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.
School shootings are still insanely rare. When you account for high crime areas the likelihood of an average kid experiencing a school shooting is so low it should make you question anyone trying to make it seem otherwise.
But the shooter drills are incredibly common. Just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean children aren't often being forced to think about it happening.
While outright shootings might be rare, bullying by fellow students and teachers is common. Shootings might just be the straw that breaks the camels back.
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.
"School shooting" is a polysemous phrase. There's the very literal version--a shooting that happens at a school--but also a more specific one that refers to a much rarer situation--a lone kid consciously plans to go in and shoot a lot of people en masse, as a kind of suicide that is intended to leave a permanent presence on a community that the kid viewed as having wronged them in some way. The former is much more relevant for policy making, but in public discourse the latter plays the disproportionate, defining role. OP is frustrated by that vacillation. School shooter drills are almost irrelevant for the modal literal school shooting, but they inflict psychological damage on students and even create the archetype of the statistically rarer type in the public imagination.
Not sufficiently rare enough to avoid transforming education in a myriad of ways, from clear backpacks to endless drills to metal detectors at the door to armed people in body armor walking around.
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.
This may be akin to the craze of fear of terrorism that swept the general public after September 11th. I found that craze to be entirely irrational, but it would hardly be appropriate for the same individuals to see their kids as being particularly irrational, if their fear of being shot is real.
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.
No surprise given the alarming amount of shooting incidents, teachers being banned from discussing certain topics (LGBT, religion, sexuality, history) under threat of losing their license or worse, completely nutty "zero-tolerance" policies, completely overworked teachers, outdated teaching methods, way too much homework, dilapidated school buildings, the pressure from parents (particularly for single children that have to turn out perfect) to make good grades to ensure good career perspectives... if I had to go to school today, I'd drop out as well - and I'm German, we have everything but the first two points as well.
Interesting that they don’t mention pressures associated with schooling, such as the pressure to get into a good college bleeding into every aspect of the academic experience, or the school shooter drills now normalized. But they do mention anxiety, lol
I was browsing the left side of the internet on my second YouTube profile and ran into Zoe Bee talking about grading and motivation. The takeaway was that it is more about controlling students than education. I think 99% of the anxiety I experienced as a teenager was frustration about the insane levels of control that children are placed under.
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.
Totally understandable. When I was of school age (last millennium) every morning I had a stomach filled with dread. School is a miserable experience of judgement and pressure. I didn't feel like I had the option not to go or I can see myself falling into the same cycle of anxiety and avoidance, especially if I'd had to experience the chaos these kids have had.
From what I understand, German school is even more demanding in terms of how they drive you to do well or lose benefits. I can only imagine the stress of things like getting demoted from Gymnasium [1] after not performing well enough due to life stresses during a critical developmental phase in life, or not making Abitur [2] qualifications and not getting that free post secondary.
Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess
According to John Taylor Gatto, american schools are modeled after prussian military academies of the late 19th century - down to the bells dividing the day into periods.
He's a really good author, and I think anyone interested in this subject should definitely read him. [1] However I think that the American and German school systems definitely diverge in that they haven't defunded, devauled and destroyed the German system to a point where it's questionable why it even exists in its current form still.
Oh we do have defunded our system as well - particularly the buildings are rotting. Estimates are 45 billion dollars [1], and that's just to catch up with deferred maintenance and upkeep work, not to create new school buildings to match the increased demand or new staff.
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.
You should have seen the one I went to. There was warning stickers on all the walls not to disturb them because they were filled with asbestos and it represented an enormous mesothelioma hazard if you like, knocked into them hard enough and breathed
The U.S. spends more per child on education than Germany, and a lot more than almost any other country. Luxembourg spends more than everybody, then comes Norway, Austria, and Iceland, who spend a bit more than the U.S., but they are all well above the global average.
I can't speak to the American experience as I'm Canadian, but my whole life I've suffered, as many do, with an anxiety disorder. Whether it was worrying about having to perform in drama class (we had limited options for electives in my small town), some assignment being due, or just getting bullied on the bus because you were the weird quiet kid who just read there was always something each day to dread. If you have social anxiety just sitting in a class trying to avoid thinking about all the other people around you who could be looking at you can be enough to be overwhelming.
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.
Its all about academic pressure where im located. Very high peer pressure in addition to the school. Basically if you arent getting atraight a’s in honors classes youre a failure. I yanked my daughter from highschool in 10th grade and let her get a ged. The panic attacks were the last straw
I would be curious whether students in places like Japan, Korea, and China would also refuse to go to school if going to school didn't also have the immense social pressure and stakes behind 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.
Not GP but everyone has different stories about American public school being awful. For instance my issues with school started with having to drop from pre-algebra to remedial arithmetic in 7th grade in order to start in the gifted classes in middle school. It was a bit of a Sophie’s choice because I really belonged in the advanced math track. The kids I was around in those remedial classes sucked and some of them would bully me for knowing things. So I learned to hide how smart I was.
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 honestly don't think it's always laziness. I liked learning growing up. But the constant pressure and dealing with terrible and awkward social interactions with a peer group that's ravenous to jump on any perceptible slip-up at a time when you're still trying to figure yourself out spoiled it for me. We want to avoid situations that are uncomfortable.
I really think we have different ideas of school based upon our own experiences in it.
I'll share this: I had great teachers, enjoyed school, felt well supported, had a tight friend group, and learned a lot. I was a nerd from a fairly poor family who lived well outside of a town of about 25k people. This was in the 80s and 90s, in the U.S. I was never bullied once, never felt threatened or scared. Was anxious sometimes, certainly did not like doing homework. If I had told my parents I was too anxious to go to school, I'm pretty sure they'd have let me stay home once. If I kept doing it, they'd have found a polite way to say "tough shit, you're going to school".
> I mean, literally, how are the US schools differ from the other countries ones?
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.
I dunno, for me it wasn't the worst. School was overall much nicer than a job - less demanding, less workload, much more fun coworkers, a ton of camraderie ("us against teachers"). Basically a fun, low-stakes environment.
This is one of those things that is going to absolutely vary between people. That seems to be coming from the perspective of someone who had a strong friend group and felt generally connected to his peers. I certainly had friends, but we were the nerds. In the 90s in my town if you liked comic books and D&D you weren't part of the cool crowd. It never felt low-stakes, every mistake or social faux pas was a way to be relentlessly made fun of.
Comics and D&D were never part of the cool crowd. The hard part was if you didn't have anything to balance that.
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.
Yeah, I didn't have proclivities towards sports and my parents didn't the money for equipment or the time to come get me from events (we were rural so you couldn't just bus home) so I couldn't find an extracurricular niche and didn't earn the respect of the school.
Why would anyone bug you? You played Football, presumably that meant you were able to beat the shit out of most anyone who would have bugged you. That's a bullying deterrent.
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.
I've never been in a fight in my life. I was far from the strongest guy on the team.
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.
I had the opposite experience. Work is far less demanding and takes far less time than school. Deadlines mean far less. You get points for solving the problem. Asking a colleague for help is expected, not against the rules.
Work was a dream, when i entered the job world. I couldn't believe how much easier life was, when you are out of work, you had no expectations, You didn't have to be standing on the bus stop at 5:45 am in the dark, the work was simpler and easier to do, It felt like you were actually doing something useful, people were more 'grown up' and interacted better, and WOW -- you got paid!! of course 30 years later i'm quite jaded, but i certainly remember those early experiences.
I had the same experience when I started working, but it only lasted about a year. In a year, the novelty wore off and what was left was an endlesss, monotonous grind, that was incomparably harder than in school.
I skipped most of high school. I didn't have a condition. High school was bullshit and pointless. Some people expect me to be repentant for this now that I'm on the wrong side of 25, but I'm not. I was right. It was a waste of my time and I minimized my exposure to idiots who thought they had power over my future.
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.
If you truly skipped most of high school and succeeded, then you're the exception. Most people that take that route end up in a dead-end job, prison, drug addiction, homelessness, or endless other problems.
Sure, school isn't perfect and has its issues, but kids skipping school is a big problem.
It doesn't matter whether or not being able to get away with it is the norm. If a large cohort of kids are skipping high school, it is likely something wrong with the schools. Maybe we should consider reforming them to be less soul crushing and awful?
Why? I feel like the burden should be on the institution trying to waste >1000 hrs per year of someone's time, rather than the person that just wants to not participate in the system.
What's the alternative for a minor who decides they no longer want to go to school? Are the parents ready to home-school them? If not...the child will fall behind their peers and become a drag on the education system, not to mention the little career prospects for people who refuse to complete basic high schooling...I somehow can't believe I'm having to explain this.
Pretty sure the generic answer is "unschooling + free range parenting" which already exists.
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.
I duly get your point, but my opinion is that most kids aren't well equipped to learn in the non-traditional way. The current system doesn't favor everyone, but I think it works best for the average kid who doesn't have exceptional abilities or the intrinsic motivation to learn in a non-standardized way.
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.
I did the lawful version (read the student handbook and missed the absolute max # of days I could without them being able to take disciplinary action), but basically same here. Also left high school at 16 because I absolutely did not want to be there until 18. Would highly recommend the GED and/or early graduation programs for anyone capable.
I would also say, if you proceed to get a college degree - even an associate's from a community college - no one will care how you got your high school diploma. Ditto for an associates when you get your bachelors, your bachelors when you get a masters, and your masters when you get a PhD.
Not 100% true. When I see candidates with MS/PhD I always check the Bachelor's school since I've seen way too many candidates that get Bachelor's from degree mills, then somehow manage to get a Master's or PhD from a low-tier state school but are unable to grasp even first-year college concepts.
> Demsky sought help from educators, doctors and counselors, trying to understand what was stopping her son from going to school for nearly a year. Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance.
>“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).
Just speculation, but perhaps what triggered relief was understanding that their son was not alone (and thus not "weird") in his behaviour. Giving a name to it makes it sound like a real medical condition and thus something that is affecting the kid, rather than the kid being broken.
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.
That struck me as weird too, but to be fair, once a disorder is identified then you can benefit from treatment plans that others have found success with.
Our schools are basically prisons these days - we drill kids to get them ready for tests, we demand perfect obedience, and we give kids little to no space to be kids.
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).
> School avoidant behavior, also called school refusal, is when a school-age child refuses to attend school or has difficulty being in school for the entire day. Several mental health experts told USA TODAY it has become a crisis that has gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
> "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.
I mean, we tell young people it's important to think critically. Well, this is what that looks like. Why is it a given that going to K-12 is somehow an immutable necessity, especially with the current curriculum and experience what it is? They are right to question it even if the answer ends up being that going to school has value.
I'm here to tell you that in 1989 we really didn't have any trouble with critical thinking on the topic of going to high school on any given Wednesday.
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.
It's pretty weird that people are debating kids going to school, lol...If I told my parents when I was younger that I no longer felt like going to school, they would have bundled me there.
I skipped a good bit of school (also in the 90s), and frequently was punished for it, and consider myself to have only myself to blame. Nevertheless, I knew a kid, a younger brother of a friend, who had school avoidance, and it was palpably different. It was probably a situation of major depression manifesting as anxiety and defiant behavior. As the article says, it's not a concrete diagnosis. It's really more of a symptom with the same effect of putting education on hold.
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.
> “We don’t call it work refusal, we call it unemployment,” he said.
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]
This may be controversial, but I think skipping school because of "anxiety" is a first-world problem and a sign of over pamperedness. I live in a third-world country with endless issues, and yet hardly see kids skipping school for so-called anxiety.
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.
Best guess you're referring to Nigeria going by your website.
> 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.
> Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world.
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.
The existence of someone having a harder time than you does not invalidate your own 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.
Mobile phones have destroyed children's attentions, given them new ways to bully and harrass eachother, made every single action that any child does subject to surviellance by their peers, and have completely and utterly destroyed the mental health of our kids, especially young girls. It needs to be banned in schools. This shouldn't even be a question.
Have we considered that children don't understand what's best for them? Kids never want to go to school. But they do anyways because going to school is extremely important for a child. I never wanted to go to school, but my parents told me to get my ass up and go. Giving children this much agency over their lives when they don't have the maturity to do so is going to cause some really bad consequences.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
Maybe not "extremely" important, but autodidacticism can be terribly socially pathological, which pedagogy is meant to deal with. A lot of the point seems to be social, we want our kids to be able to navigate each others ideas with a common logic
Have we considered (admitted to ourselves) that we may not know what's best for them either?
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).
I avoided school. Although in that era we called it "skipping school".
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 relate to this. I changed schools because of a move at the start of the sixth grade. It was a horrible experience. I dreaded going back there all summer. My brother and I saw a program on home schooling on TV, and I saw my path out. We begged our parents to home school us. That worked out really well for us in the end. We got a top level education and we learned to be unafraid to learn on our own, whatever we needed. Neither of us finished college, but we’re both reasonably successful today, having found our own path in the world. My brother is a self published science fiction author with over one million books sold. I’m a software engineer and wannabe entrepreneur. We’re both self taught in our professions. School really sucks. I will try my hypothetical future kids on home schooling first to see how they take to it.
My parents had a pretty genius solution for this. You're sick?, sure you can stay home, but anything interesting or fun was off limits. If you're feeling well enough to be out of bed, you can do homework. That's it.
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.
Reading this makes me think of
that one experiment[0] where rats were put in a "park" with regular and drug laced water. In the absence of enriching activities the rats would opt for drug use to stay entertained. Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of issues with that study that would invalidate it, but I think the lesson still stands, school has become an environment where you're judged on every facet of you existence. Your grades, your clothes, and physical appearance, your social acumen. All this leaves very little space for enrichment via learning and experimentation. Not to mention shrinking budgets and overloading for teachers, making it nearly impossible to be passionate and engaging. It makes me wonder what it would take to get alternative schools in place that take students into the real world, regularly, and have them learn through applying principles from the classroom, or if that would even be effective.
I"m seeing a lot of people taking the 'Back in MY day...' approach to this topic. I think in this case there's more at play:
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.
This is a manufactured problem due to bad incentives. Counselors, Psychologists etc get more work, more importance and more opportunity if they “discover” a condition in a child. In a way they almost encourage parents or children to identify themselves with a condition. And so something like not wanting to go to school becomes “school avoidance syndrome”. The sad part is there is probably a small percent (like 0.1%) of children who face anxiety attacks to go to school, these children give legitimacy to the condition, but then there are hundreds of cases of children who just don’t want to go to school who simply need to be forced. I say this ironically as someone who used to regularly miss a day of school in a week, because I was under high pressure to study and perform (in a developing country) and I didn’t have great friends, my life would have been objectively worse if I was diagnosed with this condition and agency was taken away from me. (I never actually improved my attendance, but I improved my exam scores so it didn’t matter)
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
I disagree on the effects (at least for the average child of a doctor or engineer), but I'm in for letting more students stop going to school. Glad it has some bipartisan appeal.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/duck-and-cover
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.
Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
- 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.
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.
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
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.
To be crystal clear: it implies an active school shooting is underway.
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.
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 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.
>“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.
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).
> "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.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U
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.
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...
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.
Already being done in other countries: https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a smash double album featuring hit singles such as "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Comfortably Numb", and "Run Like Hell".
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.
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).
Maybe they do. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/41319.John_Taylor_Gatt...
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...
How or why would police be deployed? Is it a crime (for child or parent) if the child skips a lot of school?
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
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.
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