• LUIS ALEMANY

Updated on Saturday, 16october2021-01: 35

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  • 'The Squid Game' Why its success?

  • Good Education "Ignorance is becoming a social value"

Circulars issued by schools to remind parents of their students that children in the fourth grade (nine years) should not watch series for those over 16 years of age; regional councilors for Culture who urge to supervise children's access to

streaming

platforms

(the one from Madrid, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, did it yesterday); Twitter messages from primary school teachers who estimate that half of their students watch extremely violent series; teachers' unions that warn of the increase in violence during recess; Tamara Falcó, interviewed in

El Hormiguero

, explaining that a teacher at her school was killed by a disturbed role player ...

The Squid Game

It has gone in two weeks from being news for its public success (it is the most watched series in the world in the history of the Netflix platform) to

becoming a cause for public alarm

. Is the series a poisoned toy that traumatizes children? What leads them to normalize violence?

There is another question that comes before. What is

The Squid Game

? Basically: a nine-episode Korean series, produced in 2021 with money from Netflix. Its story tells a survival game in which the contestants are a handful of ragged men,

recruited for the amusement of some mysterious millionaire who pays for the tournament

. Who loses, dies. The photography is bright and in flat colors, like a classic colored film, the characters seem drawn as in a clear line comic and some settings are reminiscent of an Escher painting. For 15 minutes,

The Squid Game

Is So Innocent It resembles

Charles Chaplin's

The Boy

, with

a disastrous and a bit floored father and a clever and sad girl

. It gives tenderness. But then, with no omens announcing chaos, the series becomes a cross between

The Hunger Games

and

Parasites

. The final part of

Parasites

, when the machete blows begin in slow motion. In Spain, it is issued with the recommendation of "not suitable for viewers under 16 years old."

"That's where the trap of

The Squid Game is

. It seems like a nice thing and suddenly it turns into something completely different," explains Begoña Ladrón de Guevara, president of the Confederation of Parents' Associations, COFAPA. "I am a fan of

anime

[Japanese animation] and it seems to me that the series

is something as simple as taking that world a bit caricatured into a series with actors and photography

. It is not the most tremendous story that can be found out there", adds Mario Gutiérrez, national president of Education of the CSIF civil servants union. "The problem is not the series but who sees it."

Deep down,

The Squid Game

is one more episode in a controversy that is reproduced periodically, half legend and half reality: the children who were thrown to fly out of the window after seeing

Superman;

the boys who committed suicide after listening

to Nirvana's

Nevermind

; Alex's teenage impersonators in

A Clockwork Orange ...

Hasn't this always happened? "There is a border that is that of violence. The cases they are reporting consist of children who, when they play hide-and-seek in English,

do not tell the one who has lost 'you are dead' but already represent violence

", says Marc Masip, psychologist and expert in addiction to new technologies." And he is not a legend. Child suicides and cases of mental illness among children have skyrocketed in recent years. "

"I am very shocked that children see things like this," says Canadian researcher Catherine L'Ecuyer, author of

Conversations with my teacher. Doubts and certainties about education

(Espasa) before explaining what happens in the mind of a child who sees content such as

The Squid Game

. "All children are born with a threshold of feeling, a sense of what is right and what is wrong. But, if we surround them with violent and frenetic environments, that threshold of feeling will rise. Everything will seem slow to them, real life it will seem slow, they will lose empathy and they will begin to depend on external stimuli to feel something. First they will normalize the violence and then they will become dependent. " Any example that illustrates the idea? "

My friends and I watched series for children until we entered adolescence:

The Mayan Bee,

Smurfs

..

.

And Gargamel's character seemed too tough at the time.

Today's preteen wants nothing to do with

The Smurfs

. "

L'Ecuyer's theory is that competition for the audiovisual market has led providers to

purify

the drug

more and more

until they push their consumers to the limit. "Children end up in a state that oscillates between apathy and anxiety. The child loses the desire to do things for himself and becomes hooked on external stimuli. He

needs periodic dopamine shots

and is increasingly looking for them in more bizarre sources. There are studies that say that current cartoons have an average of 7.5 frame changes per minute. And, as if that were not enough, there is the trick of putting

the playback at x1.5 speed

to go faster. "

Said like this, the fault of the state of anxiety / depression of our children is of the audiovisual industry. But approaching the problem like that is like going to fight windmills. "The responsibility, deep down, is always in the families. Before,

we watched TV in the living room and the parents passed by, they knew more or less what we were seeing

. Of course we transgressed, that, if a movie They put two diamonds, there was an incentive to see it. But we were aware of the transgression and that was already important, "recalls Ladrón de Guevara.

"The regulatory codes exist. They are marked in European regulations and the platforms offer filters to parents, although sometimes they are complex. But the problem is not with the producers, but with the educational community as a whole.

Schools have to bet on training for children and families

", explains Mari Carmen Morillas, president of the federation of parents' associations FAPA Giner de los Ríos. "And you have to be attentive to recesses and dining rooms, which are also educational spaces and which is where almost all conflicts occur. In recess there is where you have to teach coexistence."

Which child wants the teachers to lead their recess?

"It is not a question of directing them. It is a question of taking advantage of them. The other day, I saw a girl who came crying because they had not let her play football with the children. It is normal, the conflict will always occur and it is part of learning What you have to do is work with that conflict. " And that includes children who play

The Squid Game

and tend toward brutality.

"Violence existed before

The Squid Game

. This case should not be dramatized. The real problem is access. The real problem is with the children who,

from the first year of ESO, come to class very tired

because they have been with the tablet all night, "ends Mario Gutiérrez, from the CSIF.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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