The Head Start programme pays. If you consider the financial cost to society of juvenile delinquency, remedial education and income support that could not only be saved but also further offset by taxes from higher paid jobs, then it's not surprising that Head Start returns impressively sevenfold on each dollar invested. Indeed, it is particularly telling to compare children that had been in this programme, those that had been on a regime of direct instruction and those who had simply played at nursery school: the first two groups showed a higher IQ than the nursery-school children at school entry, whilst at fifteen years old the Head Start and nursery-school children were committing 50 per cent fewer delinquent acts than those who had had the intellectual advantages of direct instruction without the benefits of a more socialized experience; in fact, by twenty-three years of age those who had had only formal teaching pre-school were at a distinct disadvantage on a range of personal and emotional measures. The Head Start programme therefore offered the best of both worlds, an intellectual as well as a social advantage.
These results show that at four or five years old children have still not fully developed their social and cognitive skills to maximize the benefits of learning from formal instruction. For small children, then, the best option is self-initiated play and exploration, not formal, academic study. Ideal programmes involve a high degree of parental involvement, with the space and time for children to play and discover things for themselves. Inevitably, therefore, we need to look at what is currently the most immediate and most powerful influence on young minds: the family unit.
Nowadays, only 17 per cent of American families conform to the traditional profile: a stay-at-home mum, a breadwinning dad plus two kids. Families, in the developed world at least, are becoming much more diverse or merged. More than a third of all children born today will live in some kind of step-family household before they reach eighteen. An unsurprising prediction is for shorter, later, less sacrosanct marriages with easier, quicker, less traumatic divorces; eventually, perhaps, the requisite legal procedures could take place merely by video-conferencing or on the web. Divorce itself is down to 43 per cent from a peak of 51 per cent of all American marriages in 1981, but this decrease could be due to marriage having become less popular in the first place. Accordingly, cohabitation is way up from 500,000 unmarried couples in 1970 to 3.7 million in 1995, with almost half of all children in the USA living at some stage in a cohabiting family. This trend towards increased cohabitation cuts across every age, ethnic and economic group.
Other factors contributing to the increasing heterogeneity of the family will include the swelling number of stay-at-home fathers, a number grown by 25 per cent to 2.1 million in the USA over the last three years. There will also be more couples sharing homes, as a result of the growth in house prices and the needs of economic immigrants. Then there is the issue of monogamy. Hugh Hefner, the philandering founder of the magazine Playboy, concedes grudgingly that it may well still be a ‘viable choice’ in the future. A variation on traditional monogamy is serial monogamy, in keeping with the increased fluidity of the family unit, which is indeed on the increase. And to stretch the concept of sexual fidelity beyond all practical recognition or relevance, writer Adam Phillips suggests that it is the values of monogamy that will actually last into the future – loyalty, fidelity, long-term affection – but not necessarily the idea of having sex with only one partner.
Not only will sexual partnerships continue to become more and more fluid but the once robust structure of generations will also buckle. We have seen that the quality of life for older people in this century is set to improve massively, but it is not clear how they would relate to the on-going nuclear family. Older people could well be physically and mentally fitter, perhaps even become parents themselves late in life. Perhaps they will exist as independent, isolated individuals living apart from the nuclear unit of their children and grandchildren; or perhaps the family itself will disintegrate and everyone will be living on their own as soon as they can, as single person units; or a third possibility is that the notions of family and extended family will become so diverse and vague that effectively any relationship of any type could be subsumed under that label. In any event, an increase in the elderly population will be just one factor in a world undergoing colossal social upheavals.
But remember the more distant future holds the prospect of a more homogenized individual – one free from generational stereotyping, and more similar to others not only in gene pool and physical fitness but also in mindset and outlook. Add to this prospect an increased tendency to be the passive recipient of a cyber-world and it seems increasingly likely that our successors will be far more interchangeable. There may well be a greater shift of personnel within a family unit but paradoxically less actual diversity in lifestyle or in attitudes and relations within each family unit. An interesting question, therefore, is not so much to what extent or frequency new step-parents, grandparents, wives and husbands might supplant the old but the degree to which such swapping around of highly similar individuals ends up being particularly relevant.
‘One of the major problems which has emerged at the end of this [20th] century is the large number of influences on children other than parents. Parents will always be important, but there is real competition,’ cautions Sylvia Rimm, author of Smart Parenting. Already children are exposed to beepers, cell phones, video arcades, 24-hour movie channels, internet websites, email, chat rooms, online shopping and virtual reality. There is a very real likelihood that parental influence will shrivel. So whilst it is important to place a premium on stimulation of the brain, it could well be that the source of that stimulation might be changing from the family to the computer. And if so, then the children of the future might have a very different outlook as they rely increasingly on the cyber-world.
Now cyber-technology is starting to merge with that most enduring of childhood influences – toys. In 1999 toy-industry sales reached $71 billion. Toys are clearly big business, and with software prices dropping it is inevitable that we will see more and more ‘smart’ toys. Already, the last few decades have seen an increasing sophistication in the degree to which toys are interactive. Things have really moved on from the ‘speaking’ doll with a small gramophone in her stomach that I received one Christmas in the 1950s. Now remote-controlled, multifunctional toy cars can be customized through a CD or the internet, whilst toy trains will stop or accelerate under voice control. Meanwhile My Real Baby becomes more ‘independent’ over time; subtle software progressively gives the impression that the doll is gradually initiating her (always her) own actions and preferences. Another cyber-hearted infant, My Dream Baby, actually develops physically by ‘growing’ four inches, and progresses from crawling to toddling; not just physical but also intellectual development is apparent, as the doll appears to ‘learn’ new words using voice recognition. This new toy cyber-world is not just inhabited by surrogate babies but by pets as well. For example, Robokitty, all of ten inches long, has video-camera eyes, stereo-microphones for ears and speakers for meowing; thanks to touch sensors in appropriate places, kitty can even purr when touched.
The IT expert Mark Pesce explores in his book The Playful World how toys have always performed the role of introducing children to the ‘complex universe of human culture’ as they interact with them. But nowadays, unlike in the past, the physical world is becoming exquisitely interactive, and therefore malleable. We have just seen that interaction is a vital component of learning; indeed it is widely acknowledged that for people of all ages, especially the elderly, it is important for mental health to maximize the opportunities for control of the objects around them. So on the whole, the increased potential for a child, or anyone, to be able to manipulate his or her environment would surely be a good thing.
On the other hand, I wonder just how much life in a predominantly transient world could impact negatively on the young mind. Children seem to need a sense of routine, a consistent set of faces, values and rules. If
you realize early on that anything and everything around you can change, be it in appearance or context, at the press of a button or even at a voice command, then how might you start to conceive ‘reality’? Imagine you can alter everything around you; you may consequently have a very shaky concept of how you relate to this inconstant reality – your own sense of identity might also waver, or never even establish itself.
High-tech toys that may eventually make such a big difference to young thinking really started to take off in the last few years of the 1990s, with Tamagotchi, who featured briefly in Chapter 2. Then the technology was sufficiently modest to amount merely to a virtual 2D pet inside a small plastic shell. However Furby, born in October 1998, was the first real electronic furry toy; not only was it reactive and verbal but it existed in 3D. No wonder initial demand outstripped supply by four to one. Furby has a righting mechanism, the ability to ‘fall asleep’ and ‘wake up’ thanks to light sensors, plus a microphone in the ear. All the underlying software constitutes ‘brainpower’ merely one ten-billionth of our own, yet the toy still seems alive because it plays on our instinctive desire to anthropomorphize. The facial expressions with which Furby can react are easily interpreted, especially by its young owner, as wonder, anger, sleepiness and joy. And to add to the impression that Furby is really one of us the software can slowly release a repertoire of sayings that replicates the linguistic ability of a child in its first five years. A crucial feature is that, like Tamagotchi, Furby has needs, for example, the need for ‘nourishment’. However, unlike the two-dimensional forerunner from Japan, Furby has a real tongue that the carer must press. If this activity is insufficiently frequent – if it is ‘underfed’ – then Furby will sneeze. Moreover, there is the illusion of ‘learning’, as different behaviour patterns that mimic human relations are gradually revealed.
In the future toys will routinely be as truly ‘ignorant’ as a newborn, but slowly ‘learn’ from experience – as we saw the next generation of working robots might do. This new generation of toy infants will assimilate, as a result of feedback, the many expressions of the human face in parallel with their young owners. Moreover, these synthetic infants will follow their human controllers, explore and start to recognize objects in parallel with them. Hence the toy will serve as a mirror to the child's own development, acting as a kind of friend but always one who is not an autonomous equal, more of a servile sounding board.
Another change might be that although children of the future have a less defined sense of self they are used nonetheless to compliance with their will. Encounters with other children could end up troublesome, and therefore children may increasingly shun each other in favour of a more biddable cyber-society. Although at the moment children can apparently readily distinguish between real love and ‘Furby love’ we should not be so complacent as to expect that this might always be so. And as adults interact increasingly with non-biological beings so children in the future may grow up with a very one-sided view of relationships.
How will the child relate to the outside world on a global level? This will be an even more invasive and pervasive part of education than learning from cyber-toys. The implications for education are enormous when it comes to the difference the web is making to our lives, as a tidal wave of facts deluges us from the screen. At the most physical level our literary activities will become ever more computerized. The printed version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica costs, at the time of writing, some £1,000. A CD-ROM replacement is yours for just £50, and will be replaced by the net any day now, as soon as we are all confident that nothing has been omitted. All non-fiction books are in effect already competing with a free online resource, which is growing every day. The cost of all information is rapidly falling to zero. There will be instant access to all facts, for everyone. But what will future generations do with those facts?
A child born at the dawn of this century will never know a world without the web, but most significantly it will increasingly become a web that reacts. This highly accessible and interactive dialogue that younger people are already taking for granted is perhaps one of the biggest factors that will drive a wedge between the generations in the next couple of decades or so. For those, like me, on the 20th-century side of the divide, the ‘freedom’ of the web will, as Mark Pesce predicts, be ‘chaotic’, ‘disorientating’ and ‘discomforting’. But for the young of the 21st century there will be an unquestioned assumption, a confidence, of access to instant information. Yet the issue goes deeper still: it is not simply about what we do or do not need to learn, but how we think.
A recent piece in Time drew a clear distinction between we who grew up in the second half of the 20th century, ‘People of the Book’, and the new generation, ‘People of the Screen’. We People of the Book work within a culture of newspapers, law, offices of regulation and rules of finance. Most significantly, the foundation of this culture is captured in texts. From an American perspective it would be East-Coast based. By contrast, the upcoming People of the Screen are culturally more West-Coast based, working with the TV, computer, telephone and film. The journalist Kevin Kelly writes:
Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of gossip tidbits, news headlines and floating first impressions. Notions don't stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled by the audience.
The People of the Book, according to Kelly, fear that logic will give place to code, that reading and writing will die. As far back as the 1960s the futurist writer Ted Nelson made a prediction along similar lines, declaring his vision of a world in which ‘no longer would we be stuck with linear text, but we would create whole new gardens of interconnected text and graphic for the user to explore’.
Again, then, there may be a reduction not just in the constancy of the physical world, but also of unambiguous and accepted bodies of knowledge. All current technology points in this direction. Voice-activated systems have not turned out to be quite as easy to develop as was originally thought, but no one denies that sooner or later they will be commonplace. And if we also have technically simpler oral computers, then it is hard to see why the typical child of the near future will need to be literate. After all, we speak far faster than we write, some hundred words a minute. In the future, speaking into your computer at 6,000 words an hour, you would be able to write a complete novel (were the concept still to be valid) in less than twenty hours.
Yet we can take the possibilities further. Your finished novel could be available to the reader in multiple versions. Moreover, if they keep it in its electronic medium, accessing it on their screen rather than downloading it onto paper, they could introduce not only hypertexting references but visual material too. Then the story could be interactive: the ‘reader’ could not only select the course of the plot but also impose their own faces and those of their family in the visuals of the main characters. In the transition period, whilst we still use words on the screen, we might end up with TV that we read and books that we watch! Again it is possible, if not likely, that the boundaries will blur between reader and writer, between fact and fiction, with the consumer in control, a consumer defined not by a fixed reality but by ongoing interaction.
Humanity's love affair with paper books stretches back into the mists of time, way before 20th-century culture imposed its values; but we cannot be sure that someone born at the beginning of the 21st century will have any particular nostalgia for a paper book. On the contrary, a book may be a novel object to someone who has had a screen-based education. Then again, the very nature of books will be different. We saw in Chapter 2 that within the next decade or so technology will have left its mark on books: screen resolution will be so improved that we will be able to read off the screen as easily as from paper books. However, preserving the romance and convenience of hand-held paper books, the digital age will also provide a download facility. E Link Systems and Xerox
are developing thin films of paper and plastic that hold digital ink; once you finish a particular book you simply place it back in a holster for the next load of material. The same sheaf of pages would offer an eternal supply of different reading matter.
But perhaps you feel that to concentrate on a book as a physical object is to miss the main point: books are a very special phenomenon for a different reason altogether. Independent of their cultural connotations, they alone can foster and tap into our imaginations. As a neuroscientist I have long been fascinated by the process within the brain that transports us, who are simply staring at the written page, into a Victorian drawing-room, or a spaceship, or some fairy-tale scenario. So real is the world we imagine, primed by mere words, that we will almost always claim that the book is much better than the film of the same story. Indeed, when the film follows a good book we often feel a little cheated. Somehow, the characters are not quite right. Everything is too literal, too in-your-face, too reliant on sensory information. The fascinating feature of words, after all, is that when we read them they are shot through with connotations that transcend mere description; they stimulate the covert connections that give a deeper meaning. Hence, when we read, the characters do not necessarily have a photographic substance but one even more real, even though their physical appearance is shadowy.
This fascinating phenomenon of human imagination may prolong the popularity of works of fiction as books, as start-to-finish reads, that are in any event more convenient on planes or on the beach. Of course, such a prediction may hold good only for the immediate future. We cannot presume either that our successors thereafter will be capable of the same feats of imagination or indeed that computers will continue to be bulky and inconvenient, since we have seen that IT will become both ubiquitous and invisible. We have also seen that humans and computers will be more intimately related and interactive than we could ever have dreamed possible; it is most likely that the isolated, private inner world of the individual imagination as we know it could soon be as obsolete as the ability of our ancestors to recite tribal sagas from aural memory is today. Perhaps future generations will no longer have the attention span or cognitive skills to follow the narrative of a story. Perhaps, in the future, humanity will be rooted incessantly in the here and now.
Tomorrow's People Page 21
