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A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.
To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?
In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 06 2017, @03:38PM
Kids just don't go to school very much. There's some kind of little house on the prairie mentality where kids had 12 hour school days 6 days/week or something, but thats dead.
First of all, that was NEVER the case. While we don't have good statistical data on school day length going back that far, we do have statistics on school year [ed.gov] over time, which rose from ~130 days to ~180 days between the late 1800s and around 1930; since then, the school year length has been more-or-less constant. Also, it should be noted that average student (even those who were enrolled) generally attended only a bit over half of those days back in the 1800s -- on many days, there were farm duties or whatever else to attend to, so kids simply didn't come to school that much.
As for school day length, yes school days used to start earlier in the morning and/or end in the late afternoon, though frequently with a lunch break of 2 or more hours to go home (common still in walkable city/town schools through the 1960s or 1970s). Thus, the effective number of instructional hours per day was rarely above the ~6 hours of instruction most kids get today. Maybe your school when "Reagan was prez" was outside the norm, but stats we do have going back to the 1980s don't show a significant change in instructional hours.
Also, the U.S. is hardly lagging in total school hours globally. (See, for example, here [pewresearch.org], or the chart here [wikipedia.org].) The U.S. is near the top of most lists in total instructional hours per school year, despite lagging in many educational performance metrics.