The Kids Are Not Alright
*This was originally posted to my social media before I relaunched the blog, back on 3/26*
Why are our kids struggling so much? Why does it seem harder to connect with them or shake them free from apathy or perceived “laziness?”
It’s true our kids don't know much of anything about the world in general, and their brains are not developed, so there is a lot they can’t do. But there is also a lot they can do, and even more that they can perceive.
They can strongly perceive when teachers are mailing it in and don’t care. They talk about it when they feel like they aren’t learning anything or when their teachers have no passion. They perceive strongly that the resources to seriously care for their mental health is lacking. They can feel isolated socially, and that part is nothing new. But when adults are unwilling or unable to be empathetic and to meet them where they are, it’s “another brick in the wall,” one that furthers their isolation. The accessibility of social media, particularly Tik Tok and other reel-oriented platforms play a big role in our problems, but we’ll return to that later.
Public schools have always been somewhat of a dumping ground for the large scale failings of the broader society. When economic, religious, social, or family crises cause huge problems for kids, educators and public school personnel are left to deal with the fallout. Problems we cannot fix or even address in many cases are the very problems that are driving educational struggle. We have a society where consumer-based capitalism has a vice grip on the society, and the educational system more or less turns out obedient, passive people, or at least filters those types of people to the top.
Serious questions about the broader structure of the society are rare, despite the fact that true education should be dealing with those questions almost exclusively. Kids that sense the banality or insufficiency of the current systems often act out and end up as chronic behavior problems. We of course have to properly deal with bad behavior, especially when said behavior negatively impacts others. But really it’s just a band aid. It doesn’t solve anything, and perpetuates a way of thinking where root problems are not even remotely dealt with, and to the degree that they are, people try they usually get it wrong.
In the United States, where schools usually suffer from insufficient resourcing, staffing, pay and training, schools are in particularly dire straits. As economic stagnation, broken down family units, the relentless assault on our minds by corporate media, various fundamentalisms, and meaningless fashionable consumption have mounted, the problems have all gotten worse. Stack Covid 19 on top of that and now you have kids that live reel-to-reel on Tik Tok, feel disconnected socially and from each other, from teachers and mentors, and from general meaning.
It’s quite common for teachers and educational personnel to blame smartphones and social media for “ruining” our kids, and there is obviously real truth in that. There is a lot to be learned from what neuroscientists can tell us about the neurochemistry of compulsive social media use, particularly in teens. Just like TV ads know how to catch our eyes, social media platforms know how to manipulate you into particular behaviors. Thoughtful adults can avoid the worst pitfalls, though we’re all guilty at times. But underdeveloped teen brains are more easily manipulated, particularly when they don’t know what is happening.
And what is happening is that social media makes money by selling us, our very eyeballs, to advertisers. And again, we live in a society where profit is king, so the more teen minds they destroy, the more eyeballs they have to sell. They use algorithms to manipulate a kid's behavior into meaningless, endless scrolling. It likewise decreases emphasis on physically or mentally difficult tasks, which is why we see so much struggling in athletics; we are trying to activate mental and physical toughness and resilience, which are not qualities a kid can acquire by becoming a slave to screen time.
Well, how does this fit into the bigger picture? Kids spend their time on meaningless things, they find other forms of media or other modes of communication or text to be cumbersome and unstimulating, which contributes to their less critical nature, which is not currently being broadly activated in the educational system. The manner in which public schools could combat this is to provide teachers with great resources, support, resources, and training. We get some of that. Not nearly enough.
Another complicating factor is that teachers themselves are products of this society and this system. We are not superhuman beings. We are subject to the same sort of filtering, the conditioning for obedience and survival to the next phase. Corporate domination of the media and the ideological spectrum constrains a lot of our ability to view things clearly, but I’ll leave that aside.
So, against this whirlwind of problems, what can we do? Can we fix an underfunded school system that many governments are actively trying to destroy, including in our own state? Can we rethink curriculum and standards so that critical thought, analysis, problem solving, and improvement of our communities and the world are the benchmarks rather than absurd high stakes standardized testing? Can we start a movement that effectively raises awareness about what mindless consumerism and social media addiction does to people?
Not to a substantial degree in the short term, sadly. Especially when we consider that the very existence of public education is under attack by extreme forces. One cannot redesign the interior of their home if the house itself burns down; we have to first preserve the structure.
In our own classrooms, tending our own garden so to speak, we can and should do a few things right now in the faces of these challenges:
1) Find a way to balance high standards and empathy
2) Don’t lean on taking dozens of grades; lean on cultivating critical thought
3) Check in on your kids’ emotional well-being
4) Encourage them to be active citizens, to demand better from the institutions around them; to see that they we are all fellow travelers to the grave, and can improve the world we live in
In my estimation, if these tendencies were to spread, a lot of positive change would follow it. I’m still figuring this stuff out, and I make mistakes and make bad decisions as a teacher on a weekly basis. But we have to start somewhere.
Furthermore, nobody should mistake this as a recommendation for coddling. Loving on kids and pushing them to be mentally resilient are not mutually exclusive, as number 1 above indicates. It’s a broken world, and kids have to have loving people modeling and mentoring them into pushing forward in bad circumstances. But neither can we make emotional trauma any more taboo. Quite the contrary. We need to be vulnerable and honest with our kids, let them know that their feelings and struggles are real. Then we coach them through it.
