When Jill and her husband Mark dropped their son off at college, they quickly realized how times have changed. Almost immediately, text messages started to pour in… all reiterations of the same thing: “I want to come home.” Why? “The classes are too hard. I don’t like the subjects.” And so on and so on.

As loving parents, Jill and Mark were tempted to give in—but they held firm. “You need to stay at least one semester,” they told their son. And when they talked to the dean of students, he affirmed their decision and added an interesting and important insight: “I’m finding,” he said, “that this generation of kids does not know how to persevere.” The reason—technology convinces youth that everything should come easily.

Marshall McLuhan famously stated fifty years ago that the medium is the message. In other words, societies are shaped as much by the nature of the communication they use as the content of that communication.

And so are we. Most kids today can’t even imagine a world in which technology is not omnipresent. Computer scientist Alan Kay has said, “Technology is technology only for people who are born before it was invented.” For students these days, social media, computers, smart phones are as natural as breathing.

Source: John Stonestreet, www.breakpoint.org