Rebecca Winthrop
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 17 Jan
Rebecca Winthrop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We 100% want kids to have the capacity for deep attention. And you're thinking about your own kiddos who are young. And I'm thinking about my own teenagers who are 13 and 16. And I see... the undermining of attentive faculties from when my 16-year-old got his phone.
For a long time, he didn't want a phone because I'd been droning on and on for years because he has me as a mother about addiction and opportunity costs and just that, you know, it's okay to enjoy it a little bit, but, you know, can't sacrifice sleep and physical exercise and in-person, you know, communication. And then he did get his phone and he struggles with it.
And he says, mom, this is really hard. It's eroding his ability to do his homework or to follow something he wants to do. The only thing that it doesn't seem to distract him from doing is playing the piano because he loves playing the piano. So anything that we can do to actually ensure young people are developing the muscle to And it's not just attention. Attention is the entry point.
That's the doorway that gets you through. It's actually reflection and meaning-making, which is what you get from deep reading and reading full books, which a lot of young people struggle to do today. You also can get it from other means. You could get it from long Socratic dialogues in community with diverse people over time, but it has to be...
An experience where you reflect, you think about meaning, you think about different perspectives, and it changes how you see the world.
Yes, yes.
I think that's right. If I had to choose for my own kids, and I do, we would have, you know, a school that has no phones for all the reasons we know. And Jonathan Haidt has done a great job on sort of catalyzing that movement here in the U.S., and bringing it from across the globe to our schools. We should have cell phone bands in school, bell to bell.
Don't have it at recess because that's where you start interacting and playing with kids. And I think we should make school a place where kids can actually interact with each other, develop human-to-human socialization capacities because there is massive commercial tech the minute they leave school that is vying for their attention. And make sure, make sure to do some high-quality AI literacy.
AI literacy is way, way different than using AI to learn. AI literacy is what is this? How was it made? What are the risks? What are the benefits? And let's talk about how our ethics around this new tool and how to incorporate it into our lives with an adult instructor, talking about how it works and what it is. That's AI literacy, and that's important.
But I guess this goes back to the point you were making about— I mean, there is a question how much we will do, but your question is, will it make a difference?
Yeah. And I think you bring something up that's really important, which is these things need to be regulated. It's ridiculous that they're out there being used by kids. And it's ridiculous to say, Ezra, it's your willpower that should be the deciding factor. It's ridiculous for adults. It's ridiculous for kids. These are incredibly seductive technologies. So, you know, I...
This is a really tough one for me around because you do want kids to be fluent in the new technology of the time, and you do want them to have an ethics and awareness about it. You don't want them to be seduced by it. The large AI labs are perfectly capable, perfectly capable if they wanted to, of creating a gen AI product that is designed for kids that will not be as seductive
What we are creating. Well, I would say they have to change how they're developing the products. You can't create an AI that'll be great for kids and teachers and teaching and learning without having teachers and kids and education experts and child development experts involved. in the development process with you, and so few are. So I think about what the Dutch government is doing.
They're doing a partnership with sort of the teacher unions and the academics and the tech companies, and they're having a little lab to figure out, you know, what would AI look like in schools. But any of that sort of bottom-up experimentation is the way to go before you roll it out. Because most AI developers, although they might be good people, they're not child development specialists.
But if they change the way they develop their products, they could.
And I think as a parent, you, yourself, but also other parents out there are right to be suspicious because I think that linear line is going to be much more complicated as the years go on with AI in our world. So what I would think about is a couple of things. One, getting back to the research I've done with my co-author and colleague, Jenny Anderson, grades don't show you how much
kids are engaged. I mean, schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply. And it's actually not really the fault of the teacher. Teachers are squished from above with all sorts of standards and squished from below with parents putting a lot of pressure on teachers about their kids' performance and outcome.
And what you really want is some feedback loops that are beyond just grades, and behavior to know, is my kid developing agency over their learning? And what I mean by that is, are they able to reflect and think about things they're learning in a way that they can identify what's interesting and they can have the skills to pursue new information? That right there is
is I think going to be the core skill. It is the core skill for learning new things in an uncertain world, which is I think one of the number one things we think about. In addition to that, I would say make sure kids are learning to interact with other human beings. Any school that has them working with peers, but even connecting with community members, our social networks are getting smaller.
There's going to be a premium on human to human interaction as more and more skills get automated and done by AI, which are the more knowledge, cognitive tasks, the sort of interpersonal caregiving, teaching skills are going to continue to be important for some time. I'm not sure for how long, but for some time.
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