Americans do schooling wrong, and kids have to worry about getting shot on top of being overworked. I wouldn’t feel incentivized to go to school either.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.