Secret Teacher: online spaces are being used to indoctrinate young people
Playing video games has become a vital resource for young people to socialise with friends during lockdown - but has been subject to encroachment from the far-right
This week, I want to talk about boys and what we should teach them about gaming.
My son loves chess. He spends a lot of time playing online, entering tournaments and attending classes. He enjoys watching chess masters analysing games.
It’s not an interest I share, so I leave him to it. The other day, I was pottering about, picking up bits and bobs, when I heard a voice on his app describing the horrendous hunger faced by children in an African country.
The material wasn’t dangerous, but it was surprising to me that people would look for charitable donations on chess sites.
But being online means you’re in a public space and you can’t expect to control it. Not wanting my son to hear any distressing material, I told him to silence any commentary unrelated to chess.
Then, I told him to mute any discussions on race, sexuality, immigration, or gender. I educated him enough to know how to defend himself online. I know his school teaches him about inappropriate online material, but he doesn’t always know what that means.
Everyone being back in class again reminds us that education is precious and that deep learning relies on people and relationships. But the content we teach also deserves scrutiny, especially when it relates to children’s safety.
Last week, I read the new ‘Relationship and Sex Education’ programme for Catholic primary schools. ‘Puberty is a gift from God,’ it informs us. And, later, ‘We are perfectly designed to procreate with him.’ Such content is obviously alarming, but a lack of content can be damaging, too: Especially for our boys.
I’m sharing an anti-bullying programme with my second-years, one used in 127 secondary schools across the country. Its gaping holes are reflected in the gaping yawns I encounter in class every time I teach it. Be kind, tell a trusted adult, be safe, the programme urges the children.
My students have heard it all before, in primary school. The type of bullying covered is all peer-to-peer stuff, very much focused on emotional bullying, and children showing a lack of respect and empathy for one another.
What’s missing? A discussion of intellectual bullying, value-based manipulation. Specifically, how online spaces are being used to indoctrinate young people.
This is a very real form of bullying. It doesn’t hurt feelings; it doesn’t involve shaming or name-calling. It’s not sexual or deviant. It’s an intellectual form of bullying. It feeds on insecurities, most often those of boys, offering a strange kind of empowerment through xenophobic and misogynistic rhetoric.
I watched one video, preceding an innocuous-looking YouTube video game. It involved an interview with a Mexican child on the US border a few years ago. The boy reports being abandoned by his parents. The message? Mexicans are heartless and inhumane; and that former US president Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrants is valid. To these groups, our children are called ‘normies’.
While our children innocently play their favourite video games, they’re potentially being drip-fed right-wing ideologies, guided to videos of commentators who are experts at camouflaging their alt-right intentions.
And they’re proactive in dismantling any supports schools might offer. If a child is busy interacting with stimulating graphics, they won’t even register what’s happening.
So, it’s incredibly important that parents and teachers do.
I see disaffection in boys. They seem disgruntled, particularly the ones more likely to spend hours gaming, rather than playing sports or socialising with friends.
I see it in the boys who get angry when you want to discuss gender equality. I see it, and it scares the life out of me.
Gender roles are changing. These changes are positive and far more egalitarian, but the process of change will have an impact. While we are rightly empowering our girls, we must not forget about our boys. Alt-right commentators are taking advantage of the displacement boys feel; online algorithms are targeting them, while they play their seemingly innocuous games behind bedroom doors.
In the absence of guns, we might avoid school shootings in Ireland, but we’ll not avoid a seething, potentially violent undercurrent in our male population.
It’s a sad truth, but protecting our boys means protecting everyone.
I’d like to see resources now that really educate young people on how to defend themselves against this most modern and worrying form of bullying.
Spun Out has up-to-date resources, but we need their dissemination to be uniform.
While we’re at it, parents should also question that other material, about having sex with God.
