Why the UK and France are bringing Adolescence into classrooms

Euronews

21 hours ago

This week, the French government followed its UK counterpart by deciding to show schoolchildren 'Adolescence' - the gritty British crime drama about a 13-year-old accused of killing his classmate. The move comes in the wake of an alarming rise in violence in French schools as the scourge of knife crime spreads.
There's also growing concern in both countries about the amount of time teenagers are spending on social media, in particular the sites being widely blamed for encouraging sexism and misogyny - and how that is affecting society and young people's behaviour.
In this week's episode, we break down reactions to Adolescence and discuss other shows and films that have tackled the negative effects of social media.
A group of artists have begun an experiment in the southern French countryside that could redefine the meaning of creative collaborations.
The aim of the project is for researchers to study how the artists work without any links to the outside world, no natural light and no real-time information.
Over the next two weeks, the members of Deep Time II will work dozens of metres underground in the Lombrives cave at Ussat-les- Bains to make diverse works. Unfinished projects must be completed outside within two months to be ready for an exhibition that's open to the public.
It's the second such test of this type. Four years ago, a group of eight men and seven women volunteered to spend 40 days in confinement in a dark, damp and vast cave in the Pyrenees. They had no clocks, no sunlight and no contact with the world above.
Scientists at the Human Adaption Institute leading the project say the experiment will help them better understand how people adapt to dramatic and drastic changes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the organisers, our relationship with time has become one of the world's biggest concerns as many struggle with doomscrolling. We're faced with more devices and screens vying for our attention and offering us all non-stop content for our eyeballs and minds. More than 80 per cent of people believe that "time passes too quickly" and "that they don't have enough time".
During the previous experiment, speaking from underground project director Christian Clot said: 'It's really interesting to observe how this group synchronizes themselves,'
In partnership with labs in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15-member group's sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioral reactions via sensors. One of the sensors was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. The capsules measured body temperature and transmitted data to a portable computer until they were expelled naturally.
Although the participants looked visibly tired, two-thirds of them expressed a desire to remain underground a bit longer in order to finish group projects started during the expedition, Benoit Mauvieux, a chronobiologist involved in the research, told The Associated Press.