the kids are not alright

in the months leading up to my graduation from my master’s program, i was looking for a job to to make some cash after moving back home. through an introduction from my parents, i was able to land a maternity leave substitute geometry teacher position at a nearby high school. my math background and experience with math tutoring helped me get the job, but i had never worked in a classroom setting. with the convenient hours of teaching, i was optimistic that it would be a good way to chip away at my rather daunting pile of student loan debt while staying available to start a full-time career by Christmas, as i had hoped at the time. i had absolutely no clue what i was in for.

the three month span in which i taught geometry was one of the most utterly exhausting periods of my life. when at the end my slog through the maternity leave, i remained jobless, i began to take on normal substitute opportunities at the same school, and eventually ended up filling in yet another long-term temporary position in one of the service club/class academies at the school. all in all, i spent a total of 9 months working at the school, and my time there wasn’t necessarily bad, but it has certainly left me concerned about the future generations of children in the united states.

my experience was headlined by discipline problems, rampant cheating, stunted emotional development, and other than a select group of advanced students that i taught, a near total unwillingness to think critically.

of course, the discipline issues and cheating have always been a part of life in high school, as kids start to truly believe they are mature and intelligent enough to outsmart adults. and sometimes they are. but the last two themes that i tracked throughout my time there, and especially the unwillingness (or in some cases inability) of children in this new generation to think for themselves, is what truly worries me.

there are many factors to play into this development, but i think the biggest driver is the total integration of technology into education. this isn’t a novel take by any means, but it is the root of so many of the challenges that the children of the next generation face.

a day in the life of the average high school student probably looks something like this: they wake up to an alarm on their phone, and after picking up their phone to turn it off, they check their notifications to see what they missed while everyone was asleep. more than likely, this leads them to doomscroll on tik tok or ig reels until they realize they have to get up or a parent tells them to. they get dressed, eat a quick breakfast (or skip it entirely), and get in the car to drive or be driven to school. if the latter, they probably text friends or doomscroll on th way there. they rush into school, sit down in class, and if they have time, they might scroll for a bit or maybe talk to a friend before class starts. once class begins, the teacher tells them what they’re doing for the day and tells them to take out their ipad/laptop and check [insert online learning platform] to access assignments, watch videos, or take notes. After class is over, they take out their phone and check texts, snapchat, and maybe instagram before they head to the next class. the more social ones might stop in the hall to talk to friends, but there’s a high probability they’re responding to snapchats while doing so. get to the next class, rinse and repeat. eat lunch with one hand on the sandwich and the other scrolling. when they get home at night they open up their ipad/laptop and watch the videos that were assigned for homework, then ask chat gpt to do whatever problems or worksheets they were given. later at night, they may go and hang out with friends if their parents allow. come back home, doomscroll in bed, fall asleep, and do it all again. if they’re lucky enough to play sports, they might get an hour or two of exercise in there somewhere.

if that sounds absolutely depressing, it is. if that sounds somewhat normal, IT IS. children are being diagnosed with depression and anxiety at the highest rates in history. what’s changed?

when i was growing up (not that long ago), school provided a dedicated time during the day where i wasn’t able to look at the technology i carried around with me at all times. sure we used our laptops for homework, but we handwrote essays, math notes, and our teachers didn’t use technology as a crutch to offload their workload. above all, we had no access to chatgpt, or claude, or any of the dozen LLMs being used in classrooms these days. we were forced to learn and solve problems for ourselves, and if we didn’t want to do that, we had to figure out creative ways to cheat. even the act of cheating itself requires critical thought if the teacher gives even half a damn. the bottom line is that the time we spent in school was time spent learning how to solve problems, whether done ethically or not.

the rise of ai and the extent to which technology is interwoven into modern learning environments effectively removes the need for students to learn problem-solving skills on their own. attention spans are at an all-time low. they‘ll use ai for everything they possibly can, from completing full assignments down to simpler decisions like what they should respond to a friend’s text. the best example i can give is when a group of students was asked to come up with valentine’s day themed activities for a class party, and the first course of action was to ask chatgpt what they should do. no grade, no pressure, zero stakes. it was the reflexive instinct. ai and technology has robbed near an entire generation of its critical thinking skills and ability to recall information, and the education system has been the chief enabler.

this all correlates with what we see in the standardized testing data, which is of course a steady decline in essentially every subject. but many people have long argued that standardized testing doesn‘t accurately represent kids that ”aren’t good test takers” or “aren’t meant for a classroom environment”. while this may have been true for many years, the critical thinking skills, or “common sense” that characterized many of the individuals in this category have begun to deteriorate as well. what is left is a generation of kids that for the first time, maybe in history but certainly in living memory, are less academically AND emotionally intelligent than their parents.

the emotional intelligence is an obvious effect as well, but to me that is part of growing up and learning how to socialize. there are fewer confounding variables that i can see on the critical thinking side of it. the test scores data for tech in schools shows a very reliable trend no matter where you look: an increase followed by a plateau (around the late 2010s), and a sharp decline beginning shortly after the advent of commercially available ai.

in conclusion, the eye test matches what we are seeing in the data, and it’s not pretty. so is there any hope for the future?

in short, yes. as with many things in our society, there is a pendulum-like nature at work here. there are movements by many schools to remove most if not all technology from the school environment, forcing kids to think for themselves for at least 8 hours a day. parents are beginning to understand the negative effects of constant technology use and are attempting to delay exposure to it. the ingrained social pressures of not being involved are the only the stopping them (we’re so fucked).