle by hand before using a program to do it for them. No programming and robotics workshops for these children, but vegetable gardens, carpentry and strictly analogous manual activities.
Other computer pioneers such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did not allow screens at the table, and their children received electronic devices until they were 14 years old.
But why do the adults who create the latest technology want their children away from it?
This is probably hypocritical, but it also makes a lot of sense: apps and devices are not designed to promote education and knowledge, but to give the user reasons to stay looking at the screen for as long as possible. Facebook and Google do not charge users for their services, but that does not mean that they do not earn money for the use that we give them.
Many metrics related to advertising and digital marketing are associated with the time the user spends on a certain page: that is the time in which personal data can be collected, offered ads and turned into information.
In other words, as a digital adage goes, «when a product is free, the product is you.»
According to Laurent:
The objective today is for the user to spend more time in the application, in order to collect more data or place more ads. In other words, the raison d’être of the application is for the user to spend as much time as possible in front of the screen. They are designed for that.
Interestingly, children from the economically privileged classes spend the least amount of time in front of screens: an average of almost 2 hours (in 2017), compared to 4 hours spent by lower class children online. In countries like the United States, the African-American and Latino populations spend the most time online.
Creativity and privacy for rich kids, robots and surveillance for poor kids? (Image: The Country)
There are studies that relate early access to digital devices with attention and learning difficulties. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2016 to prevent children under 2 years of age from using screens, in addition to supervising and limiting the content that children see thereafter, never exceeding 2 hours a day of «educational and quality content».
Where are the digital frontiers?
Parents can limit access to the technology their children interact with, but do they have the right to limit access to the people who work with them? Syma Latif, head of a nanny agency that caters to «high-profile» families in the Silicon Valley area, says contracts specifying that nannies cannot look at their own cell phones while with the children are common.
Latif can understand both positions: on the one hand, parents need to trust that the babysitter will not neglect the children for being on the cell phone; on the other, what happens if the nanny has an emergency with her own family, a sick relative, or what happens simply with the right to leisure in her spare time?
While executives like Laurent fully understand that the results of these parenting experiences won’t be visible for a few years, it’s interesting to learn how concerned the people who design the surveillance devices that undermine our privacy are, themselves. so that their children are not victims of it.