By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Published: 8:01AM BST 16 Oct 2010
Social networking websites pose a serious threat as they blur the lines between gossip and fact before schoolchildren learn to appreciate the difference, it was claimed.
John Newton, head of fee-paying Taunton School, Somerset, said that on-line chat rooms and information sharing sites could help young people learn from peers around the world.
But he said pupils needed firm guidance from adults with “authority, balance and a firm grasp of facts and context” to avoid being led astray.
“A little knowledge is dangerous thing,” he said.
“By unleashing a monster which encourages young people to learn from each other armed by their inevitably limited perspective, while not engendering in them a discernment for the true and the noble, we will raise a generation who do not love learning but simply see the screen as a source of opinion or nuggets of information, poorly digested, that will suit their point of view without testing their veracity.”
The comments – in an article today published on Telegraph.co.uk – follow concerns over the effect of social networking websites on children.
More than 500m people currently use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share photographs and videos and post regular updates of their movements and thoughts.
A further 145m have signed up to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service that lets users circulate text messages about themselves.
But Baroness Greenfield, the Oxford University neuroscientist and former director of the Royal Institution, said last year that such websites shortened children’s attention spans, encouraged instant gratification and made young people more self-centred.
Writing today, Dr Newton, said social networking sites were a “far more powerful weapon in the hands of our children than we appreciate”.
“Facebook is a case in point,” he said. “Is it a meaningful social hive generating goodwill and reuniting old friends, or is it a gossips’ paradise infesting the world with innuendo, half truth and insult?”
He said children had to be taught that flippant comments posted on-line can leave people’s “reputations in tatters”.
“The impossibility of erasing what is posted, revealed and pronounced is a nightmare that our young people are only now experiencing,” he said.
“Job prospects as well as personal happiness will be hampered by inadvertent statements – by themselves or others – and the marketplace in which juicy news is exchanged for the hard currency of street cred or the thrill of foolhardy fame will have done its worst.”
Dr Newton, head of Taunton School for five years, said he “saw the point” of sharing information on-line, but added: “Call me old fashioned but children need to learn from those with authority, balance and a firm grasp of facts and context.”
He said: "Children believe that the imprimatur of the internet gives a statement an authority and a value that are unquestioned. They have not necessarily understood what constitutes gossip, nor appreciate the exocet quality of a hurtful word; half-formed opinion is all that counts."
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