See Dick Click



Dick and Jane were my classmates back in the first grade. In fact we spent quite a bit of time together, running, jumping, playing ball, learning to read … surely you remember them too, or have at least heard of them? That was fifty-three years ago, but the memories linger, and even today I can still occasionally hear our echoes!

See Dick run.

Oh, See Jane. Funny, funny Jane.

See Spot jump.

Oh Father. See funny Dick. Dick can play.

Indeed, we spent a lot of time playing, making things, working, helping Mother and Father, watching out for Sally and Puff, exploring the natural world outdoors … and still we all learned to read, and so much more! At the time it seemed so ordinary, but looking back now I’m just not so sure … really it’s disconcerting … maybe it just wasn’t right?

Why were we allowed to waste so much unsupervised time in those childish, unproductive activities? Dick was always climbing trees, or he and Jane were pulling Sally or Spot around in that silly red wagon, or they were all chasing Puff, all while the Russians were launching Sputnik! Shouldn’t we have been doing state-mandated No Child Left Behind homework each day after school instead? Granted, we didn’t have computers back then, but surely we could have at least learned to use slide rules by the sixth grade, without waiting for High School? After all, kids today can all use computers by the time they’re ten, if not some years earlier!So perhaps things were not entirely as they seemed; what had appeared so natural and ordinary was in some ways a national shame, so many childhoods hours wasted playing outside.

Thankfully, things have been getting better in America, at least ever since home computers came out in the 1980s. For near thirty years now, every single year more and more kids spend more and more time on computers: surfing, clicking, double-clicking, texting, tweeting, and more! That’s technology for you, and high-tech is as natural today to kids as mothers’ milk or soda pop. Better yet, practically all the kids today have 24/7 cell phones with Cyber-connectivity, so they’re almost never really unplugged!

 But that’s nothing. You’ve heard of evolution haven’t you? Well let me tell you a story...

There are some schools now where a lot of the children are “ScreenHeads.”  ScreenHead children are so highly evolved that their heads have become flatscreen monitors, and some even have IPhone hands. That’s the honest truth … and there’s one school where ALL the children are ScreenHeads, except for just two ‘normal,’ un-evolved HumanHead children, Hillary and Humphrey. You can’t begin to imagine that first day of school, and how terribly inferior Hillary and Humphrey felt relative to their so very sleek, so very smart, and so very ‘connected’ ScreenHead classmates. But here’s the interesting thing: as the school year unfolded, Hillary and Humphrey discovered that being HumanHeads is wonderfully rewarding after all!

Can you imagine that? Well it’s true, and you can read the rest of the story in...

ScreenHeads: A Story for Children (and Adults)

available as a free download. Simply click the title, then use the "File ... Download … Open (or Save)" menu to convert to the superior PDF format.

ScreenHeads: A Story for Children (and Adults) employs an innovative “You are the Illustrator” format which encourages (but does not require) artistic exploration of the story’s important Human and Cyber themes. (15 story pages, 19 pages total)

Copyright 2012 Stephen Rowe