“It’s as if an invisible thread comes and hooks your brain so that you stay in front of your screen, sitting, standing, on the sofa or on the bed,” explains this CM2 student from Manin elementary school to the camera. , in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. For ten months, Gilles Vernet, a former trader converted into a school teacher and director, conducted an experiment with his class. This is recounted in his documentary What if we looked up? A class facing the screens, currently available on the Public Senate channel but also distributed in many educational establishments.
The goal ? Make children think about their relationship with screens and help them regain control by debating with them, having them meet specialists and then organizing a green class during which the smartphones remain in the locker room. A beneficial approach given that 8-12 year olds today spend an average of 4 hours 45 minutes in front of their phones, tablets or computers. For 13-18 year olds, the average time is 6h45. A screens commission mandated by President Emmanuel Macron and made up of experts (psychiatrists, neurologists, researchers, lawyers, education and digital specialists) is currently considering measures to regulate this phenomenon. Its conclusions should be delivered in early May. The opportunity for Gilles Vernet to give us his point of view as a teacher and to give his own advice.
L’Express: How did you come up with the idea of working for a whole year on the use of screens with your students?
Gilles Vernet: Very attached to French literature, I am used to confronting my CM2 students, in a priority education network, with the great texts by Victor Hugo, Stefan Zweig and many other renowned authors. However, over the course of my fifteen years of teaching, I have noticed an impoverishment of language and vocabulary among the children in my care. The very notion of etymology, or even grouping by word families, is completely foreign to them. The trigger came to me in 2019 when students said to me: “Teacher, can you help me? I can’t express what I want to say.” I then realized that the problem went beyond vocabulary and that it now affected mastery of syntax.
I am alarmed by this, knowing that language is the basis of thought. The more it becomes impoverished, the more thought, and in particular critical thinking, becomes mechanically impoverished. Finally, I also understood that children’s memorization ability was getting weaker and weaker. Some people tend to forget points from the program discussed orally in class from one day to the next. I see a link with the proliferation of these increasingly short videos which, unlike a book or even a film, require no effort of memory or concentration.
How can we be sure that the problem largely comes from there?
The correlation between time spent on screens and academic performance is obvious: students who watch screens the least are those who get the best grades. The free time means they read more, which is an undeniable asset. Conversely, very few people manage to obtain good results even though they spend three or four hours a evening playing video games or surfing on I don’t know what platform. I return in my documentary to a particularly striking point: loneliness, of which many children complain, and the reduction in language exchanges with those around them, particularly with their brothers and sisters. Everyone is so glued to their screen that there is no room for discussions or games. We can clearly see that the issue is not only educational but also emotional. It’s the same when they are with friends: you will notice that teenagers tend to watch videos side by side without necessarily talking to each other. Once again, all of this has an impact on learning. The quality of the copies that I corrected at the start of my career is clearly no longer the same today.
Many parents are themselves glued to their smartphones or tablets. Shouldn’t they lead by example more?
The speech given by parents who urge their children to look less at screens may indeed seem contradictory to their actions, but I would not throw stones at them. We are all subject to the obligation to respond to professional requests which continue to increase via SMS, emails, WhatsApp or Telegram messages. In our private lives too, all the small everyday tasks, such as booking train tickets for example, are done via the Internet. So we have no choice. This should not stop us from showing authority and setting limits for our children by turning off all these digital tools and sending them to their room to read, play outside, or offering them activities.
It is above all the responsibility of parents to prohibit their children from surfing social networks like TikTok or Snapchat. The legal age, which is 13, is not respected at all. But children, aged 8, 9 or 10, have nothing to do there. They even represent a danger at this period of their life when they are in full construction. Parents are generally happy to be able to rely on teachers to impose limits.
Is it right for schools to alert families to the sometimes harmful role of screens?
At the risk of being accused of having a so-called reactionary or retrograde vision, I think that schools should show more authority on this subject. Any teacher will tell you “fed up with Call of Duty and other online games that monopolize children’s brains and prevent them from developing their skills!” The problem is that they don’t talk to parents about it, or not enough. But our mission is to alert them to the addictive dimension that “has been amplified over the last ten years by the game of algorithms. These have the gift of making us addicted, and even more so our children. In the documentary, one of my students, to whom I had asked like the others to watch an episode of the show This is not rocket science on YouTube, explained to me that he clicked on a short video that attracted him, then on another, and on another… Which ultimately made him lose half an hour. “You’re the joke,” I told him, while applying this remark to myself because we all have a tendency to get caught up in this way.
What solutions do you propose as a teacher?
The question of time management is essential. I advise the parents of my CM2 students to limit screen time to 1 hour or 1.5 hours per day. The idea is to free up spaces for playing, doing sports, practicing or listening to music but also for cultivating relationships with others. Adolescents, by dint of being on the networks, can develop a fear of physical contact, being handicapped by a skill that they have not developed. The fact that they are confronted with these cold, soulless objects, which are computers, smartphones and tablets, does not encourage young people to make carnal contacts. A trap in which we quickly lock ourselves since we are often afraid of what we do not know.
But it is not a question of banning everything. This is why I encourage parents to direct their children towards good practices and I try to help them get away from the recreational and addictive aspect of network games. Recently, when I was discussing Magellan’s journey based on a text by Stefan Zweig, one of my students said to me: “Have you seen the series on Magellan on Arte? It is exceptional.” Indeed, as soon as I got home, I had these absolutely incredible episodes. We can clearly see that there is unequal treatment within families, between those who let everything happen and those who accompany and guide their children.
Are you in favor of setting up parental controls?
I know that the Screens Commission is currently considering the establishment of a public parental control system, a solution that I also recommend. I am for these kinds of tools, as long as they are not too intrusive. They are obviously essential to prevent the child from having access to pornography or violent images. On the other hand, I am against the idea of following everything he does on the Internet, or even geolocating him to know where he is permanently. This drift seems quite crazy to me and does not take into account the fact that an adolescent needs to break the rules in order to grow up. This is the complexity of the parenting task. On the other hand, I always come back to the duration of exposure: programming a maximum time per application over twenty-four hours is a good idea. For example, allow access to TikTok for thirty minutes a day and that’s it. The best is to activate it with the child after discussing it with him to make him responsible.
You also recommend the implementation of a major communication campaign like what is done to fight against alcohol and tobacco…
It is necessary today to make this subject a national cause as we did to limit cigarettes, alcohol or encourage the wearing of seat belts in cars. The smartphone, this concentrate of addictions, makes us totally dependent to the point of leading us to sacrifice what we hold most dear, such as spending good times with the people we love. Coming back to school, certain countries like Sweden, which had gone completely digital and implemented dematerialized textbooks for ecological reasons, are starting to go back.
For a child, the temptation to abandon their homework to connect to network games in a few clicks is too great. In addition, researchers have also demonstrated that memorization on paper is much better than on an e-reader because the book has a shape, a materiality that makes it easier to find your way around. This is why I constantly praise the merits of libraries to my students. Reading is for me a major tool of republican emancipation. I have proof of this every year because any child who seriously puts himself into it makes enormous progress, whatever their social background. Every Friday, my students leave with a book and I make a point of asking them afterwards what they learned from it. Faced with the power of screens, we must fight.
.