TV sound-bite culture leaves bored pupils unable to listen in class

Published on Monday 13 April 2009 22:08

TEACHERS are increasingly struggling to motivate pupils in a culture of "sound bite" television, according to experts.

Children no longer have the attention span to listen to in-depth lessons, said Julian Chapman, the new president of the teaching union NASUWT.

His comments were backed by a leading child-development expert, who said schools needed to rely less on television and computers to teach children.

Sue Palmer, a former headteacher and the author of Detoxing Childhood, said a major problem was that children were tuned in to screen-based entertainment and found it difficult to listen, because they expected visual stimulus and instant gratification. "It means attention spans are not as good as they were," she said.

"Listening skills from a very early age have been eroded over the past 20 years due to people using electronic babysitters, such as TV, rather than reading or singing to their children."

She warned that some children were being exposed to six hours of screen-based entertainment a day, causing children to struggle with language.

She said: "We seriously, as a society, have to look at how this is affecting our children and we should significantly reduce the use of screen-based media in the classroom, particularly until children can read and write."

Nearly every school in Scotland now uses white-board technology, which beams the internet and video on to an electronic screen, rather than a traditional blackboard.

Hugh Reilly, a modern studies teacher from Glasgow and a Scotsman columnist, said he had seen a huge drop in attention spans since he began teaching nearly 30 years ago.

He said: "The idea that kids sit down and read through two or three pages of text, that just doesn't happen now. Everything has to be short and varied now.

"Years ago, teachers could ask a class to sit and read quietly for five minutes and get their thoughts on whatever the topic was. If you try that now, within a minute or two it just descends into chaos."

In his speech to delegates at the opening of the NASUWT conference in Bournemouth, Mr Chapman said: "There is enormous pressure to keep students engaged and attentive at all times. Students' concentration span appears to have been tailored to the sound-and-vision bite, rather than having to undergo the more rigorous process of in-depth learning."

He conceded, however, that the move was assuaged by a teaching force that was committed to engaging youngsters.

He added: "Fortunately, we do not have the nightmare scenario of bored and less-than-enthusiastic teachers delivering boring and irrelevant topics to bored and unreceptive students."

He also warned teachers had become trapped on a "treadmill" of exam results caused by league tables. He said: "To risk failing is to jeopardise a school's position in league tables and then having to endure an inquiry to explain the reasons why."