The Age of Individuation:
Professor DATA vs. Dr. Spock
Word count: 303
Are we creating lonely kids who will become lonely adults?
The Age of Individuation is upon us.
The advent of Brain Based Learning techniques means every kid in
public school will have an Individual Learning Plan based on what parts of his/her
brain fire-up in reaction to x, y, and z “educational” stimuli.
The decoding of the human genome means every patient soon may have
an Individual Health Plan based on what parts of his/her code are missing
or distorted. Doctors will become genetic tailors, cutting and sewing DNA
garments to fit each client.
Health and education will become matters of conspicuous
consumption: Armani, Gucci, and Saks
Fifth Avenue
You already know who the winners will be.
The danger of all this analysis lies in what psychiatry used to
call “morbid introspection.”
If we replace the joyful naivete and blithe spontaneity of
childhood with recipes for learning and for health which parents, doctors, and
educators use to “cook”
their child into the perfect culinary creation, we may be in danger of making
kids so self conscious, so analytical, that we destroy the very notion of
childhood itself.
Kiss ‘childhood” goodbye and replace it with depression.
Part of the problem is that parents have been bullied into
surrendering their intuitive parenting
skills and knowledge to the digital gods
of DATA.
They have replaced Dr. Spock with Professor DATA.
Are we on the verge of
creating a world of highly educated, extremely healthy, depressed
children who enter adulthood with a deep loneliness which no digital god --
and no hand-held touch screen -- can fill?
And if you add conspicuous consumption to the problem, won't we be in real trouble?
We need pause and seek
higher ground ------ before the digital tsunami overwhelms us.
Paul D. Keane
M.A., M. Div., M.Ed.
