Crossroads Podcast: Screens, Sanity And Spiritual Silence In Our Kids

Every now and then, no matter how many books and articles I have read about screens culture, I run into an image that stops me right in my tracks.

That’s what happened when After Babel (a Substack essential if there ever was one) sent me this Fit to Teach article by Gilbert Schuerch: “My School Banned Phones for the Year. Here’s What Happened.”

But first, why are you getting this post instead of the weekly “Crossroads” podcast? Simply stated, the Lutheran Public Radio team took a rare week off.

Listen To The 'Crossroads' Podcast Here

That pause allowed me to create this package deal, which combines a new post with something that readers requested from me a few months ago, an AUDIO version of the lecture — “Our Home is Different” — that I delivered at my home parish here in Northeast Tennessee. Hold that thought.

Back to the stunning overture from the Schuerch essay. Let’s dive straight into this. It’s long, but essential:

“Screen time check!” I barked out at my health class.
They sighed, took out their phones, and opened up their screen tracking applications.
“Patricia, how much yesterday?”
Patricia said, “12 hours.”
I whistled. “Okay, how about you Larry?”
Larry said, “8 hours. See. I’m way better than Patricia.”
“Shut up!” Patricia replied.
I patted the air with my hands to indicate they should calm down. “What about you Manuela?”
“17 hours.”
“What?”
“17 hours. Yeah, mista, it was a Sunday. I didn’t have much else to do.”

Well, some people in our culture do have a few things to do on Sunday mornings and even Sunday nights. You know?

But we will come back to that. Let’s continue with that scene in Schuerch’s classroom:

I sighed and went around the room getting a quick read on how much screen time each student had accumulated. The class average neared 11 hours.
I said, “Guys. Guys. Let’s suppose you sleep 8 hours a day. That means you're awake for 16 hours a day. If you’re on your phone for 12 hours, that means you only spend 4 hours not looking at a two by four inch screen…Is that really how you want to spend your life?”
Most of the kids just shrugged.
Then one kid said, “What else is there to do?”

Indeed. This scene took place two years ago, when the school was allowing students to carry their smartphones in their pockets. To be blunt, that approach didn’t work. “The moment a teenager felt a vibration in their pocket a command from Satan himself wouldn’t stop that kid from checking their screen,” noted Schuerch.

Then the school required supposedly “unbreakable,” locked pouches for phones. This allowed students to “have” their precious smartphones with them, but they could not use them until the end of the day.

This worked, sort of, for three days. The problem was that, even though students could not use their phones, they “still felt the dopamine burst whenever they felt a vibration go off in the pouch.”

That was too much. That vibration was a summons from on high.

They had to know. They had to see. It drove them mad. Students started taking pens and stabbing through the fake Kevlar pouches, other kids started using their keys to saw the locking mechanism off. Others would bring two phones to school. They would let the dean watch them pop their old phone into the pouch at entry, and keep their main phone in their backpack until the coast was clear.
One kid even got entrepreneurial about it. He went on Amazon and bought the magnet that unlocked the phone pouches for 50 bucks. Then he charged kids a dollar every time they wanted to unlock their phone. The kid had made a tidy profit by the time we confiscated the magnet. Silicon Valley has made a product so addictive a kid created a new economy within our school to help kids manage that addiction.

The school fought back, requiring students to turn in their screen devices. The consequences were stiff: “Immediate detention, call home to parents, and a personal visit from the dean mid class.”

Students kept smuggling in multiple devices. After all, some of them had multiple smartphones. One kid owned three iPads.

The students fought and fought, in defense of their gods. But the school administration stood firm and, eventually, the screens were totally locked away. You will want to read the whole essay, but here is the bottom line from Schuerch:

Teachers don’t have to fight an impossible battle against tech. Students talk to each other between classes. The cafeteria has the sound of conversation. Teachers cover material faster. Cyberbullying has fallen. When a fight happens, half the school doesn’t immediately run out of the classroom to watch. Mindless doomscrolling happens on their time, not school time. Boys can’t watch porn in the bathroom (or the cafeteria). I don’t have to fight an impossible war against the greatest human behavioral psychologists Silicon Valley has ever employed. …
Our kids are smarter, more social, and more motivated to do the things they actually want to accomplish in this world when they don’t have a Pavlovian vibration derailing their attention every 20 seconds.

State governments have the power to deal with these issues in public schools.

But here is my question: Why hasn’t every faith-based K-12 school in America adopted this strategy? What would it take to motivate the leaders of churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious congregations (and the leaders of their seminaries) to address the mental-health crisis linked to screens culture?

That brings me to Flashback No. 1 — the “Lost and Lonely” episode of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that I asked readers to watch in this recent post: “Rolling Stone finds the online version of ‘Descent into Hell.’” Here is an online blurb for that:

"Meet the Press” … will take a break from its usual focus on the latest in political news to air a special edition of the program that examines mental health and, in particular, the growing number of young people who say they are suffering from loneliness.
Moderator Kristen Welker, in her opening comments at the top of the show … will lay out the disheartening situation; studies show two-thirds of Gen Z'ers are dealing with loneliness while youth suicide rates have increased dramatically since the start of the 21st century.

Yes, I know, I know. We are all extremely busy and no one has any time to watch, or even just listen to the audio, of something like this on YouTube. Right?

In that earlier post, I asked readers to dig into the NBC News program and look for evidence that this news organization had any idea that human beings have souls, as well as eyes, minds and bodies.

It was a close call. Even though “Lost and Lonely” stressed the urgent need for lonely Americans to find support communities, there wasn’t a whisper during most of the program about religious congregations. That’s strange, since there are roughly 380,000 of them in America, compared to, oh, 17,000 Starbucks locations. I wonder how many members of the “Meet the Press” staff go to a Starbucks once a week?

Finally, scholar and author Arthur Brooks of Harvard University mentioned that his Catholic faith is crucial in his life — but he stressed that Americans could find other ways to plug into some kind of transcendent power. That brief reference to religious faith stood out in a program dominated by discussions of therapy, self-help groups and the need for legislation (which I support) treating smartphones like packs of cigarettes.

Did I miss something? I will ask again: Readers, what is your take on that episode of “Meet the Press”?

Give this assignment a few moments or, maybe, even send the URL (and your comments) to the clergy in your life.

Now, for Flashback No. 2 — an easy-to-use audio stream of the main lecture that was included in a previous Rational Sheep post, "Our Home Is Different -- talking tech with the Orthodox.”

Several readers said they wanted to LISTEN to the lecture — while driving, walking or working in the kitchen — instead of having to watch a video. The other day, I asked a tech-friendly Millennial in our parish if he could isolate the audio, so that I could file it in the “Crossroads” library (which is massive, after a decade-plus).

Thus, here it is — “Our home is not like other homes.”

In that earlier post, I noted that for Orthodox believers the title of the lecture:

… covers all kinds of things, including lots of vegan recipes for the many days of fasting. And this lecture (#trigger warning) contains all kinds of material about my own family’s journey into ancient Orthodox Christianity — with me stressing that experiences of other converts (and the “cradle” Orthodox, including those often called “reverts”) will vary.
Everyone’s timeline is different. Everyone’s journey is different. Everyone’s larger family drama is different.
However, as you will see, it’s clear that in this day and age technology issues are crucial for those who want to follow traditional forms of faith. Thus, quite a bit of the “Our Home Is Different” talk focuses directly on issues at the heart of the Rational Sheep mandate, as in issues of faith, family and digital-screen culture.
You will, for example, hear familiar quotes from my posts (click here and especially here) about my lengthy interview with Jonathan “The Anxious Generation” Haidt.
The bottom line: At some point, parents in traditional forms of faith are going to have to teach their children — the younger the better — that their their home is different from those in which many of their friends are being raised. That can be tough sledding, but these hard topics Will. Not. Go. Away.