My question is not a personal one. My question is one about education. How should a developing mind spend its time? Asked another way, can such a brain spend too much time on the wrong things? In other words, does the way a developing brain spends its time matter enough that we, society, should focus on that? When I was trained as a teacher a half-century ago, such a discussion was not known.

As far as developing minds go, I think children are pretty resilient, and that violence is a pretty powerful part of their lives, even in societies with low levels of criminal or military violence. I think there are bullies in Sweden, too. Video games in particular may create a different culture than the culture of television or radio or pulp magazines or chataquas but different isn’t bad unless, again, you’re overly convinced that your personal moment in time is and must be the very best that there was or could be.

He likens their development to computer software in which we are given a certain version of mind software at birth and our life experiences act upon that original software and shape it into one of the two types of minds. Charny also asserts that psychotherapy can convert one type of human mind to another. His two types of human minds are: Fascist Mind and Democratic Mind.

Charny describes how psychotherapy can be used to convert a Fascist Mind to a Democratic Mind. I hope he is right. But even if he is, I don’t think that such conversions will ever have much impact upon society at large. There is no doubt that there are many humans who have fascist or tyrannical tendencies and it would take thousands of psychotherapists, working over many years, to change millions of Fascist Minds into Democratic Minds. Unless and until some fast, reliable mechanism for preventing or changing Fascist Minds can be developed we need to focus on getting it right the first time.

So again, I ask, how should the developing brain spend its time?

But I do wonder about the investment of time. The youngster’s brain is growing and what it spends its time doing must have a effect on its growth, complexity, efficiency, whatever. So what is the best way for a growing brain to spend its time? Playing video games? or something else?

Once the brain is “grown,” it is too late to change it. There are things that just can’t be reversed and reconstructed in better ways.

Some years ago a Guardian TV reviewer expressed this thought as “Titus Andronicus would be a video nasty if it wasn’t Eng. Lit.” I’m sure you could get that on your arm.