Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

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SketchySeaBeast

I'm wondering how you draw the distinction between saying that children having disorders means they have no agency and that's bad, but also saying you shouldn't give children agency to make choices. Personally, when I was finally diagnosed with anxiety as an adult it was an opportunity for me to collect the tools required to better myself, it wasn't a way to absolve myself of my responsibilities or "self victimize".

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.

Children have lots of agency to make choices in the school system. They are constantly given the choice to do their work and listen to their teachers, or to be someone who is lazy and doesn't learn anything at all. We have completely destroyed the punishment for being lazy and uninterested, so naturally children will take the path of least resistance.

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.

From the article:

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.

I think a psychologist treating avoidance is a very different thing than forcing someone to go. As I said, I don't think kids shouldn't go to school, but I think you get more flies with psychiatric honey than vinegar.

"Mom I'm not feeling well, can I stay home today?

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.

The whole "parents feel helpless" theme is so weird. When I was a kid in the '80s and didn't want to go to school, my dad plopped me in the car and brought me to school himself. We do the same thing with our kid today. The idea that she can just stay home if she doesn't want to go sounds ridiculous. And calling the police to bring her?? Another poster here put it well: "America is getting weird."

> 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?

As a smash double album featuring hit singles such as "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Comfortably Numb", and "Run Like Hell".

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