Kate Emery: Why I think it’s bulls..t kids are learning more from TikTok than from school

The video starts with a young man standing in front of a whiteboard. Unlike most TikToks, there’s no music or dancing, just an English guy in a jumper that belongs on Chris Evans in Knives Out.

“Alright dickheads, I’m going to show you how to nail a tiny part of the A Levels syllabus now,” he says. “A little f...ed up thing we call implicit differentiation.”

What follows is a good — if sweary — explanation of implicit differentiation, a maths technique that lets you to find the derivative of ... look, if you’re interested, check out @thefxckingmathstutor on TikTok, with his half a million followers and five million likes.

Comments on the video include: “You are better than all my maths teachers combined” and “not gonna lie, this actually helps”.

Educational TikTok is big. Get your algorithm right and, in five minutes, you can learn an easy way to calculate percentages, set to Heat Waves by Glass Animals; get a long division hack while listening to Love You So by The King Khan & BBQ Show and receive decent accounting advice from some guy who’s really into accounting (but not music, apparently).

So maybe it’s not a huge surprise to hear of a UK survey that found one in three kids thinks they learn more from TikTok than school.

On the face of it this is bleak. It’s also a bit, at the risk of sounding like the sweary maths guy, bulls..t.

Not the survey of 1000 kids aged five to 16-year-olds, which found what it found. And I don’t doubt the children believed they learnt more from TikTok than school.

But the reality is that kids learn more at school than the “three Rs”. School teaches kids to listen, wait their turn, make friends, share and speak in front of others. TikTok can teach many things, but not how to talk out of your arse when a teacher asks you questions about homework you have not completed.

Also, it’s worth noting that survey wasn’t all bad. A fifth of those surveyed said they assumed what they saw on TikTok was correct, meaning four-fifths didn’t. That’s not bad, given the number of adult cookers who seem to believe everything they see online, even if what they see is that the world is being run by lizard people and noughties popstar Avril Lavigne has been replaced by a clone (I know what you’re thinking and the answer is I have no idea).

More worrying than what the survey found was that it showed kids as young as five were on TikTok. It also coincided with a warning from US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that 13 — the supposed minimum age for many social media sites — was too young.

“I . . . believe that 13 is too early,” he said. “It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships, and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children.”

As an adult I know social media is rotting my brain, but I accept that declining cognition is the price I pay to watch furious people argue with strangers like they’re discussing the Holocaust and not a movie one of them didn’t like.

But kids, with their squidgy brains, need protection as they continue to grow.

They’re also less emotionally equipped to deal with the dark side of social media, which is less maths nerd with nice accents and more bored bullies with keyboards.

Parents who let their kids access social media from a very young age — and we all know them — under the mistaken belief that it’ll happen one day so what’s the difference, are doing them a disservice.

Delaying the age at which kids start on social media is a bit like delaying the age at which they start drinking alcohol. Most kids will probably be on TikTok or enjoy a beer one day but, in both cases, making them wait for it has benefits for their health (and means fewer embarrassing selfies in both cases).

Parents who don’t teach their kids how to use social media are failing just as badly as those who let their five-year-old on TikTok.

Consider social media like the WA outback: beautiful and fun, but also full of potential dangers. If your child was going hiking in the outback you wouldn’t chuck them out the back of the 4WD and hope they made it back. I hope.

You’d give them tools — water! a map! — to survive.

No kid of any age should be chucked into the social media soup without tools — critical thinking! strategies to deal with bullies! — to survive and the equivalent of whatever an EPIRB would be in this tortured analogy for when they inevitably find themselves hopelessly lost.