Hello, everyone, and welcome again to another Joseph podcast.
Well, our Government is examining whether it can ban people from using mobile phones. It’s currently considering removing the right to use a mobile phone from people under the age of 16. Now, of course, as I’ve told you in many other podcasts, our Government love to play the role of a parent because our parents here don’t really like to make decisions for their children.
And there’s a news story here saying that our Members of Parliament (MPs), our Government, are demanding that phones are removed from those under the age of 16. Now, of course this is highly controversial. Many parents are very against this but I think everyone’s agreed that some action needs to be taken.
Since parents don’t like addressing these kinds of issues, As usual, they look to the Government to fix it. Recently, when the Government introduced a smoking ban, people were scratching their heads saying, “well, you know, is this really democratic? Can we take away people’s choices”? And equally removing smartphones from a bit of society there’s all kinds of question marks there about whether this is the Government’s responsibility and also what role the parents will play. So let’s read through a news story here. It says:
“Children under the age of 16 should be banned from having smartphones and going on social media”. It says:
“the Commons Education Committee warned that the next Government must introduce stronger guidance, and controls to curb kids time online”.
To curb, that simply means to try to maintain, to guard, to fix or the best one to use is to contain.
Youngsters’ screen time has risen by 52 percent in two years. And they’re saying here:
“current guidance does not go far enough and recommended a complete ban on mobiles in schools for under 16s”. Now, there’s big debate about this. But what’s really surprising for me is the way in which we always expect the Government to do something.
So if kids are failing at school. People will say oh well I mean the Government has to do something about this. This is terrible.
If people are smoking too much, people will say, oh well, you know the Government has to do something.
If people are eating too much and dying because of obesity, People are saying oh well, you know the Government needs to fix this and do something. We seem to have lost the ability to make individual choices.
And we expect everything like this to be managed by the Government, of course, our Government react by giving us things to think about but in return they will expect us to vote for them and it keeps them popular. I think what we really need are for some people to guide us on these points. Preferably people who don’t care about ego. And maybe care more about for example, in this case, children’s education. The more we look to the Government to make choices for us, the more we lose our individuality And we’re kind of getting to a point where I’m thinking, well, should we really be looking to the Government for this? Because the more we look to the Government, The more perhaps they can take control of other issues.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about young people in the 1960s. They wanted some kind of an expression. They wanted more freedom. And they wanted to break away from the conservative attitudes of their parents and peers. As a direct result of that, it started the social revolution of the 1960s, which gave more liberation, more freedom, and more ways for young people to express themselves. I can remember when television started to become very, very popular for young people in the 1970s. During that time, people were very concerned and they used to say,
“Oh television, it’s a social evil, it’s bad for people. And it will lead to more and more people having a lack of concentration. And the lack of an ability to talk to each other”.
Perhaps in part that was true but on looking back it didn’t actually do us any harm. In fact, if anything, it really helped us to find our identities and to offer us new ways of living, So this debate about smartphones and young people.
Um, maybe if the Government was to capture that energy, maybe if they started using social media to educate people, instead of simply removing it from people, Perhaps that would be a better idea. Or maybe they should examine how social media is educating people already. Perhaps that’s another thing that they could examine.
But it’s very difficult and I’m not sure where all of this is going, but one thing is for sure. Social media can be very addictive but Is it really an evil? I’m not so sure. One problem about British culture and living in the UK is we tend to have a moral attitude to everything.
We don’t think of it as being useful or not useful. We tend to think of it as being good, or bad.
I think this is something which religion has left with us. Because of our religious history we seem unable to let go of this kind of strange duality that everything has to be good or bad and somehow brings about some positive thing for our life or some kind of bad thing which leads to a scary and dangerous discussion. We’ve been able to let go of the thing that brought us this whole good and bad attitude towards life. So maybe it’s time to rethink that perhaps most things that we see around us usually end up being good.
It looks to me like that old British proverb:
nothing is good or bad except you’re thinking makes it that way
… is really relevant in this situation. Because the more we examine things, the more we decide if they are a good or bad, but we don’t really look at the wider implications. Of course, our Government will look to other countries and they will say
“look, the smoking ban worked well in this country” or
“removing mobile phones from kids went well in this country”
…Trying to back up their arguments, but if we can just let go of this idea that some things are completely good and some things are completely bad. Then probably, we could move forward in a quicker way.
One of the key differences between American culture, and British culture is that in America, they seem able to move forward, they can make changes to their systems and adapt them very quickly.
We don’t seem able to do that because our education system, for example, And the other systems we have here have been around for hundreds of years. So it’s not easy just to introduce a new way of doing things. Americans on the other hand, they’re very good at just bringing in new psychology, bringing in new practices and new ideas but In Britain, we get a bit stuck. Also, there’s the question of how much money it will take to discuss all of these things. In our Parliament building, there will be debate after debate after debate and then lawmakers will be brought in. And then of course, there will have to be a committee to enforce this idea that children shouldn’t have mobile or phones.
And then the question will be “well, who’s going to enforce this”? Will it be the police? It can’t be the parents so who can enforce it? And this is where things get very, very confusing. At that point either the law itself will simply drop off. Or it’ll just never be enforced and will be left somewhere in the ether. It’s very interesting how these things end.
A few days ago. Our Government called a General Election and that’s going to take place in July. Unfortunately, one thing that they weren’t able to do before they called this election was to pass the law, which would ban smoking forever for all people. Now that already was very controversial because it was considered to be a little bit undemocratic.
So the question is, what’s going to happen? Will it be picked up by the new Government? Well, it was deeply unpopular. So, probably not. The current Government…. the current Government have promised it will remain in their manifesto. So it might be making a comeback in the future.
The Government promised “Oh, this will work well, after all, it worked well in New Zealand”, but actually it didn’t… New Zealand also got rid of it. So, it looks like that’s not going to see the light of day in the UK either.
So for kids with mobile phones it could happen but then with a changing Government, Probably not, I would say.
See you.
Bye.
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