/ world today news/ There is a tendency to exaggerate the role of the Internet and the increasingly early use of information and communication technologies by children when explaining the causes of school violence. But this, in fact, is simply turning a blind eye to the real facts.
BGNES spoke with the expert Georgi Apostolov days before the conference “How to stop violence at school – three steps for a safer learning environment”, which will be held on October 6 at 9:30 a.m. at the Arena di Serdica hotel with the support of Vivacom.
It does us no favors to try to shift the blame to glowing screens instead of looking at the roots of the apparently increasing aggression in children. Unfortunately, the manifestations of aggression begin to go lower and lower with age. If years ago this was typical for junior high school and high school courses, now outbreaks of violence are also among children in the primary course of education.
In fact, the Internet could be an extremely important factor precisely in solving the problem of aggression. But its roots naturally start from the family environment. According to data from UNICEF-Bulgaria, about 260,000 children live without parents in our country. They are mainly children of immigrant parents who work abroad and are left to be raised by grandparents or relatives. Of course, they can in no way replace parental care. This is one of the reasons why the child feels insufficiently loved, deprived of the closest people on whom he can rely and trust.
By including the Internet factor – Skype, Messenger, which enable children to seek contact with their parents, the problem is not solved, but it provides some support. Here the Internet plays a positive role.
The second major cause of school aggression is the overall social and informational environment in which children grow up. We greatly underestimate children’s ability to absorb and navigate the environment in which they grow. We think that they don’t hear the news, that they don’t pay attention to the coarse language or straight – to the language of hate, that they don’t notice the violence in the street, hypocrisy and fakeness in relationships, but it’s not so. For many of them, this is a model of behavior that they copy directly from adults.
The third heavy factor that most influences their aggressive attitude is the education system itself. It is overburdened and in need of radical reform because it is tragically outdated and inadequate. According to our research, children today access the Internet from the age of 4-5. And when they are already 7 years old, 73% of Bulgarian children already use one of the social networks, mainly Facebook. But Facebook is no longer just a communication network, it has become a medium of media. Children in it become witnesses and participants of a huge flow of information. Early on, they learn to use internet search engines when they need some information. At the same time, our education system continues to stuff their heads with knowledge that it is not clear if they will ever be useful. The emphasis is on memorization, the reproduction of hard facts, an endless supply of numbers, dates and names that children know very well they can find with a click.
But because of the huge amount of often redundant information that needs to be digested, teachers do not have time to develop in children skills that are vital in the new age. And these are, first of all, critical thinking, searching, analyzing, understanding information. I.e. we shape the minds of children, in which are stuffed some knowledge that has no relation to their real life. This is understood by children very clearly. Therefore, their demotivation to work at school occurs very early. Years ago, the limit was 5th-6th grade, and now from the 3rd grade, children start going to school reluctantly, because they do not see any benefit for themselves from long hours of standing in class and listening to useless, according to them , facts.
Research shows that blaming computer games as the main culprits of childhood aggression is the exact opposite of reality. It is they who allow children to pour out their pent-up energy, suffocating frustration and all their disappointment with life. So computer games have a rather preventive role and are not the culprit of their aggressive behavior. Simply, the Internet is a mirror of the mental state of today’s generation of children. We see them being extremely rude, obscene, aggressive on the Internet, but this is not because of the Internet, because in life teenagers show the same habits and that is the big problem.
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Georgi Apostolov, coordinator of the Safe Internet Center.
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