Seton Hall Law's School Outreach Program Featured in Washington Post
As posted in The Washington Post's - The new lesson plan for elementary school: Surviving the Internet
The fifth-graders of Yolanda Bromfield’s digital-privacy class had just finished their
lesson on online-offline balance when she asked them a tough question: How would
they act when they left school and reentered a world of prying websites, addictive
phones and online scams?
Susan, a 10-year-old in pink sneakers who likes YouTube and the mobile game “Piano
Tiles 2,” quietly raised her hand. “I will make sure that I don’t tell nobody my personal
stuff,” she said, “and be offline for at least two hours every night.”
Between their math and literacy classes, these elementary school kids were studying
up on perhaps one of the most important and least understood school subjects in America
— how to protect their privacy, save their brains and survive the big, bad Web.
Classes such as these, though surprisingly rare, are spreading across the country
amid hopes of preparing kids and parents for some of the core tensions of modern childhood:
what limits to set around technologies whose long-term effects are unknown — and for
whom young users are a prime audience.
The course offered to Susan’s 28-student class at First Avenue School, a public neighborhood
school in Newark, is part of an experimental curriculum designed by Seton Hall University
Law School professors and taught by legal fellows such as Bromfield. It has been rolled
out in recent months to hundreds of children in a dozen classrooms across New York
and New Jersey.
The classes are free, folded into kids’ daily schedules and taught in the classrooms
where the fifth- and sixth-graders typically learn about the scientific method and
the food chain. Gaia Bernstein, director of Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection, which designed the program, said each class includes about a half-dozen lessons
taught to the kids over several weeks, as well as a separate set of lectures for parents
concerned about how “their children are disappearing into their screens.”
Professors designed the program — funded by a $1.7 million grant awarded by a federal
judge as part of a class-action consumer-protection settlement over junk faxes — to
teach students about privacy, reputation, online advertising and overuse at the age
when their research found that many American kids get their first cellphones, about
10 years old, though some in their classes were given phones years earlier.
The Seton Hall instructors speak of the classes in the same ways others might talk
about sex education — hugely important, underappreciated and, well, a bit awkward
to teach. But they said they had no interest in teaching kids digital abstinence or
instructing parents how to be the computer police. The Internet, they conceded, is
a fact of life — and the kids always find ways around their parents’ barriers, anyway.
In designing the classes, Bernstein said she was surprised at how little attention
most schools paid to the digital worlds its students were immersed in every day —
and, as a parent, she often wished she had done things differently with her 15-year-old
son. She could find few other classes that included both the kids and parents in broader
conversations about tech dependence and digital tracking. Other programs, she said,
seemed unrealistic or out of date, aimed at choosing good passwords or avoiding bad
chat rooms but silent on the daily questions of attention and privacy.
“Everybody seems to focus on things that are unlikely — a stranger online taking your
child away,” Bernstein said, adding, “There are things that happen every day that
parents aren’t taught about — children posting things on Instagram or a group text
that could have an effect on their social lives, their college admissions, their futures.”
That privacy debate was rekindled recently by news that the personal information of
as many as 87 million Facebook users, mostly in the United States, had been gathered
by the political data firm Cambridge Analytica — a sign, Bernstein said, that these
were issues affecting lots of adults, too.
“Everybody’s so appalled about how that information got out,” she said. “But the problem
is how the information gets in — the fact that we can’t resist putting our information
in, because the platforms are so addictive.”
The tech giants have shown a growing interest in catering to a younger clientele.
Facebook recently released an app, Messenger Kids, aimed at children as young as 6.
Apple in March unveiled family-focused suggestions on how its devices could help people
become better parents and introduced classroom-friendly iPads at a high school on
Chicago’s North Side.
But even supporters of those companies are sounding the alarm about the potential
for childhood havoc. Two major Wall Street investors — the Jana Partners hedge fund
and CalSTRS, the California teachers pension fund — urged Apple in January to study
the health effects of its products on young minds and make it easier for parents to
limit iPad and iPhone use. That month, Apple chief executive Tim Cook told an audience
at a British college that he would not allow his young nephew on social networks.
Often, the kids-only online playgrounds advertised by the services as cures for parental
anxiety carry subtle risks of their own. YouTube Kids, with its 11 million active
viewers every week, was found by the website Business Insider to have steered young
audiences to conspiracy theories and lewd videos, probably because the video giant’s
recommendation algorithms have trouble understanding context and filtering out junk.
Netflix, which offers an exhaustive stream of shows for kids, tested in March — and,
after backlash, quickly killed — a video-game-like rewards system that would give
special “patches” to kids on a streaming binge.
Parents and schools, meanwhile, have often struggled to keep up. The ideas for protecting
kids — screen-time limits, content ratings and campaigns such as Wait Until 8th, which
urges parents to delay giving their kids smartphones until eighth grade — have been
mostly scattershot, untested and devised on the fly. Jamie Winterton, a cybersecurity
expert at Arizona State University, said she tells her teenage kids to go on the Internet
only with an “online secret identity, like a spy.”
But there is a growing push among teachers and education advocates to focus school
resources on combating the dangers of the Web. The advocacy group Common Sense Media
in February said it would expand a “digital citizenship” curriculum now offered free
at tens of thousands of nationwide public schools touching on topics of self-image,
relationships, information literacy and mental well-being. Lesson plans for the program,
which one executive called “driver’s ed for the Internet,” range from kindergarten
(“Going Places Safely,” “Screen Out the Mean”) to high school (“Taking Perspectives
on Cyberbullying,” “Oops! I Broadcast It on the Internet.”)
Cyberbullying, in particular, has gained recent attention in the White House after
first lady Melania Trump met in March with representatives from Facebook, Google and
Twitter for a summit on “the need for kindness online.”
The Seton Hall program’s elementary classes serve as a children’s guide to some of
the Web’s biggest pitfalls and thorniest debates. For a lesson on privacy, the kids
are taught that sharing personal information online is like walking around with a
sign on their back telling everyone about how they embarrassed themselves at summer
camp — as well as their phone number, their best friend’s name and their bad grade
in math.
Kids are taught how websites track them (“digital footprints”), what kinds of content
they should be careful sharing (“bad-hair days,” “potty training”) and how long their
selfies last (forever, basically). They are taught about location-based, contextual
and behaviorally targeted ads and why, when it comes to personal data, they’re sometimes
not the customer but the product. “Advertisers want to make us believe that their
products are good so that we purchase them,” a slide from that lesson says.
The students’ parents are offered separate companion classes in which, Bernstein said,
many have agonized over how to set reasonable rules for their kids with technologies
they barely understand. The classes focus largely on how parents should deal with
kids’ overuse — and, in a world where much of their homework and friendships play
out online, what normal use even looks like. “What really bothers parents is how they
are losing their children,” Bernstein said, “and how family life is changing.”
A big part of those adult lectures, she added, is teaching the parents that how they
use their phones matters, too. The kids, they’ve found, have often ended up taking
after the grown-ups: When the parents are constantly buried in their phones, the kids
end up buried, as well.
During Bromfield’s lesson in Newark one morning in March, the young students were
given “gift of time” cards, which they were told to label with the person in their
life with whom they were craving more time, undistracted by the Web. Nearly every
student labeled it with the name of a brother, sister or parent; one boy said he would
give his to his dad, who is “on his phone 24/7, even when we’re in the car.”
Bromfield said she was surprised how wise the kids in her digital-privacy classes
were to the dark side of the Internet. During lessons, she said, kids had warned her
to watch out for scammers, not trust search results and be careful around companies
selling her personal data.
Some students said they have self-imposed limits on their screen time and talked about
how they clear their minds after so much time online. One 10-year-old student said
in Bromfield’s class that she uses the Moment app to track and limit her Snapchat
and YouTube use.
“These kids are much more savvy than we had anticipated,” said Najarian Peters, an
assistant professor at the Seton Hall institute. “They’re also very observant about
how technology affects the people around them — how their parents or siblings or friends
can often be more engaged in their devices than they would like.”
That’s largely a function of how important and all consuming the Internet has become
in students’ daily lives. When Bromfield surveyed the class, she found that the average
student spent five to six hours online every day, and every kid seemed to have a story
of staying up so late — swiping through Snapchat, reading a tablet, playing the online
shooter game “Fortnite” — that their eyes stung the next day.
During class, Bromfield shared with the kids how she deals with her own habit of Web
overuse — by buying more comic books, a pastime she had loved when she was young.
She encouraged the kids to write out resolutions for how they wanted to spend their
time, online and offline, to which one girl wrote that she wanted to “go outside and
explore more about nature with my sister.”
The professors are now pushing to introduce the lessons in other schools and keep
developing it for the years ahead. But they are realistic about whether they will
make any difference in an age where the tech is always evolving and expanding in their
students’ worlds.
As one student said, gathering his stuff for his next class, “My phone is my life.”
(Photo credit: Drew Harwell/The Washington Post)