The reconnect movement
Seán is doing what I’ve argued in my books and in this Substack: Students, who never have had a phone free life, can experience face-to-face classrooms without phones, likely the only place in their lives where it’s possible every day.
But he goes deeper. He recounts the wasteland of phone-driven life––his and his peers. On his website reconnectmovement.org he lays out his mission. In a talk at James Madison University last year, he equates the freeing of “digital smoke” in society with the campaign against smoking by creating “smoke-free” environments. For Seán (and for all young people) phones are radioactive in a social setting. “Their presence has polluted our social environments to the point of social collapse.” For emphasis, he repeats: “The presence of this device in social settings has polluted our social environments to the point of social collapse.”
Seán wants his life back and the lives back for all his peers. His recognition that “one person on her phone shifts the environment in the room” says it all. Visualize what happens when a girl at a table with friends takes out her phone.
We need to pay attention.
(A note: Reading about Seán in the Times, I recognized that I am in the presence of a Gen Z person who knows far more about his social environment than I and my adult friends. I thought back to my early teaching days where I participated inside new and different methodologies, ideas alien to my teacher preparation, ones I did not see others around me comprehending. Learning about Seán Killingsworth’s Reconnect Movement has me thinking that we need to hear more from him and others like him.)
Given that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard), I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, “Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way” is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Blog or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
