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Home — Essay Samples — History — Roaring Twenties — Technology Advancement In The Roaring Twenties

Technology Advancement in The Roaring Twenties

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

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The Roaring Twenties

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: April 14, 2010

The Roaring Twenties was a period in American history of dramatic social, economic and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and gross national product (GNP) expanded by 40 percent from 1922 to 1929. This economic engine swept many Americans into an affluent “consumer culture” in which people nationwide saw the same advertisements, bought the same goods, listened to the same music and did the same dances. Many Americans, however, were uncomfortable with this racy urban lifestyle, and the decade of Prohibition brought more conflict than celebration. But for some, the Jazz Age of the 1920s roared loud and long, until the excesses of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down as the economy tanked at the decade’s end.

Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper : a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe ), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend—and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA , hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio —and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin , Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile . Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs—as did the burgeoning oil industry .

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them “bedrooms on wheels.”) What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago ; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age—Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were “the most expensive orgy in history”—while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground—now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone . (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago’s police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation’s cities. For instance, to the so-called “Drys,” beer was known as “Kaiser brew.” Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924 , which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance —discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression. 

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union , the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans—excluded from white neighborhoods—were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest , a Chicago Republican , became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a “cultural Civil War” between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, “New Women” and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic , the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine . The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History . The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience .

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Essay: 1921-present: Modern California - Migration, Technology, Cities

Over the course of the 20th century, California grew at a rate surpassing even state boosters' most breathless predictions. In the 1920s and 1930s, the oil, agriculture, and entertainment industries attracted millions of people to southern California, which overtook northern California as the economic engine of the thriving state.

World War II further transformed California as emerging aerospace and shipping industries brought millions more workers of varied geographical and cultural backgrounds into the state. Migration actually sped up after the war's end. In 1962, California passed New York as the nation's most populous state. By the turn of the 21st century, California laid claim to the world’s fifth largest economy and a population of nearly 34 million.

As the state's housing, transportation, health care, and social service infrastructures struggled to keep pace with this phenomenal growth, many California cities had begun to suffer from poverty, pollution, and racial strife. The state's tremendous ethnic diversity created tensions as well as opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration. Throughout the 20th century, California's millions of Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans strove for economic security, political equality, and social change.

Native Americans

The number of Native Americans living in California rose steadily after 1900, reversing the appalling decline of the previous century. Much of this increase was a result of federal job training and relocation programs that encouraged Indians from other states to move to California.

In 1965, fewer than 10 percent of the state’s 75,000 Native Americans lived on rural reservations. Those who did comprised California’s most disadvantaged group, with higher unemployment rates than any other minority. Urban Indians fared better but still experienced limited educational and employment opportunities.

Beginning in the 1960s, Native Americans in California formed pan-Indian organizations such as the American Indian Historical Society, California Rural Indian Health Board, and California Indian Education Association to advocate for native rights. A group of activists called Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay from 1969 to 1971, part of a nationwide Native American social justice movement that continues today.

In the early 1980s, the Cabazon and Morongo Bands of Mission Indians began offering card games and bingo on their reservations, setting off a controversy over gaming that would culminate in a 1987 US Supreme Court decision affirming Native Americans' right to build casinos on reservation lands. By 2005, there were 55 Native American casinos in California bringing in a total annual income of more than $3.5 billion.

These revenues have dramatically changed the economic, political, and social landscapes of California's native peoples. Because only groups that have been federally recognized as official tribes can build casinos, an enormous financial gulf now separates recognized and unrecognized native groups. Those groups with federal recognition enjoy considerable political clout, while members of unrecognized groups continue to suffer from joblessness, under-education, and poor living conditions. Money from gaming has also generated controversies over Indian identity as federally recognized groups have been forced to reconsider who can and cannot claim membership. Gaming has brought new wealth to some of California's Native Americans, but it has also brought new divisions, contentions, and self-definitions.

African Americans

African Americans first moved to California in large numbers during World War II to work in shipping and other war industries. Chester Himes's 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, set in wartime Los Angeles, exposed the racial discrimination many black migrants faced in their new home. Racist real estate policies limited African Americans' ability to move out of segregated urban neighborhoods, and discrimination restricted their access to skilled and professional jobs as well as higher education.

In 1965, anger and desperation turned into violence in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, triggered by rumors of police brutality. The violence in Watts — the most destructive urban uprising in US history at that time — lasted a week, involved more than 10,000 Los Angelinos, and left at least 34 people dead.

The underlying causes of the Watts uprising — including underemployment, poverty, segregation, and police harassment — persisted almost 30 years later. In 1992, violence erupted again in south central Los Angeles after the acquittal of several white police officers for the beating of motorist Rodney King. This reoccurrence of urban violence surprised many who believed the Civil Rights movement had improved conditions for California's African Americans.

In fact, the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s did see the emergence of a sizeable black middle class in the state, a result of activism, entrepreneurship, and government programs. A number of African American politicians won important offices, including Thomas Bradley (five-term mayor of Los Angeles), Willie L. Brown, Jr. (two-term mayor of San Francisco), and US representatives Augustus Hawkins, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Ronald Dellums, Julian Carey Dixon, Mervyn Dymally, Barbara Lee, Juanita Millender-McDonald, and Maxine Waters. Ironically, as upwardly mobile African Americans have moved from the urban centers of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco into suburbs and the Central Valley, their ability to elect black politicians has actually weakened. Their voting bloc has scattered, while Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans have grown in numbers.

Asian Americans

California's Asian American population remained small until 1965, when federal officials changed immigration policy to allow migration from Asia after 40 years of exclusion. In the decades before 1965, those Asian immigrants in California were considered "aliens" and barred from citizenship due to their race. Furthermore, a 1913 state law forbade Japanese Americans from owning land or leasing it for more than three years.

After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government rounded up and relocated 93,000 Californians of Japanese descent in the name of national security. Most were confined to relocation camps for more than two years despite never being convicted — or even formally accused — of a crime. Once released, many Japanese Americans found themselves destitute, stripped of their houses and possessions. Recognizing the injustice of the relocation campaigns, the US Congress made partial reparations to Japanese Americans in 1948 and again in 1988. But the stigma of being labeled national enemies simply because of their race lingered.

After 1965, immigration to the United States from Asia and the Pacific skyrocketed, with California as the prime destination. By 1990, 40 percent of all Asian Americans in the country lived in California, numbering about 3 million. California became home to thriving immigrant communities from China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Pacific islands. Asian Americans most heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, with large numbers also living in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Fresno, Sutter, Yuba, and Sacramento counties.

According to 2000 census data, a higher percentage of Asian Americans went to college than any other California group; but their per capita income still lagged significantly behind that of whites ($22,000 versus $31,700), revealing the persistence of anti-Asian prejudice in hiring. The growing political strength of Asian Americans has only begun to be exercised, thus far manifested in the elections of S. I. Hayakawa, Robert Matsui, and Norman Mineta to the US Congress, and Matt Fong as California State Treasurer.

Hispanic Americans

The largest minority group in California during the 20th century was Hispanic Americans, most prominently Mexican Americans. One-half million Mexicans migrated to the United States during the 1920s, with more than 30 percent settling in California. Mexican Americans soon made up the bulk of the labor force in many unskilled and semi-skilled industries, including agriculture, railroads, manufacturing, and domestic service. Many immigrants lived in segregated urban barrios, such as east Los Angeles, where they forged new identities as Mexican Americans.

Two incidents in Los Angeles during World War II revealed the city’s rampant anti-Mexican prejudice. In January 1943, 17 Mexican American youths were convicted of murdering a boy whose body had been found in a reservoir known as Sleepy Lagoon. The racist bias of the judge and prosecution was so blatant that the Sleepy Lagoon case attracted the sympathy of people around the country before being overturned by an appellate court. Meanwhile, long-simmering tensions between white servicemen and Mexican American "zoot suiters" (so named for their jaunty clothes) turned into a week-long race riot in June 1943. Mobs of white sailors, soldiers, and marines assaulted Mexican-American teenagers and tore off their clothes, but local newspapers portrayed the boys as the aggressors. Even the name of the incident — the Zoot Suit Riots — placed the blame on Mexican Americans.

In the decades after World War II, Latinos in California grew in numbers and political strength. In 1966, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta helped found the United Farm Workers, a labor union aimed at organizing migrant farm workers — mostly Mexican Americans — who had for decades endured perilous working conditions, low pay, and no job security. The labor activism of Chávez and Huerta comprised one arm of the La Raza movement, which endeavored to expose and overturn the discrimination in employment, housing, and education that Hispanic Americans faced in California. The La Raza movement included muralists, poets, entrepreneurs, politicians, and labor organizers within its ranks, and descendants of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other parts of Latin America in addition to Mexico.

Despite this tradition of activism, Hispanic Californians have had trouble winning public office. But the recent elections of Cruz Bustamante (Lieutenant Governor) and Antonio Villaraigosa (Los Angeles mayor) suggest the arrival of a powerful political presence. Ongoing controversies over illegal immigration and bilingual education have mobilized California's Hispanic population even as they exposed internal class and cultural divisions.

Multicultural California

The 2000 census produced a snapshot of California today. The state is more multicultural than ever before, with 32 percent Hispanic Americans, 11 percent Asian Americans, 6.7 percent African Americans, and 1 percent Native Americans (330,657, more than any other state). A full 26 percent of Californians were born outside the United States, and 39.5 percent of adults reported that they spoke a language other than English at home.

For the first time, census respondents were allowed to mark more than one race to identify themselves, and more than 1.5 million Californians did so, a small sign of the blending of cultures that has marked California for centuries. Though riven by fault lines and marred by continuing inequality, California continues to symbolize opportunity and hope for millions. It is a product of the interwoven histories and cultures of its diverse peoples.

California African American Museum

Calisphere, Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives

The Bancroft Library. Chinese in California virtual collection

Oakland Museum of California. Latino History Project

In the Library

de Graaf, Lawrence B., Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, eds. Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California. Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001

Phillips, George Harwood. The Enduring Struggle: Indians in California History. San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1981.

Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Yoo, David K. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California, 1995.

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"1921-present: Modern California - Migration, Technology, Cities" was written by Joshua Paddison and the University of California in 2005 as part of the California Cultures project.

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Jessica Grose

Get tech out of the classroom before it’s too late.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. “I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said.

She decided to do something about it. Lewis told me that she got together with other parents who were concerned about the unfettered use of school-sanctioned technology in San Luis Coastal Unified School District, their district in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Because they knew that it wasn’t realistic to ask for the removal of the laptops entirely, they went for what they saw as an achievable win: blocking YouTube from students’ devices. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director.

To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It ends with the notoriously violent “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence from “A Clockwork Orange.” (Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included “rape scene” in the title.) Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, “I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.”

That acknowledgment gets to the heart of the problem with screens in schools. I heard from many parents who said that even when they asked district leaders how much time kids were spending on their screens, they couldn’t get straight answers; no one seemed to know, and no one seemed to be keeping track.

Eric Prater, the superintendent of the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, told me that he didn’t realize how much was getting through the schools’ content filters until Lewis and her fellow parents raised concerns. “Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.” He added that he’s grateful this was brought to his attention.

I don’t think educators are the bad guys here. Neither does Lewis. In general, educators want the best for students. The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.

One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.

Though tech’s incursion into America’s public schools — particularly our overreliance on devices — hyperaccelerated in 2020, it started well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Google, which provides the operating system for lower-cost Chromebooks and is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is a big player in the school laptop space, though I also heard from many parents and teachers whose schools supply students with other types and brands of devices.

As my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer reported in 2017 (by which point “half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students” were, according to Google, using its education apps), “Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable”: potential lifetime customers.

The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours. Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that “readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.”

“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” Nicole Post, who teaches at a public elementary school in Missouri, wrote to me. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”

I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.

Some teachers said they have programs that block certain sites and games, but those programs can be cumbersome. Some said they have software, like GoGuardian, that allows them to see the screens of all the students in their classes at once. But classroom time is zero sum: Teachers are either teaching or acting like prison wardens; they can’t do both at the same time.

Resources are finite. Software costs money . Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money . When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed . More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm.

I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague work force readiness.

But on the first point, I think other forms of distraction — like talking to friends, doodling and daydreaming — are better than playing video games or watching YouTube because they at least involve children engaging with other children or their own minds. And there’s research that suggests laptops are uniquely distracting . One 2013 study found that even being next to a student who is multitasking on a computer can hurt a student’s test scores.

On the second point, you can have designated classes to teach children how to keyboard, code or use software that don’t require them to have laptops in their hands throughout the school day. And considering that various tech companies are developing artificial intelligence that, we’re meant to understand, will upend work as we know it , whatever tech skills we’re currently teaching will probably be obsolete by the time students enter the work force anyway. By then, it’ll be too late to claw back the brain space of our nation’s children that we’ve already ceded. And for what? So today’s grade schoolers can be really, really good at making PowerPoint presentations like the ones they might one day make as white-collar adults?

That’s the part that I can’t shake: We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.

Holly Coleman, a parent of two who lives in Kansas and is a substitute teacher in her district, describes what students are losing:

They can type quickly but struggle to write legibly. They can find info about any topic on the internet but can’t discuss that topic using recall, creativity or critical thinking. They can make a beautiful PowerPoint or Keynote in 20 minutes but can’t write a three-page paper or hand-make a poster board. Their textbooks are all online, which is great for the seams on their backpack, but tangible pages under your fingers literally connect you to the material you’re reading and learning. These kids do not know how to move through their day without a device in their hand and under their fingertips. They never even get the chance to disconnect from their tech and reconnect with one another through eye contact and conversation.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” prescribes phone-free schools as a way to remedy some of the challenges facing America’s children. I agree that there’s no place for smartphones on a K-12 campus. But if you take away the phones and the kids still have near-constant internet connectivity on devices they have with them in every class, the problem won’t go away.

When Covid hit and screens became the only way for millions of kids to “attend” school, not having a personal device became an equity issue. But we’re getting to a point where the opposite may be true. According to the responses to my questionnaire, during the remote-school era, private schools seemed to rely far less on screens than public schools, and many educators said that they deliberately chose lower-tech school environments for their own children — much the same way that some tech workers intentionally send their kids to screen-free schools.

We need to reframe the entire conversation around tech in schools because it’s far from clear that we’re getting the results we want as a society and because parents are in a defensive crouch, afraid to appear anti-progress or unwilling to prepare the next generation for the future. “I feel like a baby boomer attacking like this,” said Lewis.

But the drawbacks of constant screen time in schools go beyond data privacy, job security and whether a specific app increases math performance by a standard deviation. As Lewis put it, using tech in the classroom makes students “so passive, and it requires so little agency and initiative.” She added, “I’m very concerned about the species’ ability to survive and the ability to think critically and the importance of critical thinking outside of getting a job.”

If we don’t hit pause now and try to roll back some of the excesses, we’ll be doing our children — and society — a profound disservice.

The good news is that sometimes when the stakes become clear, educators respond: In May, Dr. Prater said, “we’re going to remove access to YouTube from our district devices for students.” He added that teachers will still be able to get access to YouTube if they want to show instructional videos. The district is also rethinking its phone policy to cut down on personal device use in the classroom. “For me,” he said, “it’s all about how do you find the common-sense approach, going forward, and match that up with good old-fashioned hands-on learning?” He knows technology can cause “a great deal of harm if we’re not careful.”

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

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Powered by the cutting-edge AI technology, AI Writer generates high-quality content that is tailored to your needs in just seconds. Whether you need to craft a persuasive essay or a professional email, AI Writer has got you covered. Whether you're stuck on an assignment or just need some extra help getting your thoughts down on paper, AI Writer is for you! We understand that writing essays can be a tedious and time-consuming task, especially when you're struggling to come up with ideas or simply don't have the time to write. That's why we've created AI Writer, to help you write smarter, not harder. Our app analyzes your topic and generates a comprehensive essay tailored to your specific needs, saving you time and effort. The process is simple: all you have to do is input your topic, select the type of essay you need, and let our AI technology do the rest. Our AI algorithms will analyze your topic and generate a comprehensive essay that is tailored to your specific needs. 【Writing Features】 - Articles and Outlines: Intelligently generates articles and their outlines, assisting your writing projects. - Creative Writing: Includes compositions, stories, jokes, prose, novels, poetry, fables, scripts, etc. - Academic Research: Papers, experimental reports, research reports, literature reviews, academic book reviews, etc. - Professional Needs: Includes diaries, summaries, reading notes, weekly reports, work plans, personal growth plans, etc. - Multimedia Content: Video scripts, movie scripts, TV drama scripts, podcast scripts, animation scripts, etc. - Business Writing: Trending headlines, news reports, product descriptions, advertising copy, social media content, etc. - Personal Purposes: Travel logs, reflections, lyrics, brand stories, personal records, and thoughts, etc. For more information : Privacy Policy : https://appzibraininfotech.blogspot.com/2024/03/privacy-policy.html Terms of Use : https://appzibraininfotech.blogspot.com/2024/03/terms-of-use.html

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Entertainment in the 1920’s

This essay about entertainment in the 1920s explores the vibrant cultural landscape of the Roaring Twenties in America. It delves into the rise of jazz music, the flourishing of Hollywood cinema, the popularity of spectator sports, and the impact of Prohibition on underground culture. From the pulsating rhythms of jazz clubs to the glamour of Hollywood’s silver screen, the 1920s was a decade marked by unprecedented creativity and innovation in the realm of entertainment.

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Imagine stepping into the bustling streets of 1920s America, where the air is electric with the sounds of jazz music and the flickering lights of movie theaters beckon you to step inside. This was the Roaring Twenties, a decade of unprecedented cultural dynamism and social change, where entertainment took center stage in the hearts and minds of Americans.

At the heart of this vibrant era was the emergence of jazz music, a genre that captured the spirit of the times with its infectious rhythms and soulful melodies.

From the smoky speakeasies of Harlem to the bustling clubs of Chicago, jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington electrified audiences with their virtuosity and improvisational flair, setting the stage for a musical revolution.

Meanwhile, Hollywood was experiencing its own golden age, as silent films gave way to “talkies” and stars like Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow became household names. The silver screen transported audiences to far-off worlds and exotic locales, offering an escape from the hardships of everyday life and a glimpse into the glamorous lives of the rich and famous.

But entertainment in the 1920s wasn’t confined to the realms of music and film. Spectator sports like baseball and boxing captivated the nation, with legends like Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey capturing the hearts of fans across the country. Meanwhile, the advent of Prohibition gave rise to a vibrant underground culture of speakeasies and bootleggers, where flappers danced the night away in defiance of social norms.

In conclusion, the 1920s was a decade of unparalleled creativity and innovation in the world of entertainment. From the smoky clubs of the Harlem Renaissance to the glittering lights of Hollywood, Americans embraced a culture of escapism and glamour, seeking solace and excitement in an era of profound change and uncertainty.

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