On Friday 17^th November at Ryde we will be holding a device-free Friday. It is a tentative step for Ryde in an area where some schools have been far bolder; some banning phones, some creating regular device free days and others having a ‘don’t see, don’t hear’ policy. Our Deputy Head, Ben Sandford-Smith, reflected in assembly last week on some of the arguments for doing this but also on a trend that suggests pupils are increasingly concerned as much as the adults who care for them. Below is a shortened version of what he had to say.

I wonder how many of us have been told recently that we’re spending too much time on our phones or some other electronic device? I also wonder how many of us, in our heart of hearts, feel like we do, on occasion, spend too much time looking at our screens?

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting article about Benenden School in Kent. The pupils there decided that they were spending too much time on their devices, in particular social media, and asked the school to put in place a whole school ‘3 day digital detox’.

Whilst some pupils were initially negative about the idea, some of the comments from them afterwards were quite interesting:

• One Year 10 pupil said she was a bit annoyed at the detox initially, but soon realised “we don’t enjoy our phones as much as we think we do. In terms of the way we view ourselves and our lives negatively. I think people put what they see as their best image forward – it’s not always the real image.”
• She also said that the ban stopped her from sitting in her room scrolling through social media and encouraged her to spend her work breaks chatting to friends.
• She said it reminded her of what it was like when she was younger – when she would spend more time socialising in person.

The Headmistress commented afterwards, “In the run-up I was worried about how the girls would cope, but afterwards they were wondering what all the fuss had been about and said we should do it again – but for even longer next time”

These attitudes appear to be reflected elsewhere in the UK:

• A recent survey of almost 5,000 independent school students  aged between 14 and 16, found a growing backlash against social media – with over 70% admitting to taking digital detoxes to escape it.
• 50% said that they felt less confident about themselves for using it
• And 60% said they had been victims of abuse from social media use.
• Despite this over half of those surveyed said they were on the edge of addiction.

So why are young people so addicted to social media when so many recognise that it isn’t very good for them?

Like all addictions, social media triggers reward circuitry in the brain. All humans are social animals and need to connect with others to feel good, but as teenagers, this reward circuitry is particularly sensitive to social rewards and peer approval.  Evolution has made the teenage years a key time in your lives for forming friendship bonds, learning how to attract others, and finding out about your status within the group. This means that your brains fire off huge amounts of the reward neurotransmitter dopamine at any kind of social reward, whether this is a thumbs up for a comment you’ve made online, being invited into a group chat, or racking up your 500^th ‘online friend’. So our brains get quite easily hooked on social media, but this isn’t the only problem with overusing it. 

I don’t plan to talk about the well-documented online bullying which can occur, because I think we all recognise this is a bad thing, but rather some of the more subtle problems with the social media world:

The first problem is that social media can create envy. The human brain evolved at a time when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers and is not well adapted to cope with the bombardment of success stories and images that social media can throw at us. As one of the Benenden girls said “people always put their best self forward” and it creates an illusion that everyone else’s life is brilliant all of the time. Gore Vidal famously wrote “When a friend succeeds, a part of me dies” – and whilst this is a rather cynical view of how we feel about other people’s success, there is probably some truth in it, especially when we are bombarded with the successes of others and our own lives don’t always feel the same way.   

Another issue with the social media world is that it encourages ‘shallow interaction’ rather than ‘deep interaction’. It can be useful for staying touch with other people but most of the communication on there is quite superficial, brief and does not help us to build deep, strong, lasting bonds with people.  To do this we need to spend time interacting with people face to face. The recent Ghana Link trip was an excellent example of this: Internet access was severely restricted for most of the time and students on the trip spent far more time doing things together and talking to each other. By the end it was clear that strong friendships had been formed.

It is too soon to draw meaningful conclusions on what over-use of devices and social media is doing to us, or indeed how many hours even constitutes ‘over-use’ because the research is still catching up with the rapid rise of mobile technology.  But something I am acutely aware of is that technology is supposed to serve us as humans, we are supposed to be technology’s master, but increasingly I worry that we are becoming enslaved by technology, it is mastering us and preying on the addictive nature of our brains.

There are things that the school can do to tackle over-use of technology such as banning mobile phones, something which a number of schools have now done; but the whole point of school is to prepare you for adult life and therefore the most important thing we can all learn is to monitor and regulate our own behaviour, including noticing when we are using our mobile phones too much and making a conscious effort to do it less.

On ‘Device Free Friday’, everyone in the school will be asked not to use their mobile phone all day. It is an opportunity for us all to have a break from our devices and to focus on face-to-face interaction for the day. I am confident that most of us will actually have some positive things to say about it afterwards and maybe start to think about changing our own behaviour.

We were treated in school assembly this week to a talk from the Second Master, Mr Dubbins, who spoke with great passion and sense on the importance of making the most of the present. Assemblies have been themed by quotations from Shakespeare this term and Mr Dubbins took as his theme the above line from Act V of Richard II as the deposed King laments his lot and reflects on the opportunities he wasted as he now wastes away himself.

With this in mind pupils were asked what they had done and were planning to do but were also asked to consider whether, by too often looking forward to the future, we end up living our lives in the future and fail to enjoy the present. Schools can be guilty of this too – do we fall into a trap where year 9 is to prepare for GCSE, which is a gateway to IB or A Level, which are only valued as routes to university, which gets us a job, which gets us a pension and then…

This is a theme returned to often by philosophers, writers and thinkers. Mr Dubbins reminded us of Paul Tillich’s idea of the present as the ‘eternal now’; he showed a clip from Dead Poets Society when Mr Keating reminds his charges that in the end we are all ‘food for worms’, that life is amazing but short and we need to seize the day, carpe diem; he quoted Herrick’s ‘Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may’ and read the extract from the Screwtape letters when the young devil is told by Satan that the best way to do evil in the world is to tell men ‘not to worry as they have plenty of time before they need concern themselves with [heaven and hell.] Then you’ll see what trouble they can get into.’

I was pleased we were reminded of the importance of Now. Of how critical it is not to squander our time and how easily we can wish moments away for a future that may never come. Important things happen every day, and when pupils or parents focus on how well we are preparing our pupils for ‘the next stage’ there is a very real danger we lose sight of the importance of the stage we are in. It manifests itself in the ‘is it on the syllabus?’ question that can so irritate the classroom teacher and it creates the dander that we only value that which is measurable or valued by a future institution.

Mr Dubbins reminded us on Monday to cherish every moment, and it was a moment this week that I valued for being at.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
  Tomorrow will be dying.

When planning this term’s calendar I really hadn’t expected to be pencilling in (another) mock election, but here we go again and its an election where, whatever the outcome, social media, and Twitter and Facebook in particular, seem set to play a major role. Until the EU Referendum last year Twitter had always seemed the more aggressive and partisan of the social media options, but many people were surprised, including myself, at how personal and at times very hurtful some comments got on Facebook last year. I gather the same had happened in the Scottish Referendum too. I think it partly has to do with a willingness for people to say via an email or on-line things that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and certainly the emotions on both sides were stronger than you usually get in an election, but I also suspect a lot of people were quite taken aback to discover that friends and relatives had views, often strongly felt, that thy didn’t realise they had. Traditionally, in Britain at least, we have preferred to talk about sport and the weather, not religion or politics, but suddenly, whether through likes, responses or posts, we were revealing attitudes previously kept fairly private.

After the Brexit vote, and then again after the election of President Trump, I kept seeing posts on Facebook announcing that people would unfriend anyone who had expressed support for one side or the other, particularly, it has to be said, those supporting the winning side. Then last week I saw something similar happening with the coming election when a friend on Facebook promised, I won’t comment on your posts to try to convince you otherwise if you also refrain from commenting on mine… we should just agree to disagree right now and save the arguments of last summer.

This post sounds at first to be positive and sensible – it’s about avoiding conflict, keeping friends and so on, but it worried me enough to talk about it in assembly this week. I and for three reasons in particular:

Firstly, I was concerned that it suggests we cannot be friends if we disagree. I disagree with friends on a whole host of issues, from Brexit to marmite, and we should be able to disagree and still enjoy one another’s company. It isn’t impossible – after all there was a point not long ago when the Prime Minister of Norway was married to the Leader of the Opposition and most people assume Winston Churchill’s wife was a Liberal voter and his Labour opponent and Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, had a wife who voted Conservative.

Secondly I am concerned, and this seems to me to be a particular problem with social media, that if you only want to engage with people who agree with you then you end up reinforcing your views rather than considering and developing them. If we only talk with people who share the same instincts then we can quickly lose sight of the wider picture. I saw a young woman on the TV last night in Paris saying she knew Macron would win the next round in France because she had not met anyone who had voted for Marine Le Pen. But that said rather more about her than France, for more than 1 in 5 French voters did vote for Le Pen. The danger of getting rid of people who disagree with you is that Facebook becomes an echo chamber for your views so on the one hand your views become unchallenged and thus sloppy and on the other you might lose sight of majority or at least alternative opinion. I am lucky to have a whole host of friends who hold wildly different views and it makes me think carefully about my own arguments – sometimes that means I change my view, but at the very least I formulate and develop arguments with care.

My third concern, and this is the most profound, is that I see this as part of a current trend that I know is increasingly real at universities, of not tolerating alternative views, of attacking in a sense what we would call Free Speech – and Free Speech is one of those things we closely associate with British values. One of the most famous of Voltaire’s quotations, even if we are not certain he said it, is ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ It captures perfectly the principle of free speech, for what is the point in supporting free speech if you only defend people who agree with you?

But how far do we really agree with that statement?

It doesn’t seem to be the view of a good number of people, maybe even the majority, at universities today. There the increasing willingness to ‘no platform’  people with strong views that go against prevailing polite opinion find themselves banned from speaking. To some extent this has always been the case – when I was at university I remember attempts to ban speakers from South Africa and Israel, or representatives of the National Front for example. In many European countries it is illegal to argue that the Holocaust did not happen. But there does seem to have been a growth recently in stopping people  expressing views that reflect, if not the majority, then at least a mainstream position and people with a fine record in asking difficult questions and challenging authority, for example the feminists Jenny Murray and Germaine Greer,  both recently prevented from speaking because of their views on transgender and Peter Tatchell. Tatchell seems to have been criticised not because of his views, but because he has supported the right of people with opposing views to express them and he has debated with them. When he said “I’m prepared to share a platform with people I profoundly disagree with, precisely in order to challenge and expose them,” an officer of the National Union of Students refused to debate with him.

It is not just student unions though – critics of the Government’s Prevent Strategy, aimed at stopping the growth of violent Islamic fundamentalism – are worried that the Government is trying to silence legitimate views, even if those views are disapproved of by the vast majority. After all, whilst Karl Marx was writing about the violent overthrow of western society he was living in London and holidaying in Ventnor.

Supporters of free speech at any cost would argue that it is far better to have these arguments out in the open, to challenge and so defeat poor arguments and to help strengthen the counter argument. They argue that too many people take offence at comments rather than argue back and that the younger generation, the snowflake generation as they call it, is too easily upset and fragile to engage in robust and challenging debate and so prefers to shut their ears to argument, retreating to a safe space where everyone agrees with them. I totally understand this, and I worry too about our moving into a world predicted by George Orwell of double think – a world where we dare not say what we really think because it is socially unacceptable so we keep it to ourselves, but that means our views go unchallenged and also apparent consensus is not a consensus at all.

And yet – do I really believe in free speech? Because how far do you take it? In that exchange on Facebook I mentioned earlier, someone commented as follows:

Of course, in my rational mind, you’re right and I agree – no point being in an echo chamber etc. However, I personally think the real problem lies in the definition of ‘opinion’ or ‘view’ on something. In my mind an ‘opinion’ that involves somebody voicing a racist, sexist, disablist, homophobic etc remark, I view as discrimination and that, in my opinion, is an altogether different thing.

How far should we be prepared to tolerate language or ideas that promote hate, or violence, or advocate distasteful things. Should we allow people to make the case for racism, or paedophilia, or terrorism? Should we allow extremists the chance to influence people? But if we don’t, who decides what is extreme? If we ban people speaking in favour of Hitler, why don’t we also ban people for supporting Mao or Stalin? What is an extreme political party? The National Front? UKIP? Yet 1 in 5 French voters supported the Front National at the weekend and four million voted UKIP at the last election.

And what of the position of the Government? We know there are some Mosques where preachers speak a language so violent and hateful, one was near here in Portsmouth, that some of those who heard them were motivated to go out and fight and kill, first in Syria and Iraq, now on the streets of London, Stockholm, Paris and Berlin. Are the speakers as guilty of the crime they advocate or encourage as the person who carries it out? Should we stop that? But if we do, should we also have stopped those who left Britain in the 1930s to fight and kill in the Spanish Civil War?

I am not providing answers here, but I do want all our pupils at Ryde to think about where they stand on this question, one which I feel is becoming the question of the age. It is not a new question and it boils down to how far in a tolerant society we can support the intolerant. Voltaire would I feel sure have argued that you only defeat the intolerant by open and reasonable debate, but he hadn’t lived through the C20th. One who did, the philosopher Karl Popper, had this to say.

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with it.

And as we ponder this questions I hope that over the next six weeks we can have a civilised debate which we approach with open minds, where we can respect and learn from one another’s opinions, and after which our friendships will be intact.

An article in today’s Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/the-top-9-languages-for-the-highest-paid-jobs-in-britain-a7329201.html) looks at which languages are likely to secure you a job or command a decent salary in London if you have it as a second language – a pretty useful skill in London where 22% of Londoners speak a major language other than English. It makes interesting reading, not just because non EU languages Mandarin, Russian, Japanese and Arabic all make the top nine but because sitting at the top of the list is German – the speaking of which will not only get you the highest paid job on average but also means you speak the language that is highest in demand across job postings. This matters, because German has been in freefall as a language taught and studied in schools over the last decade, often at the expense of Spanish. Spanish is there, but sits in 5th position behind Dutch, French and Arabic as well as German. Deciding which languages to offer in a school is a fraught business but I have long been worried that the domination of French – a language that is more challenging than most as a starter – is more a result of history and staff supply than strategy. Its appearance at number 3 is reassuring in that sense, and a reminder that the recent vogue for Spanish may be more helpful for the gap year plans than a career in London. But what of Arabic at second place? Surely the most obvious missing language in most schools and unlikely to suffer as other languages might in a post-Brexit London. Having lived and worked in Athens and Prague the question of which language to study troubles me less than it did – I could hardly have expected to be taught Modern Greek or Czech at school but the fact I had studied German, French and Latin helped me start to grapple with those languages when I lived there. But that same experience in Prague has convinced me that the decline of German in schools should be a worry for us all. At Ryde in the last three years we have gone against the trend with language learning – a school that did French and some Spanish three years ago now has over 100 pupils studying German, 180 do Spanish and over 50 Mandarin, alongside French and Latin. This week we have been celebrating the European week of Languages, cakes have been baked and eaten, flags flown, new languages learnt and a flashdance Macarena is planned for this afternoon. Languages matter, and perhaps Deutsch ueber alles.

I am typing this in the knowledge that any moment now our new website will, after two years planning, finally see the light of day. I hope parents and pupils, past, present and future, will think it worth the wait and will find that it is a fair reflection of our busy school and allows the information within to be easily reached. As we talk of our new website as a contemporary and dynamic window on the world and say goodbye to a familiar but tired previous version one cannot help but reflect on the passage of time and the need for change. I am sure that when our old website first appeared it was greeted with the same enthusiasm as I hope this will be now, but, to steal Lampedusa’s famous quotation, ‘if we want things to stay as they are, then things are going to have to change.’ It is interesting to note that those institutions that stand the test of time, and so seem at first to represent tradition and continuity, almost always have an impressive inbuilt capacity to change whether that be the British Monarchy, venerable political parties, successful sports teams (not a moment to mention English Rugby) or great restaurants. And so it is with schools. Our new website comes at the start of a year when we have opened a new boarding house, two new Chemistry labs and an outdoor learning space, when we have launched an entirely new 6th form curriculum route, the IBCP (the first independent school in the UK to do so) and we welcome new Heads of English, Maths, Physics, Economics and Games, as well as our new Head of Junior School, Mrs Linda Dennis. But it is not out with the old and in with the new – these changes allow us to maintain the values and ethos established back at our foundation in 1921 and they will be stronger for doing so. Our new website is an important part of these changes, but I am sure that in five years it will be all change once again – and it must be, for only by internal renewal do we deserve to survive – ask The Doctor.