Carl Honore

Too much of a good thing?

Just back from a conference in Newcastle, England called Thinking Digital. It was a glimpse into the extraordinary ways that technology is going to reshape the future, revolutionizing every aspect of the way we work, play and live. It may even alter what it means to be human, as artificial intelligence catches up with the real thing and more and more gadgets – think medical nanobots patrolling the bloodstream or computer chips boosting the brain – are installed in our bodies. The most vivid picture of this sci-fi future was painted by Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and inventor, who appeared on stage as a ghostly apparition inside a slab of glass. He was thousands of miles away in California yet we could see and hear each other as if we were all in the same room. I found the crystal ball-gazing in Newcastle exhilarating, but also a bit troubling. It seems to me that as the rate of technological change accelerates, we urgently need to slow down and answer some crucial question, starting with: Do really want everything that technology can deliver and will all the advances be benign? Even as a technophile, I have some doubts. What happens to memory, patience and the journey of discovery when all human knowledge is instantly accessible from anywhere? What happens to human relations when you can download the full profile of anyone you meet and read it on a Terminator-like screen on your contact lens before speaking to them? And who gets to write that profile? Above all, what happens when we are constantly connected to the Internet and no longer have any time or space for silent, solitary reflection?

One reason for the global obesity epidemic is that our bodies were designed for a hunter-gathering society and are therefore highly efficient at storing excess calories as fat. Today, when calories are permanently on tap and there is less call for burning them off hunting and gathering, our waist-lines are ballooning. As I sat there in Newcastle, with my own waist expanded from the buffet lunch, it occurred to me that maybe the same analogy works for the high-tech revolution. We are hard-wired to be curious and to want to connect and communicate with others – and those are wonderful instincts. The trouble is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we don’t know when to stop. Just as we keep on eating even after our bodies have had enough food, we keep on texting, surfing and wilfing long after our minds have reached a frenzy of stimulation and distraction. The truth is that no matter how fast the technology becomes, the human brain is always going to need slowness. To rest and recharge. To think deeply and creatively – every artist, designer and inventor knows that deceleration is essential for the act of creation. We also need to slow down in order to look into ourselves and grapple with the big questions: Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is life really for? Nor is this a concern voiced only by monks and meditation gurus. Even the most gung ho geeks are starting to warn that being “always on” may not be the best thing for the human brain. Dipchand Nishar, the man in charge of wireless technology at Google, has said: “We had Generation X and Generation Y. Now we have Generation ADD.” And other high tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, are coming to similar conclusions.

Yet this is not a call for a Luddite backlash. Technology is not evil; on the contrary, it has mind-blowing potential to make the world a better place. But as we enter the era of what Kurzweil calls “exponential growth in technological advances,” the need for circumspection is greater than ever before. That means thinking hard about how best to apply each new technology rather than just automatically adopting it. Or put another way: As the pace of change quickens, we need to remember that some things never change, starting with the fact that we are human beings. And human beings will always need to unplug and slow down.

In praise of summer holidays…

A new reportfrom a leading think tank in Britain draws some intriguing conclusions about the future of education. First off, the authors warn that the modern obsession with academic learning in primary schools is backfiring, that pushing the three Rs earlier and earlier is failing to produce a generation of children who are more literate and numerate than before. Their prescription: promote overall well-being in the classroom and clear more space for kids to learn through play. “Improving results can’t just be about focussing on maths, English and science,” the report argues.”Schools need more support in developing healthy and happy young people.” Amen to that. Let’s just hope that the politicians take note. But the report contains a second conclusion that is harder to interpret: that the long school holiday should be abolished in favour of a series of two-week holidays spread across the year. The argument is that children forget too much of what they learn during the academic term when schools shut down for a long summer break. But is this really the case? I’ve read mixed research on the subject. Some argue that children need a long break from school in order not only to recharge their batteries but also to let the academic learning sink in. And what about the sheer joy of a long vacation? Surely that is the time when children can see a world in a grain of sand and hold infinity in the palm of their hand – it’s certainly hard to imaging William Blake campaigning for shorter holidays for the young. One of my happiest memories of childhood was finishing school at the end of June and knowing that I had two months of play and freedom ahead of me. Do we want to lose that? Especially when nations with very successful education systems (eg. Finland) allow their kids a long holiday in summer. If academic gains really are eroding during the warmer months in Britain, maybe the real reason is not that children are taking a break from school; maybe it’s that they are getting the wrong kind break. For many kids, the summer holiday is no longer a time to play freely, to roam the neighbourhood without adults butting in or to explore the world on their own terms; it’s just an extension of the rest of the year, a treadmill of structured and supervised activities. Perhaps that is where we are going wrong. Instead of abolishing the long summer holiday, we should be finding better ways to spend it…

More stranger danger

Yesterday I did a radio interview with a station in Newfoundland in Canada. Before my segment, I listened to a report of how local police had street-proofed a city there. You heard a voice repeatedly saying “Never do this” and “Don’t do that.”I felt afraid just listening on the phone from the other side of the ocean.Then you heard children talking about how they would run a mile from any strange adult. It was chilling, and depressing. Is that really the message we want to send to our kids? That every grown-up is a potential abuser? That you can’t trust anyone unless you know them personally and they have been formally approved by your parents? What kind of society does that create? And how will children ever learn how to distinguish the very tiny minority who are a threat from the rest of us? Anyway, it made me think again how timely is the Safer Stranger campaign just launched in Britain (see blog post May 7).

Testing times

Around the world, exam season is switching into high gear. Months of studying, training and sweating are all coming down to a few lonely hours in a testing hall. But will children emerge from their exams better equipped for life in the real world? Maybe not. Over the last generation, many countries have put standardized testing at the core of their education systems so that kids now sit more exams than ever before. English pupils, for instance, take a whopping 70 national tests while at school. The trouble is that the obsession with targets and measurable results is backfiring. Instead of inspiring pupils to learn, teachers end up teaching to the test. The curriculum narrows. Children learn how to serve up oven-ready answers rather than how to think outside the proverbial box. What exams do better than anything else is tell us how good a child is at taking exams – and how useful is that? Of course, testing has a role to play in education – it can spur children to work hard and it can help measure their progress. But it’s folly to make exam results the sole measure of a child or a teacher or a school. That is why pressure is building around the world to reduce the emphasis on testing. A couple of days ago, a parliamentary committee concluded that testing is now doing more harm than good in England. Read morehere.

Giving children space

One of things I examine in Under Pressure is how we can become over-invested in our children, treating them as a mini-me. These days you often hear people talking about their kids with the collective pronoun: “We have lots of homework this weekend;” “we are signing up for football this year;” “we are applying to Harvard or Oxford.” This may start out from the noble instinct to do the best for our children and to be close to them, but it can go too far. Another problem is that in a culture in thrall to management science the temptation to approach child-rearing as a kind of product-development is strong. So we think: “If I add X to my child, I’ll get Y at the other end.” Unfortunately that is not how it works. Child-rearing is much more complex, blurry and confusing than that – and all the more thrilling and enriching as a result, I think. A child is not a product but a person born with his own character, aptitudes and flaws – his own soul. In that sense, parenting is more about discovering and celebrating who our children are rather than striving constantly to turn them into what we want them to be.

Since Under Pressure came out, several readers have sent me a poem by Kahlil Gibran that sums up these ideas with a gentle beauty. So I figured I’d share it here:

On Children

“Your children are not your children.?

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.?

They come through you but not from you,?

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

?For they have their own thoughts.?

You may house their bodies but not their souls,?

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, ?which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.?

You may strive to be like them, ?but seek not to make them like you.?

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children?as living arrows are sent forth.?

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, ?

and He bends you with His might ?that His arrows may go swift and far.

?Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;?

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, ?

so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

And while we’re on the subject, here is something that Anne Frank wrote:

“Parents can only give good advice or put [children] on the right paths,

but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”

Just like riding a bike

The tendency to over-protect children can backfire in lots of ways. Keeping kids cloistered indoors means they don’t learn how to navigate traffic, how to identify a well-meaning stranger or how to play with their peers without an adult taking control. The same may apply to learning to ride a bike. A landmark moment for any parent is buying that first bicycle and slapping on thestabilizers (training wheels)to support the child. But do children actually need that support? And do stabilizers really help them learn how to cycle? Maybe not. Recently, pre-school teachers in London noticed that even children under three were able to balance on two wheels if given half a chance and that they learned better as a result. They also developed more strength, stamina and balance. Said one teacher:”We might be wrong but at every stage we found that what holds them back was not them but us.”To prove the point, one London borough is now running an experiment where kids are given small wooden bikes with no pedals and their progress is monitored. We’ll have to wait for the results but I can already report that at least one two-year-old has almost mastered cycling without stabilizers. He’s the one that ran over my foot in the Battersea Park on the weekend.

The end of Stranger Danger?

Much of the panic and hysteria surrounding children today is focussed on their safety. Many kids are not allowed to venture outside alone. To modern parents, the world beyond the front door looks like a vast cesspool of drug dealers, bullies, paedophiles and rampaging traffic. As a father of two,I know that fear all too well. Sometimes I think it’ll be okay for my children to start walking to school alone when they’re 12. Or maybe 23. The instinct to protect our kids is a natural and noble one, but over the last generation it has tipped so far into paranoia. Even when statistics show that are streets are no more dangerous than before, they still feel more dangerous to us parents. The upshot is that many children are almost being raised in captivity. And they’re missing out on some valuable life lessons: how to handle risk, how to get along with their peers without adults hovering overhead, how to know when to trust a stranger. For years the rallying cry at schools has been “Stranger Danger” – the implication being that the outside world is a hellish, apocalyptic place where every unknown adult is a potential threat. Is that the right message to send to the next generation? Probably not. But thankfully the backlash has begun.This morning, at the House of Commons in London, I attended the launch of a campaign to help children navigate the streets alone by showing them that most adults can be trusted. It’s called Safer Strangers, Safer Buildings. A shortvideoteaches children that they can turn for help to people in uniform (police, doctors, check-out assistants, etc) and certain buildings (churches, shops, post offices, etc). It’s not rocket science, but it punctures the pernicious assumptionthat every stranger is a danger. And anything that makes parents feel less anxious and gets kids outdoors more has to be a good thing.

Can money make us happy?

One big argument for slowing down and working less is that more money doesn’t always make us happier. The roots of this thinking lie in a 1974 study by Richard Easterlin at the University of Southern California. He found that the happiness of a nation’s inhabitants rises in tandem with growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but only up to a certain point. Thereafter, getting richer stops making us any happier. This, of course, calls into question our obsession with maximizing economic growth. But over the last 30 years the boom in happiness studies has encouraged other academics to revisit the data. Apparently, two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are about to publish a comprehensive survey of the literature which shows that happiness and per capita GDP continue to rise more or less in unison. In other words, making more money does make us happier. I haven’t read the study yet, but already it raises some intriguing questions. What does it mean for the Slow revolution if working longer and earning more does in fact make us happier? How much does our happiness depend on the kind of work that we do? Do we need to build other criteria, such as health, education and the environment, into any measure of economic growth? How do we even define happiness? Lots to think about here….

Seeing slow fast food in action…

On my last day in San Francisco, I visited a branch of the Chipotle chain (see blog entry from April 22, 2008). Even on a busy, bustling working day, there were several office types happily waiting for their food. One woman, a fortysomething accountant, ordered a chicken burrito. “I don’t mind waiting the extra time,” she said. “It’s reassuring that you can see them making the food fresh rather than just pulling it pre-made off the shelf like they do in other places.” The man behind her, a young lawyer, nodded his head. “A lot of fast food is just too fast,” he said. “If you slow things down a bit you get a more quality experience.” I told them both about Slow Planet so maybe we’ll see them on here soon. I can’t speak for Chipotle’s food, however. I was too stuffed from my own slow lunch even to try the chips and salsa