if we shut down all these schools and sold/converted them into AI training click farms, those kids could get skills training and earn a wage!
so-long ADHD, hello pre-professional development for kids!
MMO gold farming for the youth
After reading it: by “schools” they mean decades of policies like standardised testing that put students under evermore pressure. Most of the article lays out pretty well how the pressure on students and even pre-K has increased dramatically since the 80’s, but then there’s bits where their fence-sitting and “just asking questions” gets really annoying.
The overall conclusion is that school needs to lessen the burden and rediscover “learn through play” so students don’t hate school anymore, and then just bemoaning all the interest groups that get in each other’s way
I fully think school can’t be saved until we decide that 1) Kids need more than one adult in the classroom, and 2) school needs to be longer than it is now. The fights are so often “well if we do THAT what will we cut”. Kids need recess and PE everyday, plus probably another indoor free time as well. School has more reason to be 8-5 than jobs do, and yet elementary school kids her get out at like 1. (In this world there is also much less homework, imo)
) Kids need more than one adult in the classroom,
or the class size needs to be less than 10
Even then, if you want teachers to be able to use the bathroom they need another body for kids under 10.
A school system designed to prepare the proletariat for 8 hours of mind numbing assembly line labor per day that mainly emphasizes sitting still and following directions combined with a culture of increasingly intrusive screens, overparenting, reduced unsupervised socialization opportunities, and generally low childhood autonomy is producing children that have apparent difficulties with self-regulation?
There’s a lot of problems, but I’ve always thought that the way we run schools is definitely one of them.
Standardized testing, for example. When I was in school the only ones to worry about were the SAT/ACT and you didn’t do those until late in high school. Now there’s like a hundred of them and kids are doing them all the time.
But that and the other problems with schools don’t come from the schools themselves. They come from outside forces - testing companies looking to make money from government contracts, politicians looking for some number that they can make go up so they can say they fixed the schools, etc.
The real fix is to give teachers control over their own damn profession. They’re the ones doing the work and who know the kids, just give them what they need and let them cook. No not every teacher is good but relaxing everything and making it more flexible has got to be an improvement over what we’re doing now, turning up the pressure and then wondering why so many kids have anxiety issues.
It’s almost like they wanted school to run like a factory, the product of the education pipeline becoming a cog in the machine, stratified by both wealth and ability.
I mean schools are definitely part of the problem because they reflect the society’s implicit and explicit beliefs about children, learning, and “human capital”
Schools are indeed part of the problem, but their failures are a symptom rather than a primary cause. Schools are contributing to the mental health crisis because they are relentlessly cut-throat, often boring, and chronically understaffed for all the functions they end up having to fulfill. All those problems are a consequence of the way capitalism has hollowed out the social institution of education rather than any intrinsic problem with schools.
i dont know who decides these things in the US because it’s so weird and fragmented, so i dont know who to blame, but when i went to an american school in suburban NJ in 1998, in a small town where property taxes were slightly higher and therefore paid for 1) supposedly better schools and 2) maintenance of trees on the streets.
it also only had one road in and one road out, often with a cop sitting in a car watching the entrance, so while it wasnt a gated community, i’ve often thought that it must’ve been on the spectrum.
at any rate, the school was absolutely fucking inhumane compared to any school i’ve ever gone to in hungary. the curriculum was shit, the homework was super repetitive, and we had 8 44minute periods in a day (one of them being lunch), with 3 minute breaks between them. baaarely enough to rush to the toilets and then your next class. you also didnt have an actual class, a group you stayed with, the whole yearful of students were reassembled into new groups for each subject.
and anyway, 8 periods is absurd, what the fuck. 3 minute breaks? i think the shortest we had in hungary were the 10 minute breaks. and like, period 7 was rare and reeeeeallly stretching it, and period 8 (if it ever turned up, i certainly never went to anything like that) was for like extra higher level tutoring or school club shit you could optionally do.
i dont know how this compares to american education in other places and times, but it was fucking grim, lemme tell you. and it’s not like the hungarian education system is a gem.
over 25 years ago, i was in high school in the US. we had something like 12 minutes between classes, which was referred to as a “break”.
then one day two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria and there were so many students watching the armed police who are permanently stationed on campus felt unsafe. administration rang the bell early and all the administrators, janitors, others were suddenly on radios and bullhorns announcing break was over, handing out detentions for anyone not quickly jumping up to their next class, and i remember seeing an additional police officer riding his motorcycle aggressively INDOORS through a hallway to push students through.
after that, it was announced that we had lost the privilege of “break” indefinitely and only had 4 minutes between classes.
a year later they put up barbed wire fencing around the entire school and added metal detectors.
the “fight” involved no weapons of any kind. it was simply the armed pigs seeing a number of young people in one area well exceeding the number of rounds they were carrying.
schools in the US are prisons. they take away “privileges” and lockdown more and more every year. for “safety”.
meanwhile one of my favorite stories from high school in hungary was simply going home for “empty” periods (a friend and i could skip english class because we’d done the certificate for english). it was easy since i lived a few stops away by tram, and then we could maybe watch a family guy episode and go back. and it was better than hanging around school.
so one day the vice principal caught wind of this and decided to stand on ceremony, so when we tried to go back to school for our final class after the empty period, we were denied entrance by the doorkeeper type person. which struck me as absurd. teenagers wanting to go into a school for music class of all things (a subject that “didnt matter”) and being denied.
anyway, one of the gym teachers came along, heard us out and let us in because she too saw that this was absurd.
after that, they instituted a policy of you cant go out during the day, because blah blah legally responsible for you blah.
so we naturally climbed out the back.
schools in the US are prisons.
r/teachers gets really mad when you make this point lol
It has proven to be very controversial anytime I bring up my opinion that teenagers are one of the most oppressed groups in
The existence of the troubled teen industry should’ve erased any doubts about that.
Schools are probably the last thing I’d blame.
Well, I’ll at least blame them for forcibly infecting kids with COVID over and over again without lifting a finger to reduce airborne transmission
There are definitely some reasonable arguments in the article, including a few grim data points:
In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.
Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.
However, the fact that it barely mentions alternative hypotheses outside of two handwavy paragraphs (one of which is paraphrasing RFK’s plan) is absurd. I mean, look at this:
Some parents may see children who simply need to toughen up. The world that awaits is not easy either. What they may not realize is how much children have begun to see school as an endless chore to be endured — the means to some promised end on the other side of childhood. This makes it only harder for them to learn the very skills they need most as adults.
Anxiety and depression seem inevitable when school is a field in a game for economic survival, played by children hoping to secure enough stability to last the rest of their lives. In a 2020 paper, Yale researchers found that nearly 80 percent of high schoolers said they were stressed; almost 70 percent reported being bored.
Sounds to me like the problem is the economic system which molds the schools to become worse and puts ever more pressure on the students, but you won’t find any harsh words about capitalism in this article. The dynamic would be pretty different in a world where both jobs and basic necessities of life were guaranteed. And that’s to say nothing of the stress of imagining a future when the world is careening into fascism and climate disaster as people struggle to put food on the table. Even if the schools were better, how can you expect most children to be optimistic when staring down the barrel of that gun?
Also, at the very beginning of the article it drops this statistic without any qualifications or further explanation:
The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.
Wow, it’s almost like we’ve learned more about autism and also have more screening in place so that more people can get diagnosed! It’d be laughable that a statistical argument which wouldn’t pass muster in a high school class could make it past editing if this weren’t in the paper of record and people didn’t take it seriously.
edit: almost forgot the casual anti-union snipe at the end, which appears in an incomplete sentence because editing is dead:
The chief defender of that project, the Democratic Party, is ill-suited to addressing this crisis. Not only must it navigate teachers unions who may be skeptical of still more grandiose ideas on how to fix schools. The party has also become the political home of the meritocratic elite, the people perhaps least likely to see flaws in the system that crowned them as winners.
Well, I’ll at least blame them for forcibly infecting kids with COVID over and over again without lifting a finger to reduce airborne transmission
i find it harder to blame the schools for that instead of the overall government that could have but did not stop covid from becoming an endemic constantly transmitting nightmare
I’m confused. Shouldn’t their LLM have caught that sentence fragment?
then you either forgot what it was like or had an incredibly outlier experience
Implication of the article is that this is a new development, right? I think schools have probably changed less than most other things in children’s lives.
Could be wrong. I went to school before smartphones existed, but that seems like a huge change.
guarantee we were undercounting mental health problems. i and most of my cohort weren’t tested for shit unless you had disruptive behavioral problems or had failing grades. second or third order effects from social media are new problems of course.
blaming the school is like blaming the gun itself for having been manufactured.
One of the silver linings of the Internet is the creation of communities for neuroatypical folks to learn more about their experiences and maybe to self identify. This might be a good thing in the sense that these issues were always present but now we have destigmatized to some extent and made diagnosis easier. I don’t think more kids have ADHD (though maybe they do, who knows?) but either way diagnosis is unquestionably a good thing
