Students are increasingly refusing to go to school
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
We are in a constant cycle of rewarding children for saying they have a condition. It's very important to give reasonable accomodations to people who have mental issues. But when you are constantly excusing children from accountability if they say the magic words, if you are promoting a culture that celebrates self victimization, and if you frame every single decision in life as one that has no free agency, you create massive problems. You get an uneducated populace that has convinced themselves from the get go that their life is doomed to fail because of XYZ condition someone said they have.
There have been other studies where students who had to miss large amounts of school due to a natural disaster caught up within a few years and there was no measurable difference in adulthood.
That was a study done from almost a hundred years ago, its hard to imagine its exactly applicable today.
Now certainly we should find ways for kids to go to school, but hard assing it seems like a bad way. Once the kids become adults who have had little agency in their lives and an intense hatred of having been forced to go to school how is that going to turn out? Is the hope they'll look back at all the anxiety and go "You know what? that gave me character! Thanks Mom and Dad!"?
If we want an educated populace dragging children kicking and screaming through twelves grades seems like a bad plan. You need to instill a love of learning and education that continues after that point. Graduating high school should just be the beginning.
I have ADHD. It makes me so unbelievably upset when people use the fact that ADHD can bring academic problems as a get out of jail card when they have academic problems stemming from their own laziness. It makes it so much worse for people who actually have ADHD too, because they get lumped in with the group of children who don't want to do their work. That's what I mean about self-victimization - by proclaiming yourself as a victim of your circumstances, you are absolved of responsibility and consequences for your actions. Not that schools nowadays even have much of that - kids now get so much leniency with ideas like "50 is a minimum grade" that you can just move from grade to grade not having learned anything.
How do you instill a love of learning when your competition is social media and smartphones that are designed by the smartest people in the world to be appealing? You can only make so much of learning fun. At some point, you have to buckle down and actually learn the stuff. You can't always make learning something that you love and want to do. Sometimes you just gotta know how to do algebra, and schools can't make algebra preferable to TikTok in a classroom. It's just not possible. And maybe children need to learn they can't always do what appeals to them in the immediate.
It’s important for students to stop using avoidance as a coping strategy before it becomes their primary way of dealing with problems for the rest for their lives, Dalton said.
“I don’t treat anxiety. I don’t have to treat anxiety because anxiety is temporary and harmless,” Dalton said. “What I treat is avoidance, and avoidance ruin lives.”
In other words, the experts recommend hard-assing it.
I’m not trying to comment on your anxiety diagnosis, even though the “expert” from the article apparently thinks it’s BS. I’ve known people with similar, persistent problems, and disagree with the expert.
However, I suspect there are other, non-mental illness related reasons for the uptick. Schools in parts of US have gotten a lot worse in the last few decades (especially in California), and are often run like prisons, complete with arrests civil rights violations for the poor or minority kids and shooting incidents.
If school administrators admit that, they get in trouble. However, if they say “20% of our kids have made up mental illness du jour,” then they receive additional funding.
One thing that really pisses me off about our local schools is that they’ve replaced enrichment programs with behavioral remediation programs. The latter hand out prizes for misbehaving less, so the smart kids do their best to get into remedial class.
In the past, the enrichment programs were the things to game if you wanted fun stuff to do during the day.
Has probably been uttered by majority of school age kid once in their life.
It's not something new.
Kids are kids, they play by testing limits. How high they can jump, how fast they can run, how much lie they can get away with.
As a smash double album featuring hit singles such as "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Comfortably Numb", and "Run Like Hell".
We mostly went into the woods and smoked pot, fooled around with our boyfriends and girlfriends, and went for fast food burgers.
I barely graduated high school, but went on to get a BS in electrical engineering and managed to have a reasonably productive life.
Modern kids are under a constant microscope. No wonder they're anxious. Although it's 1/2 their own fault for the amount of time they spend lost in their own minds (people call it "on the phone", but it's really just an electronically enhanced form of "lost in inner space"). The other 1/2 is their parents, who are stiflingly overberaring.
When we walked out of the house, no one knew where the hell we went. The effect of loosing this sense of individual freedom is MASSIVELY underappreciated...
Maybe they do. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/41319.John_Taylor_Gatt...
To me the article reads like we're witnessing an evolution in biology, but instead of exploring the new nature of this offspring, we insist on using the previous generation's standards to measure this new branch.
We may not know exactly what it is they need, but their biology is clearly telling us that this is not it (you can measure hormonal levels if you dont actually believe what the kid is saying).
Back in the 1980's in the U.S., I found junior high (grades 7-8) pretty unpleasant, but I really enjoyed high school (grades 9-12).
Please share something, as it's not clear at all for those non-US citizens.
Every school district is different. At the federal level, there aren't that many rules that apply across the entire US. Each state has their own rules on top of those. You've no doubt seen on the news that places like Florida and Texas are exerting a lot more control over the schools in within their states. Others are far more laissez-faire and leave many decisions to the local population.
I'm in the Chicago metro, in Illinois. By default, the school systems are based on the townships created by the original land surveys done after the American revolution. The school systems are independent governments that levy taxes and do not answer to the towns and cities whose boundaries overlap them. If a city grows large enough, it is allowed (but not required) to take over the school system and make it part of the city government, meaning that the city government now dictates many aspects of how the schools are run. Chicago (and many of its larger suburbs) have done this. My own school district is a variation on that; it is a consolidation of multiple parts of multiple townships, but still mostly independent of the city.
We, the voters, exert control over how the district runs. And ours is very sympathetic to anxiety issues in children. It is an excused absence to keep your child home for a "mental health day" if they need it. Kids can go to school half-time if that is better. Want to home-school your kid and just send them to science or math class? Perfectly fine. Band, orchestra, sports teams? Sure, no problem. Break up with your boyfriend or are on the outs with your group of friends and it's just too embarrassing to eat lunch all alone? We have special rooms for when that happens.
But our district is very well-funded and has outstanding academics. We've got a lot of freedom to try almost anything.
This doesn't mean that every kid had these problems, and the article says as much, but for those who were already having a hard time I can see their conditions being further exacerbated by the constant noise now.
So it’s not going to be any one thing but rather a consequence of our culture of devaluing intelligence and learning coupled with how severely under-resourced our schools are.
In my opinion, it's just the "human condition". Like adults, kids want to take the least path of resistance. Since learning is difficult for some/most of us, avoiding school is the easiest path since it requires real effort. This is why parental guidance is so important for young people. Sure, some cities experience violence, some schools have odd teaching mandates, etc, but all-in-all, it's the daily grind that kids want to avoid (just like adults!). Not to mention the pressure from social media.
I really think we have different ideas of school based upon our own experiences in it.
I had to wake up at 6am and get driven on a noisy school bus for >1hr into the countryside to go to my Catholic public school here in Canada for years. It’s normal for kids to dread that sort of commitment. Looking back though I realized my school life was much nicer and had better teachers than the awful stuff I’ve heard from my nieces/nephews today, so maybe it was worth driving for an hour instead of staying local. Not all school life is equal.
You can read more about the dark side of the system here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_of_Schooling especially the 100 bad habits learned at school
To be crystal clear: it implies an active school shooting is underway.
- compulsory
- segregated by age
- passive lecturing
- strict rules and deference to authority
- standardized, inflexible curriculum
[1] https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/john_gatto.html
Education is one of the easiest things for politicians to "save money" by cutting budgets and the consequences usually take 15-20 years to appear, at which time the responsible politicians are long gone and can't be held accountable.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/investitionsruecksta...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
Whatever complaints we may have about the U.S. education system, they cannot be explained by a lack of funding.
Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess
I played football. I wasn't getting invited to big parties, but nobody bugged me. Even guys who were never good enough to be first string as seniors - they were part of the team. But that might just have been my school. It was pretty good about letting the drama kids be drama kids, the nerds be nerds, etc. People generally found their niche. Maybe it wasn't the one they wished they could have, but it was a place where you were accepted, and they mostly left each other alone.
If you had purely intellectual interests, or physical issues in general you quite likely would not have had the same experience.
It's not about niche finding so much as it's about social blending and masking.
The most "pure intellectual" people in my class ended up editing the school paper and being in student government. They might have been made fun of, especially behind their backs, but nobody ever really tore them up.
Like I said, it was a place where you could find your niche and live in it. Not perfect, and if you wanted to have a conflict, you could. But mostly, that didn't happen.
Maybe we should distinguish between these categories. Because there does appear to be a relatively new phenomenon -- the never-employed adult. They're not unemployed like some of us are sometimes unemployed. Nor are they disabled. They don't want a job. In Canada, almost 70% of unemployed and not in training 25 - 29 year olds, say they're unemployed because they don't want a job [1].
Speculating here but I would bet lot of them are formerly school-avoidant. They've failed to form typical social attachments, or get positive rewards for the usual efforts. And so they've checked out of society. A lot of them are basically hikikomori [2], dependent on social assistance and ongoing parental support, living at home, rarely going outside. Unsurprisingly, the hikikomori phenomenon is starting to be recognized as a thing not unique to Japan.
In the USA sometimes they're referred to as the disconnected youth. [3]
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2018013...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
[3] https://www.ssrc.org/programs/measure-of-america/youth-disco...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew
If I had kids of my own I think I would encourage them to skip the last years of high school and just get an online degree if they didn't enjoy themselves. Maybe look into taking community college courses instead after getting a GED. There are so many better options now.
Sure, treat their anxiety and help when you can, but I'll never let my hypothetical child skip one day of school because of emotional issues, and I'm glad my parents never let me do the same...I'ma jack you up and drop at the school gate then come get you when school is over.
> The point of out-of-school learning is to overcome learning disabilities, development of talents, strengthen communities and increase interest in education by creating extra learning opportunities in the real world.
> Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world.
How would you see them if they're not there?
I didn't mean to say people don't skip school here, I meant they don't skip because of anxiety...It's usually poverty-related issues or the parents just not caring because they aren't formally educated. For instance, I personally know a couple whose kids don't attend school despite being registered, and they don't care, but there's nothing I can do about it.
Kids skipping school for anxiety feels like a subset of kids skipping school for an unknown reason.
Over-pampering parents that don't care seems worse than any any over-pampering of kids having issues
I'm fucking thrilled that most American schoolkids feel comfortable enough in their lives that anxiety over things like shootings and bullying and slander and hatred can come through and be acknowledged.
School aged children have just gone through a once-in-a-100-year pandemic that absolutely _wrecked_ social lives and completely upended the schooling system. That, and there's growing evidence of neurologic impact from tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease that have _doubled_ in the last 20 years. We're still also figuring out what impact pervasive social media is having on kids.
To be clear, none of these are the fault of the children. Each one is outside of their control. Blaming them is doing them a disservice and deflecting the responsibility of the remainder of civilization to provide them a world in which they can flourish.
Maybe instead of asking what's wrong with these kids that they don't want to go to school, ask what's wrong with the schools that kids don't want to go.
Sure, school isn't perfect and has its issues, but kids skipping school is a big problem.
To be more specific... read books. Get a job (maybe a standard job if 16, maybe mowing lawns if 13, whatever). Spend a day at the local museum. Hang out with your friends at the park fighting each other with sticks. Write a story. Build a table. Voluntarily take classes in things that are actually interesting and useful, and instead of caring about grades see if you can apply/expand on the knowledge. Build a fort in the woods. Learn to sew. I could go on, but I feel like you get the point.
Early education is basically day care so I can see it making sense for kids that need supervision and don't have basic skills yet (literacy, skepticism). But a well-adjusted ~13 year old should have stuff to do that's way more important than school.
"Falling behind on the education system" is a product of the current system, not an end in itself. I don't want to make adults that know how to sit still and tolerate the system, I want to live with people who are actively engaged with the world.
A reasonable criticism of this is that very disruptive or malicious kids might get away with more BS. The school system as it currently is doesn't prevent bullying, but some of the current "enforcement power" would definitely have to deal with kids that abuse it.
a) I think current schooling causes a good portion of the lack of motivation
b) Most kids not caring about memorizing information about Sumer or Freud seems like a feature and not a bug [Caveat that a couple things like literacy, civics, and basic math need to stay universal.]
c) I think most of highschool's value is currently sheepskin effect anyway
I don't disagree that this wouldn't work for everyone. Some kids do need the structure and routine. I just am not convinced what we have right now should be the standard that's incredibly difficult for kids to opt-out of.
> Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance.
That's not a "condition" and shouldn't be de facto medicalized. Treat anxiety when it doesn't match reality, sure, but there are plenty of perfectly logical reasons for students to resist school as it currently exists.
As far as I can tell, fear of being shot is not the primary factor why students don't want to go to school. The article, for example, doesn't mention global warming / climate change (our planet burning) or AI (possible humanity ending). How incentivized would you be to spend your youth working hard for a future that might not exist?
And the idea of having to account for "high crime areas" as if it is a normal thing for a subset of the population to be dealing with guns on a regular basis in schools is a very American attitude.
What does this mean? Kids in high crime areas are still kids, you still have to count them when they get shot.
The harm of a school shooting is certainly not contained to the specific individuals who got shot either, which if one of these has happened near you you know. Everyone at that school and to some extent the entire city is affected socially and psychologically. They are a particularly powerful terrorism for this reason.
From what I understand, the Japanese K-12 system makes the US system look like Disneyland.
They do have kids out of high school that are quite good with STEM stuff, but I have heard that bullying is a big problem.
As I am a bit "on the spectrum," my grade school years were absolutely awful. I suspect a lot of folks here can relate, but we have a way of attracting bullies that seems innate. It's crazy.
I did enjoy tech school, though, and have done fairly well in the working world.
I hate to use this word, but I feel like kids today are increasingly coddled, and it leaves them dangerously unprepared for the hyper competitive world they will face as adults.
>“It was almost like a revelation,” she told USA TODAY.
The psychiatrist basically repeated back the description of the son's behavior and called it a diagnosis (and charged money).
IMO the name makes it seem _too much_ like a proper disorder, since the kids' actions are somewhat reasonable. If I could've gotten shot at school or had to deal with as much BS as they did, I might have not gone either. I skipped a large amount of my last year regardless since I had turned 18 and could excuse myself. Not anxiousness -- kids just don't like school.
> "There's no book on this, it's not spoken about," said Demsky, whose son declined to be interviewed by USA TODAY but gave his mother permission to share their story. "It's very scary and parents feel a sense of helplessness."
As an old guy I have to say the entire way this is being discussed is completely baffling.
I guess in the 90's when me and my friends didn't feel like going to school we were part of a pioneering trend or something. I should have written a book. Instead people got mad at me and told me to stop skipping school. They couldn't see I was a visionary at the time I guess.
America keeps getting weirder.
Knowing the parents, I am sure they tried to make him tough it out at first. I suppose you eventually go for psychiatry because the usual parenting strategies don't work.
On every discussion of mental health, there seems to be one side that says "I recognize that in myself..." and another that says, "This is not a disorder". Whether it's about laziness vs executive dysfunction, social anxiety vs. awkwardness, autism spectrum vs. weirdness, depression vs saddness, or anxiety vs discomfort. Most mental health disorders are not trivial, and do not have easy solutions. While I don't doubt that some people want to become the authority on a new disease they discovered and name, I think most of the time the profession is actually trying to help people.
Guided by key 20th century American[0] and British[1] thought leaders we were developing and refining these theories of "immutable necessity" in suburban cars and convenience store parking lots on a regular basis.
We're also increasingly letting clueless adults run things (see all the adults who are banning books or worried that there are litter boxes in bathrooms).
It's been a huge success for her; she's gone from a D average to an A average, thanks to being able to review the video material repeatedly until it makes sense. And she still socializes with her friends, both in person and online.
What it did is take her away from the bullying and hatred for anything different that public schools are rife with.
> where she can't look up the answers on the internet
It prioritizes understanding and not memorization.
As an aside, it's always fun to read sentiments like this on an internet forum dedicated to a profession that prides itself on their googling skills.
Except this isn't about advanced physics, it's about basic education that children should know to exist as functioning human beings. You are putting way too much trust in a child to not do what they are being incentivized to do - cheat and get an A while putting in no effort.
Already being done in other countries: https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-...
We mostly went into the woods and smoked pot, fooled around with our boyfriends and girlfriends, and went for fast food burgers.
I barely graduated high school, but went on to get a BS in electrical engineering and managed to have a reasonably productive life.
Modern kids are under a constant microscope. No wonder they're anxious. Although it's 1/2 their own fault for the amount of time they spend lost in their own minds (people call it "on the phone", but it's really just an electronically enhanced form of "lost in inner space"). The other 1/2 is their parents, who are stiflingly overberaring.
When we walked out of the house, no one knew where the hell we went. The effect of loosing this sense of individual freedom is MASSIVELY underappreciated...
I can totally see not wanting to go to school because of this. Students saying, "I learn more on my computer at home, why would I go to school where I'm taught to hate everyone and myself."
Prison is better.
How or why would police be deployed? Is it a crime (for child or parent) if the child skips a lot of school?
First, this reminds me of this essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Especially the second half of it, where he talks about all the things wrong with the current school system.
Second, I think the problem is bigger than school. Also seeing massive discussion on HN today: "Americans Have Never Been So Unwilling to Relocate for a New Job", "U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs", and "The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007". The US is having some kind of a crisis in terms of some of the fundamental things that hold a society together. (Though, arguably, being willing to move for work is not one of those things.)
America is actually having those issues. HN has talked about most of them before. But seeing them all together on HN today feels almost like an orchestrated campaign of "Hey, America, you should feel bad about yourself". It makes me wonder if someone is running this somehow.
It's actually worse than this, students have a much easier time learning to program, which they have mostly never done before, than to perform even the simplest identical reasoning in the context of mathematics.
I am forced to come to the conclusion that school is so bad that it is harmful to education. This strikes me as something to consider before worrying about whether children are attending.
This is, I am assured, the basic right wing agenda coming to fruition. Make (public) schools so bad that people start thinking of them as a waste of money, but the actual work that has gone into making them terrible has been bipartisan.
Bad teachers need to be able to be fired, and schools need to compete for enrollment, rather than some secondary measure of performance.
let them drop out
they'll eventually realize, most white-collar work is now not even an aspiration for them
but then they get the extra bonus of realizing that in the US, many jobs are performed by undocumented immigrants who exist at or often even below minimum wage...this is where you end up when you have three weeks of high school completed
the children of engineers and doctors will be ditch diggers
eventually the sprout a grey hair and they can no longer claim the pity often granted to the young...they are just aging manual labor