Mar

20

The dangers of virtual reality

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management 

games.jpg“the overpowering stimulation and excitement that virtual reality produces can lull the imagination and numb sympathetic feelings for pain and suffering (Daisaku Ikeda, Soko Education (Santa Monica: Middleway Press, 2001), 53

This quote could help explain a lot of things that I see and hear in my classroom of at-risk kids. . Many of my at-risk students play video games, violent video games most of their time at home. I just checked here to see which games are the most popular now. I was hoping it wasn’t the especially violent ones. But I was wrong. Grand Theft Auto is still right there at the top.

Many of my at-risk students have desk top computers in their bedrooms and play on them into the wee hours of the morning. They have little ones they carry around and play games on when they’re away from home. They play games and don’t interact with other people, except to comment on how many points they have scored or which level they’ve gotten to.

These at-risk students seem numb to the pain and suffering of others and have no empathy for anyone. They glorify violence. When I talk to them about things they just shrug their shoulders and say things like oh well, that’s life. They ‘ve even held fights that were specially staged for and posted on YouTube, that is until the school got wind of it and it was stopped. It just boggles my mind. Perhaps the quality of life is becoming what Hobbes claimed it was- solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

How can we counter the negative effects of virtual reality?

UPDATE-March 22

My daughter Lisa read this post and said that she had recently read that violent video games actually reduced the incidence of youth violence. The only conclusions I’ve come to are:

1. For some reason my at-risk students might be affected negatively by violent games while other students might n0t be.

2. My at-risk kids would be even more violent if they didn’t play violent video games because they wouldn’t get some of the violence out of the system by playing those games (Oh my goodness)

Does anyone know of research that could speak to this? Please let me know if you do.

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