My kids were watching an obviously kids-themed kids-friendly YouTube video and were shown an ad for Walking Dead, with graphic scary zombies. My 4yo was covering her eyes in fear.
Like WTF Google.
Hmmm...
Now that I think about it, Saturday Morning Cartoons were filled with advertising for sugar and violent toys, some of which was clearly labeled as advertising.
You're teaching your children about censorship.
It's easier, sure, but maybe it's worth the effort to have a mature conversation with them instead of wholesale preventing access to their generation's largest media platform.
I don’t think they’re talking adolescents but rather toddlers and young children.
That will immunize them from everything from zombies to pornography to Fox News.
(Shrug) Don't tell me, tell Plato. He came up with the notion.
It’ll be as effective as saying, “don’t be afraid of the dark, there are no monsters, that’s just your imagination.”
That's pretty effective, and something almost every parent has to tell their child at one point or another. What do you recommend saying instead?
However, the Allegory was about how our senses and perceptions limit our full understanding of the world, not the fact that things we see on a television or stage are not real.
The former is a philosophical concept, the latter is just good advice.
That's my whole point. As a parent, you not only have the authority to tell your kids not to believe anything they see on a screen or hear through a speaker, you must raise them with that understanding. They will spend their entire lives with their senses and perceptions not only limited in a Platonic sense, but under active, continuous assault.
"Somewhat fitting," indeed: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/06/05/edit-video-editing-text...
Plato wasn't making a case for discerning fact from fiction using obviously fictitious sources (literature, dramas, TV, your friend Rob, etc).
He was illustrating that our own senses and perceptions prohibit us from seeing reality in an objective nature.
He compared the escaped prisoner to an enlightened philosopher, who has learned to use his mind and abstract thinking in order to see what his eyes cannot.
Plato isn't saying, "Don't believe what you read in the newspaper," he is saying, "Don't trust your eyes and ears at all, because your entire reality might be false."
That doesn't very much help a kid understand not to believe what he sees in advertisements or to distrust friendly faces who want to control them.
Basically, I'm saying that instead of being prisoners, we have entered the cave voluntarily, and have delegated our senses to the wall. In addition to Plato's puppeteer, the one unavoidable agent of indirection between us and objective reality, we now have two, our senses and our screens.
If you treat screens and speakers as if they are literal manifestations of the cave wall, it's no longer an abstract philosophical point. I'm saying that the only responsible thing I can tell a child is to believe nothing they see on a screen until they're old enough to argue with me about it.
When I was three I had already developed the basic sense that people can lie and that advertisements are made by people. I had already taught myself how to read and was reading at a junior high level before even entering preschool.
I have clear and distinct memories of all sorts of advertisements I viewed around that age, and my deconstruction of them. It is most certainly a skill that can be taught by then.
I'm not special. Most people take for granted what a child can accomplish and waste those precious developmental years treating them like idiots instead of people.
As for kids who can't even speak yet, I don't know why any parent would just plop them in front of a tablet device and YouTube. It's a literal propaganda platform and if your kid can't even form their own sentences then maybe you shouldn't be providing a direct link to bad actors who want to turn them into lifelong consumers.
No, Google/YouTube with all their resources and experts should do better.
I think we can focus more heavily on pre-scholastic education without raising our expectations. No one ever expected me to do anything; my family tree is extremely anti-intellectual.
Despite the lack of expectations, I found the motivation to educate myself. The main driving motivation was fear of not being in control of myself or of being controlled by others, which I found knowledge could combat.
We don't typically instill this motivation in children, because largely as parents we just either don't know any better or don't have the motivation ourselves.
But I don't think that the average performance of a preschooler is indicative of the potential average performance. Too many factors come into play.
So without raising expectations, we can increase our attention to our children's developmental years, and instill within them the proper motivations by example.
Again, it isn't easy. And you're right, it doesn't completely generalize. Every person is unique.
But I'm shooting for the average here. On average, we take for granted the learning capacity of children, and take for granted how much the early phases of their childhood impacts the rest of their life.
To bring it back around, YouTube itself, in addition to tons of other online resources, has been a fundamental tool in my education. I would not nearly be where I am today without it. I can only imagine what I could have accomplished if YouTube as it is today existed in my youth.
I don't think we should be denying that to children.
I agree that Google needs to do better. It's that, or outside regulation will eventually creep in and turn the internet into the new TV.
Like I said, we can't use the current average performance as an indicator of potential average performance.
So why won't you do this with digital media? An okay NAS costs about a same as year YT subscription, and there is a lot of great content.