![\"sandpit\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/druttley\/files\/2016\/12\/sandpit-1-300x172.jpg\")
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Social Media Harms Moral Development \u00a0Or\u00a0so this link<\/a> from the BBC’s coverage of the result of a survey from the excellent\u00a0Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues<\/a>\u00a0suggests.\u00a0The survey focuses on parents’ views that social media is not, necessarily,\u00a0such a good thing in the development of morals. Now of course the parents surveyed could be wrong – antediluvian, Luddite etc etc but when one remembers that a goodly proportion of the parents concerned are, themselves, pretty much\u00a0digital natives\u00a0<\/em>such an easy critique does not seem up to the task. So what might be going on?<\/p>\n The joy of blog\u00a0posts\u00a0is that they encourage\u00a0a word limit and therefore I will dispense with empirical research, learned papers or newspaper trawls. I will simply vent, albeit as a Headteacher who is lucky enough to spend much of his time among those High Priests of social media – teenagers. Socialisation, I think, \u00a0requires accountability which, at its most primeval, requires physical proximity. And social media requires no such proximity; indeed it often feeds off separation, the joy of sounding off or, in its darker manifestation, the troll. Hence in this separation, the possibility at least of stunted socialisation with the concomitant harm to moral development.<\/p>\n Ever since our earliest forebears disagreed over who should occupy the most luxurious cave there has been a recognition that disputes can end, quite literally, in death. Consequences can be dire if one rushes roughshod over the sensibilities of the other person and, in community, we quickly learn to play a percentage game: is my cave man’s club bigger than my opponents? And if this crypto-phalo-centrism<\/em>, to coin a (new?) phrase, suggests that women and girls are somehow excused from such\u00a0reasoning then, I would suggest, you’ve never had to do a Truth and Reconciliation job among a group of Year 9 girls following\u00a0a social-media-inspired fall-out.<\/p>\n Of course the development of culture, the rule of\u00a0law and religious sensibilities somewhat airbrush the cave person’s\u00a0\u00a0club in favour of the scales of justice or the generous heart yet, at our most unreconstructed, the club device remains potent, as those MPs voting on the replacement for Trident undoubtedly appreciate.<\/p>\n Socialisation, the learning of virtue, the recognition of the very physicality of those others with whom we rub along, sometimes ingloriously, in what we dare to call civilised society, is a messy, intimate and proximate mystery. It starts in the sandpit and, please God, it rarely ends in the Somme. So get your young person out there; in the mess, in the scrum, and let them go Greek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Social Media Harms Moral Development \u00a0Or\u00a0so this link from the BBC’s coverage of the result of a survey from the excellent\u00a0Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues\u00a0suggests.\u00a0The survey focuses on parents’ views that social media is not, necessarily,\u00a0such a … Continue reading