I’ve read a lot, recently, about concerns over children using electronic media, too early in their lives, and too often. It’s been a concern for a long time; I remember my father pointing to his temple and saying “TV rots the brain.” There’s a book review by T. Mattingly on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt dealing with the topic, here. (I haven’t read the book.)
https://tmattingly.substack.com/p/what-happened-when-parents-gave-a

I have a different slant on the matter. (Same conclusion.)

When the internet first began to be really useful and universal for factual information I loved it. I have all sorts of ideas/pictures in my head about all sorts of topics. The sudden accessibility of tons of information meant that, if I was pondering a topic, I could find new information quickly, and create a better, richer picture. I could expand my universal understanding. That was catnip to me.

I read a book about 15 years ago called Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham (2009). His answer was, Because It’s Hard. Then he went on to discuss some aspects of how we learn, and how teachers could use that information to do a better job teaching. And it’s a great book, and I should reread it.

The thing that really stuck with me was the idea that we form a picture of the world, and then use it to navigate life. (That may not be exactly what he said, just fair warning.) And the implication was, that if a child doesn’t form a good picture of the world, then he or she cannot use it for good navigation. Duh.

Willingham said that analysis happens when you take various bits of knowledge in your head, and compare them to each other. He has a long description of how much ‘stuff’ you can hold in your working memory, at a given moment, and says that it’s nearly always seven items. The amount that’s there is the amount you can use, and think about. Other stuff goes into your long term memory or … not. He describes the process by which you can increase the amount of ‘stuff’ and it’s very straightforward. I think he called it ‘chunking.’ Here’s a simple example.

When you first learn the alphabet, each letter is an item. So it’s tough to learn more than seven letters. Some letter has to be shuttled to your long term memory, so you can learn another letter, or you forget it, and have to learn it again. Eventually, you learn to call the whole set of letters, The Alphabet. Now 26 letters are one (1) item and you can use it in your working memory, pulling it out and sort of sliding it up and down, like a string of beads, to see what you need. It’s just one ‘item’ not 26, so you can have other things in your working mind with it.

Here’s another example. I used to have a sketch of the American Revolution in my head. Not separate battles or campaigns or people, but the whole thing from beginning to end. That’s because when I was in 7th grade I had to write the whole thing out for an exam. The exam took hours, and I used up half a cartridge of ink writing it out, but after that, it was one item in my head that I could look at, and compare to other things.

If you think that you don’t need to learn facts because the internet will always just tell them to you, then you can’t do analysis. This idea was a plague on my teaching years. There was a fad called, teach analysis, not facts. Teach higher level thinking, not lower. It can’t be done. Higher level thinking calls upon facts. The ‘chunkier’ your facts are, that is, the larger the amount in raw information you can call upon and hold in your working memory, the better your analysis can be.

Teaching ought to be about absorbing information in the best way possible, and then using it more and more widely. As soon as you get rid of facts, IN a child’s head, there will be no more learning and certainly, it won’t be high level.

One more example. I heard a lecture the other day about the Gospel of Mark, at least about three chapters in it. One of the incidents that was discussed was the story of the disciples in the boat when Jesus comes walking over the water. (Mark 6:48) It says that Jesus was ‘about to pass them by’ when they see him and get scared. He gets in the boat and calms them down.

I always wondered why he was about to ‘pass them by.’ In fact, when I was little I thought he was sort of playing a game and I thought it was kind of mean. The lecturer pointed out that Jesus ‘passing by’ was a reference to stories about Elijah and Moses. God ‘passes by’ Elijah and Moses, and thus reveals his presence. She went right on, because this was just a side note in her main lecture, while it was a happy and interesting thought to me. However, it only mattered because I already had a story in my head, that I had thought about, and wondered about, and remembered. And I had the stories of Moses and Elijah also in my long term memory. Now I have all of them, enriched.