Bring life back offline

As the social media capital of the world, we badly need to bring life back offline. This should be an urgent educational and social policy objective, particularly for children and young people whose everyday lives are increasingly mediated by social media, online games and digital entertainment. The ‘platformization’ of our lives is here to stay, but the ‘platformization’ of our minds can still be reversed.

There is nothing inherently wrong with technology. Social media and online games provide entertainment, connection and opportunities for learning. The problem begins when they become the default environment in which young people spend their time. Our response should therefore be bigger than telling children to reduce their screen time. We need to give them compelling reasons to put their phones and gadgets down.

The 1980s and 1990s provide a useful reference point—not because those decades were perfect, but because childhood then was more deeply rooted in physical connections. Children played outside, joined local clubs, read books in libraries, made things, planted gardens, performed in school productions, learned musical instruments and spent hours simply talking to one another.

Boredom was not necessarily a parental nuisance nor an existential problem. Sometimes it was the beginning of creativity. Schools should bring some aspects of that world back. And no, this does not mean simply building more basketball courts.

Sports are important, but the offline life of a child should be much fuller than athletics. Schools should invest seriously in arts, crafts, music, theatre, literature, gardening, horticulture, cooking, woodworking, drawing, photography, debate, journalism and other creative and practical activities.

These should not be treated as optional extras for children who happen to have time after class. They should become an integral part of basic education. For the Department of Education (DepEd) and Congress, this means allocating more funding for this policy improvement.

The current buzz amongst politicians is to make the online environment safer for children. Some lawmakers are promising to introduce measures dealing with age assurance, parental controls, harmful content and platform responsibilities. Those efforts deserve serious attention. But lawmakers should understand that intimidating social media companies is a perilous dead-end. It can even be counterproductive.

Digital regulation can reduce some risks. But this responsibility is shared by government, parents, communities, schools and the platforms themselves. More importantly, this task will require the enactment of a law establishing duty of care for digital platforms. Effectively regulating the online world cannot be done by ad hoc measures only.

But there is a larger problem we should not ignore: we have allowed the digital world to become an increasingly dominant part of childhood while the physical, social and creative world around children has become smaller. We cannot ignore the graver issue of losing our kids to the ether.

As the adults in the room, we must bring them back to reality. And local school boards and communities should lead the way. They know what our children need. One community may need a school garden; another may need a theatre programme; another a library, music room, workshop or community arts centre.

DepEd should provide the impetus, resources and national framework that allow these initiatives to flourish. But the policy should also move from the bottom up. Conditions on the ground should influence national education policy, rather than every solution being designed in Manila and imposed on communities.

This reform will not be cheap. Schools need spaces, equipment, instructors, coaches, materials and partnerships. But raising a generation whose primary social and recreational environment exists inside a screen will lead to immeasurable losses. Today, the important question to ask is this: How do we make the offline world more attractive to them?

The fact is, keeping children safe is not only about restricting what they can see online. It is also about giving them somewhere else to go. The goal should not be to take the digital world away from children. It should be to make their real world so rich and enjoyable that they do not need to live their lives exclusively online.