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Union head Leslie Blatteau: "Human to human is better.”
The president of New Haven’s teacher union locked eyes with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal to deliver a meta message about how to free kids from the grips of social media giants like Meta: Lean on hands-on learning that takes place face to face.
The union leader, Leslie Blatteau, joined eight fellow teachers and counselors for a roundtable discussion inside the library of Hill Regional Career High School Monday to school Blumenthal on how online social services are harming their students — and learn more about a federal bill aiming to hold corporations liable for minors’ mental health.
The conversation came a week after the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled tech chief executives during a hearing held to debate a slate of legislative proposals, including the Kids Online Safety Act, which seek to protect kids from the dangers of internet access.
“I grew up in a time when there weren’t any computers in the classroom,” Blumenthal told the teachers. “It was a blackboard and chalk.”
Blumenthal has been a recent champion of regulating big tech, despite or perhaps because of his difficulties understanding modern social media operations. As a co-sponsor of the Kids Online Safety Act, Blumenthal has been interviewing parents and kids about their relationships to online social networks. On Monday, he turned to New Haven teachers and student counselors for additional insight.
That bill, approved by the Senate Commerce Committee back in July, would require social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable product features determined to be “addictive,” and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations. It would create liability for online platforms that target specific threats to minors, like promotion of suicide, eating disorders, or substance abuse. It could further require those large platforms to perform independent audits to assess their risks to minors and report how they are addressing those potential harms.
Civil liberties advocates have criticized the bill as too vague and sprawling. They warn it will lead to blatant censorship through disparate interpretations across the states concerning what constitutes “harm” to kids.
“We’re not saying anything should be censored,” Blumenthal said, “but that we need to impose a duty on corporations.”
In the business model behind social media, he stated, “kids are not the consumers, they’re the product. They’re literally the product — information is collected about them, it’s sold and monetized, and then it’s weaponized.”
Teachers like Career High School’s Rose Murphy recalled instances of students witnessing “the worst things you can imagine,” like acts of murder, sexual assaults, and revenge porn, online while worrying about seeming overly sensitive to such ubiquitous content in front of their peers or getting in trouble with parents for accessing inappropriate sites.
“What I see everyday is that they’re completely addicted to doom scrolling,” Wilbur Cross tech teacher David Lopez-Ibarra said.
“I’m seeing children who are just asleep in class because they’ve been up gaming all night,” added Mia Comulada-Breuler, a counselor at the same high school.
“This is a great opportunity for government intervention,” she said of the big tech challenge. But human solutions are equally important.
The most direct way to avoid turning children into 24-hour consumers and commodities, Blatteau argued, is embodied learning that counteracts addictive screen time.
Teachers, parents, and children themselves cannot be wholly responsible for minors’ media intake. “We welcome a partnership because we can’t do it alone,” she said, pointing to the deliberately addictive design behind social media and the importance of protecting students’ data privacy.
“I just want to make sure we all celebrate the human solutions to our children’s mental health crisis.”
“We can’t regulate corporations from our classrooms,” Blatteau said, but the federal government could prioritize policies that would facilitate smaller classroom sizes, more library media specialists and counselors inside schools, and an emphasis on experiential learning models.
“I have counselors with care loads of 200 kids,” KC Petruzzi, director of the Connecticut Education Association, and the only non-New Haven teacher present Monday. “How do we build relationships” with so many students and so little time? she asked aloud.
“There’s a reason we look or student to teacher ratios,” Blumenthal began …
“… Yeah, yeah, keep looking!” Blatteau cheered.
“It’s so revealing when you talk to people who run these tech companies,” Blumenthal followed up: “Are you crazy?” tech chiefs answer when asked if they let their own kids use those networks.
Blatteau argued that private schools are often able to impose restrictions on social media more easily than public schools and offer better one-on-one guidance to kids growing up in the age of big tech. “Those students grow up and end up running the tech companies,” she said, while the Black and Brown and working class students of school districts like New Haven are less likely to access jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
“We’re coming out of a time when we all felt so alienated,” Blatteau said of remote learning. “We’re asking our children to learn on computers… is that the human solution that we want?”
“We’re bucking trends if we do this,” she noted, remembering a recent visit to her favorite local bagelry where she was instructed to order on a digital tablet rather than a cashier.
“But I think we know,” she said, giving a grin to the senator and her colleagues, that “human to human is better.”
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