What's Happening to Students?

A frustrated teacher recently took to social media with a desperate warning:

You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….

First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.

When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….

They’re not there.

And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

They just care about the next fix—because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.

How bad is it for educators right now?

Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:

I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021….I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn't comprehended the material before, but hadn't faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn't care….

Since 2021 I've been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn't performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.

I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.

I’ve made a similar claim in this article—where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.

Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing—and at an accelerated pace.

Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis—and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists—shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.

This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.

Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things. (...)

I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Parents, for example, have no doubts about the danger—because they see it happening right before their eyes.

But let’s give tech companies some credit. They have improved one skill among current students—cheating, which has now reached epic proportions.

The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Common Sense

[ed. See also: Why ‘Adolescence’ Is Sparking Conversations About Incel Dread Online (RS). On Netflix. The second episode on 'school' is pretty depressing.]