Forming citizens in the age of screens

The Warning We Should Not Ignore

One of the most important voices to emerge in recent debate about the future of Western civilisation is Sophie Winkleman. Many will know her as a British actress. Others will know her as Lady Frederick Windsor. But her deeper contribution may prove to be the cultural warning she is sounding about children, screens, technology, education and the formation of young minds.

Her message is simple, unfashionable and desperately needed: childhood is not a software update. It is not an experiment to be conducted by technology companies, convenience-driven institutions and exhausted adults who have mistaken digital access for human development.
At the heart of her argument is a profound question: what are we doing to our children?

We live in an age that talks endlessly about safety, wellbeing, inclusion and care, yet we have allowed many children to be raised inside a toxic online environment no sane society would have designed on purpose. We hand them devices of extraordinary addictive power and then wonder why their attention fractures, their anxiety rises, their confidence collapses and their sense of reality becomes distorted. We restrict their freedom outdoors while giving them almost unrestricted access to digital worlds full of cruelty, pornography, ideological manipulation, status anxiety, bullying, body dysmorphia, rage and despair.

This is one of the strange inversions of our time. Many children are treated as if the local park is too dangerous, the walk to school too risky, the tree too high, the creek too unsafe and the stranger around the corner too threatening. Yet the same child may be left alone for hours with a device that gives strangers, algorithms and industrial-scale psychological manipulation direct access to their developing mind.

We have created a society of high perceived danger and low actual danger in the physical world, while tolerating high actual danger and low perceived danger in the digital world. We have become frightened of the wrong things.

A Form of Child Abuse

At some point, decent adults must be prepared to say something unfashionable: knowingly exposing children to environments that damage their attention, confidence, innocence, resilience and capacity for real human connection is not merely unfortunate. In many cases, it is a form of child abuse.

Not always deliberate. Not always malicious. Often it is well-intentioned, tired, convenient or socially normalised. But abuse should be judged not only by intention. It must also be judged by effect.

A child does not become confident by being permanently protected. A child does not become resilient by being constantly reassured. A child does not become wise by being endlessly stimulated. A child does not become brave by being told every discomfort is trauma. These qualities are built slowly, in the real world, through friction, effort, risk, boredom, responsibility, minor failure, collaboration and recovery.

That requires opportunity. It is not enough to lament what screens are doing to children if we do not offer them something better. Adults must deliberately create environments where young people can test themselves safely, take responsibility, work alongside others and discover that

capability grows through effort.

This is why the outdoors matters.

The Outdoors as Formation

Children need wind, dirt, rain, heat, cold, hills, mud, animals, trees, water, tools, maps, campfires, ball games, team games and unstructured play. They need the joy of minor danger and the triumph of minor competence. They need to climb something, carry something, build something, lose a game, win a game, apologise, try again and discover that the world does not end when they are tired, uncomfortable or disappointed.

They need to learn how to use tools. They need to plant, dig, till soil, build fences, light fires safely, prepare food, navigate ground, care for animals, repair equipment and understand the rhythms of nature. In appropriate and lawful settings, under competent supervision, they may also learn the discipline that comes with activities such as hunting for supper, target shooting, archery or other controlled outdoor pursuits where safety, attention and self-command are non-negotiable.

These are not quaint hobbies. They are pathways to confidence. A young person who can split wood, cook a meal, read a map, pitch a tent, help a teammate, tend a garden or keep calm in bad weather is not merely learning a skill. He or she is learning self-trust.

Clinicians and educators are increasingly using the language of “Nature Deficit Disorder” to describe the rapid decline in wellbeing among young people deprived of meaningful contact with the natural world. Whether used as a clinical phrase, educational shorthand or cultural warning, the point is clear: children were not designed to grow up detached from the physical world, mediated almost entirely through screens.

Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, understood this deeply. He argued that young people inherently crave adventure and risk. If adults provide those things in safe, structured and purposeful environments, young people grow. If we deny them those outlets altogether, they will often seek risk elsewhere, in unsafe, uncontrolled and destructive ways.

That insight should sit at the centre of any serious conversation about youth wellbeing. The answer is not to remove risk from childhood. The answer is to restore the right kind of risk: supervised, purposeful, developmental and connected to responsibility.

Minor team games matter more than we think. A simple game outdoors teaches what no lecture can: cooperation, leadership, fairness, tactics, humility, courage, restraint and humour. It teaches children that they are part of something larger than themselves. It teaches them that other people are not merely avatars, opponents or threats. They are teammates, rivals, friends and fellow travellers.

What I Saw at Pindari

This is what struck me so deeply at the Pindari Centre with my friend Barry Rodgers OAM.

Barry is a lifelong educator and outdoor leader, a pilot, a life member of the Australian Light Horse Association, and a man who understands the formation of young people in a way our credentialed age too often forgets. Pindari is set on more than 2,000 acres beside Pindari Dam in northern New South Wales. It is a place where young people can step away from screens and comfort, reconnect with the outdoors, and learn through history, nature, service and shared adventure.

What I saw there was not complicated, and that is precisely why it was powerful. Young people were given space. They were trusted. They were challenged. They were not wrapped in cotton wool, nor were they abandoned. They were placed in an environment where they could learn by doing. They could become useful. They could become a little braver. They could discover that discomfort is survivable, responsibility is meaningful and confidence is earned.

That is a profoundly countercultural idea.

Much of modern childhood is now structured around avoiding pain rather than developing strength. But a life without appropriate challenge does not produce happy children. It produces fragile adults. It produces people who confuse disagreement with harm, effort with oppression, anxiety with incapacity and safety with comfort. It produces citizens who may know the language of rights, but not the habits of responsibility.

This is where the conversation must move from childhood to citizenship.

From Civilian to Citizen

A healthy society does not merely raise civilians. It nurtures citizens.
A civilian may live within a nation. A citizen carries responsibility for it. A civilian receives the benefits of order, prosperity and freedom. A citizen understands that those benefits are inherited, fragile and dependent upon service. A civilian asks, “What am I owed?” A citizen asks, “What must I help protect, repair and pass on?”

This is one of the reasons Israel is so instructive.

Israel is often discussed through the narrow lens of conflict, politics or military necessity. But one of its deeper civilisational strengths is the way it turns young people toward service. Not perfectly. Not without difficulty. Not without argument. But seriously. Israel understands, in a way many comfortable Western societies have forgotten, that citizenship must be formed. It does not emerge automatically from prosperity.

Military service is part of this, but it is not the whole story. Young Israelis serve in combat brigades, armoured units, infantry, artillery, intelligence, cyber, logistics, engineering, medical units, search and rescue, air defence, naval roles, education roles, training establishments, technology units, specialist formations and civil defence functions. Some serve in elite units.

Many serve in ordinary units doing necessary work.

Others contribute through national service in hospitals, schools, aged care, disability support, emergency services, youth movements, community organisations, agriculture, welfare agencies and programs supporting vulnerable citizens. Service is not only about carrying a rifle. It is about carrying responsibility.

The point is not that every society must copy Israel’s model exactly. Australia is not Israel. Our geography, history, threat environment and civic traditions are different. But we would be foolish not to study what Israel does well. It creates shared experience. It brings young people from different backgrounds into common purpose. It builds networks of trust. It teaches responsibility under pressure. It gives young adults a story larger than themselves.

Trust Cannot Be Downloaded

Out of that service come friendships, marriages, business partnerships, professional networks, start-ups, community bonds and lifelong trust. People who have served together in brigades, specialist units, hospitals, schools or national programs often emerge with a durable knowledge of one another.

They have seen each other tired, tested, afraid, competent, funny, loyal, annoying and brave. They know who can be trusted. They know who gets the job done. They know who looks after the team.

That kind of trust cannot be downloaded. It cannot be created by a corporate values statement or a school wellbeing poster. It is forged through shared effort.

This is one of the great losses in many Western societies. We have rights without rites of passage. We have comfort without formation. We have education without initiation. We have opinion without service. We have young people who are constantly told they can change the world, but too rarely given the practical disciplines by which they might first become useful in it.

A serious policy conversation should begin here.

A Policy Worth Taking Seriously

What would it look like for Australia to build a renewed culture of youth formation and service?

Not conscription in the narrow military sense. Not some bureaucratic scheme designed to produce press releases. But a serious national effort to restore confidence, competence and citizenship.

Imagine programs that combine outdoor education, first aid, surf lifesaving, bushcraft, emergency response, aged-care service, disability support, environmental repair, team sport, local history, civic education, leadership development, physical challenge and practical skills.

Imagine young Australians spending structured time away from screens, working in teams, serving communities, learning the story of the nation, meeting people outside their social bubble and discovering that responsibility is not a burden but a privilege.

Imagine if our schools and communities were brave enough to say that handwriting still matters, books still matter, teachers still matter, memory still matters, face-to-face conversation still matters, physical courage still matters, and service still matters. Imagine if we stopped outsourcing childhood to Silicon Valley and started rebuilding it in families, schools, sporting clubs, faith communities, cadet units, surf clubs, volunteer organisations, farms, workshops, camps and centres like Pindari.
This need not be partisan. It should not be ideological. It is a national project. It is about the formation of young Australians capable of inheriting freedom without squandering it.

The Moral Obstacles

The obstacles are not merely practical. They are moral.

The old language of the seven deadly sins may sound antique to modern ears, but it remains uncomfortably relevant. Pride tells us we know better than every generation before us. Sloth tells us the hard work of formation can be avoided. Greed allows technology companies to profit from children’s attention. Envy turns social media into a theatre of resentment. Wrath turns disagreement into hatred. Gluttony appears in our addiction to stimulation, consumption and comfort. Lust is now industrialised and delivered to children through devices in ways previous generations could barely have imagined.

These are not medieval curiosities. They are modern pathologies wearing new clothes.

Complacency and lethargy are particularly dangerous because they rarely announce themselves as vices. They masquerade as tolerance, sophistication, moderation or exhaustion. They tell us not to overreact. They tell us every generation worries about the young. They tell us the market will solve it, schools will manage it, parents will cope with it, government will regulate it, and somehow things will muddle through.
But civilisations do not decline only because enemies defeat them. They also decline when those entrusted with inheritance become too comfortable, too distracted or too timid to defend what made that inheritance possible.

Before Suffering Forces Our Hand

The question is whether we still possess the civic seriousness to act before suffering forces our hand.

Will we proactively adopt policies that rebuild childhood, confidence and citizenship? Or will we allow our civic values and way of life to decay to the point that we must markedly suffer before rediscovering what should never have been forgotten?

Societies often change only after they have suffered enough. That is a tragic way to learn. We should not require a generation of anxious, isolated, digitally damaged children before we admit that something has gone terribly wrong. We should not have to watch civic trust collapse before rediscovering the need for service. We should not need national humiliation before remembering national responsibility.

There is still time.

The answer is not despair. It is agency. Parents have agency. Schools have agency. Governments have agency. Communities have agency. Faith leaders, sporting clubs, veterans, educators, philanthropists and citizens all have agency.

We can restrict smartphones in schools. We can restore books and handwriting. We can rebuild outdoor education. We can fund serious youth service. We can honour teachers who form character, not merely deliver content. We can support places like the Pindari Centre. We can learn from Israel without becoming Israel. We can recover the idea that freedom requires citizens, and citizens must be formed.

The Citizen in Formation

Most importantly, we can tell young people the truth.
They are not fragile creatures to be managed by screens and protected from every discomfort. They are capable of courage, service, friendship, discipline, sacrifice and joy. They are not problems to be medicated into compliance or consumers to be captured by algorithms. They are inheritors of a civilisation, members of families, future parents, future leaders and future custodians of the common good.

Sophie Winkleman is right to warn us. Barry Rodgers is right to build something better. Israel is right to understand that service forms citizens. And we would be wise to listen, learn and act.

The task before us is not merely to take screens away. It is to give childhood back. It is to replace digital toxicity with human connection, replace fear with confidence, replace lethargy with service, replace entitlement with responsibility, and replace despair with purpose.

A society that does this can renew itself. A generation formed this way will not be perfect, but it will be stronger. It will know how to collaborate, endure, serve, build, defend and belong.

That is the optimistic truth: decline is not inevitable. Civilisational renewal remains possible. But it will not happen by accident. It will happen when adults once again decide to act like adults, when communities recover courage, and when we remember that the child in front of us is not merely someone to be entertained, protected or assessed.

That child is a citizen in formation.

And the future will be shaped by whether we have the wisdom, love and courage to form them well.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.