Conversations about screens with teachers, parents, students — and my spouse and our children — all lead to the same conclusion: we don’t know what to do. Some schools of thought say that the sky is falling, society is coming apart at the seams, and that we are all zombie addicts. Other schools of thought say that the concern is overblown. When we think about this individually, most of us want our relationship with our screens to be different — and better — than it is, but we do not want someone telling us what we can/can’t or should/shouldn’t do with the lovely little marvels of 21st century incredibleness, thank you very much.
As a boarding school, we have a responsibility to our students and our community to do something, even as most people are frozen and fretting. We need to meet students where they are — not where we wish they would be, or some idealized version of the past —and partner with them and with each other to launch micro-experiments in different kinds of screen use and create an environment that invites students to self-reflect on the experience. We need to articulate what we are for — and why — not just what we are against.
It is for all of those reasons and more — many that we’ll discover along the way —that we are reading My Tech-Wise Life: Growing Up and Making Choices in a World of Devices by Amy Crouch and her father, Andy Crouch. Amy Crouch was in her late teen years when she wrote the book, and she wrote it for other teenagers. It’s real and it’s practical. (The only disclaimer I will make is that the end of each chapter includes a letter from Andy Crouch to Amy reflecting on the chapter. The Crouch family, as we learn, identify as Christian, so, especially in Andy’s letters, there is insider language that may be unfamiliar and unusual to readers who are not familiar with that tradition. As you’ll see, however, these facts about the Crouch family don’t detract from the usefulness of the book overall and hopefully encourage us to be curious.) Enjoy!
