Education

This Professor Is Teaching Students How To Get Off Their Phones

REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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Dr. Sylvia Frejd has a digital recovery plan for you. The Liberty University professor wants to “preserve humanity” by saving it from an an healthy over-emphasis on computers and other high-tech devices that virtually control our lives.

Frejd founded the Center for Digital Wellness at the well-known Christian university’s founded by evangelist Jerry Falwell and located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her mottos are “Thrive in real life” and “Look up!”

“I’m here to preserve humanity,” Frejd told The College Fix via telephone. “Face to face contact is so important, and the more we are looking down at our screens the less we exercise the muscles of our emotional intelligence. Life is about relationships, with our parents, spouses, friends, kids, and bosses, and we cannot allow technology to erode them.”

The center oozes the structure of a non-digital world, with a cozy fireplace in the middle of a living room and a kitchen table where people can engage in real-life conversation — just like people used to do before people chronically checked their email. There’s even a “digital detox day when students are expected to leave their digital devices at home.

Frejd is convinced that coping with the digital world is not just a case of spending less time staring at your computer screen or texting on your cell phone

“It’s not so much how many hours you’ve been on technology today, it’s really about what the technology is keeping you from in your real life and relationships,” Frejd, who is also a Christian counselor and co-author of a book on the digital invasion.

“When our video games stop us from going outside with friends or our phones interrupt our dinner conversations, that is technology’s negative impact,” she said.

Ultimately, the professor encourages her students not to deny the high-tech world but to use it in moderation and avoid the same kind of addictive behavior that is associated with drugs or alcohol abuse.

But Frejd does teach at a renowned Christian academic institution and she says technology can even come between ourselves and God. If we are to “keep our God space” then we must also maintain the “silence and solitude needed to reflect and focus.”

“Every religion and spirituality requires this in some form,” she told The College Fix. “If we become addicted to technology, the distraction it brings will rewire our brain to the point that we lose our capacity to contemplate God.”

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