Newly unearthed footage from March 2016 shows Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, discussing the idea that wireless internet is hurting children’s brains.
In the video, someone in the crowd asks Stein, “My school district is rapidly moving toward [a one-to-one student-to-computer ratio]. Can you speak to the health issues?” Stein replies, speaking to growing concerns about the amount of time children spend staring at screens of all varieties:
“We already know that kids who get put in front of TVs instead of interacting, this is not good in all kinds of ways. And it’s just not good for their cognitive development, it’s not good for their social development, I mean, that is incredible that kids in kindergarten… We should be moving away from screens at all levels of education, not moving into them.
Stein goes on to call the proliferation of technology in education “another corporate ruse.” But when the woman who asked the initial question follows up, asking about wireless internet in particular, Stein — a Harvard Medical grad and licensed physician — answers:
“We should not be subjecting kids’ brains especially to that. And we don’t follow that issue in this country, but in Europe, where they do, they have good precautions around wireless — maybe not good enough, because it’s very hard to study this stuff. We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die. And this is like, the paradigm for how public health works in this country [laughs] and it’s outrageous, you know?”
Watch the clip in full below.
(Via Gizmodo)