One of the biggest problems my wife, a middle school teacher at a private Catholic school, faces these days is kids who simply don’t care. You might think this is less of an issue at a non-public school, but in those cases, the parents are the ones who care enough to pay extra for their child’s education. The child’s motivation, however, is a separate subject.
And this isn’t a matter of “school sucks, I’m going to be a singer/entrepreneur/flight attendant/dental hygienist”. This is “these kids are failing every class and will not be allowed to graduate high school.” (At least, they shouldn’t be allowed to graduate. I never knew anyone who was left back because of grades. I feel like, even before NCLB, schools were moving kids along so they could get funding.)
And I get it, to a certain degree. When I was in middle school and onward, I hated it. Hated it. It was like prison. I was in a tornado of social anxiety. Every night I made a list of “things I have to worry about tomorrow”, and was relieved when it only included “gym” and “the bus”.
But still, I knew I was going to grow up. I had to prepare for the likely possibility I was going to become eighteen and older. Just keep my head down, keep my grades up, and eventually I’d no longer need to go to public school. One day I would become an adult and buy candy whenever I wanted. And I’d have to fulfill the role of a full-fledged citizen of the United States (although I still haven’t been picked for jury duty yet). Time marches on, whether I like it or not.
So I don’t understand these kids who cannot function in middle school. I mean, some of them are 100% insubordinate, doing things that they know will get them kicked out of class. They’re not doing work, turning in work with the quality of a first grader (with penmanship to match). I mean, they sit there and do… nothing. What do you think you’re going to school for? Do you think you just sit in a desk and breathe for seven hours and then go home?
The same thing happened to her in MathCorps, which is a math & reading tutoring program. You get paid less than minimum wage to pull some underachieving kids out of class and tutor them. I was boggled when she told me how many students “just don’t care”. She would try to educate them, and they’d just go “nah.” They don’t care about flunking and don’t seem to understand what “future” is.
I don’t think this is an undiagnosed mental illness (unless it’s something no doctor has discovered yet). One let out a loud fart and then smiled. Another time (not sure if this was the same kid) one was leaning back on his chair. Teacher told him to stop it. He leaned back so now he was on one leg of the chair. Some boys are TP’ing the bathroom. These one or two are exacerbating the others, encouraging chaos and disruption. The counselor has advised my wife and his other teachers to not give him any negative feedback. That he needs compliments and positive reinforcement. Well, that’s difficult to do when the kid does nothing positive.
And you’re not allowed to simply remove the child from class. They keep being a disruption day after day after day after day. This happens every year–there’s always one or two kids that are just the worst. And they cannot be removed or expelled because then you lose that tuition. This is a case of “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”. But what do you do with the horse then? You can’t move it out of the way so other horses can drink. And it seems like there are lots of horses who aren’t thirsty.
I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about your future. That, to get better at something, you have to put forth effort. It will not be handed to you. You need resistance to build muscle.
What do these kids think is going to happen to them when time catches up with them? Don’t they have something they want to be when they grow up? Something they want to reach for? Or have we reached a point where they expect a future like Idiocracy? The cruise-goers in WALL•E? Comatose blobs in floating recliners, watching TV and drinking liquid cupcakes. Just existing, not living because everything is provided for you. Have we achieved “Brave New World”? Is this what cell phones and sports and Amazon and DoorDash have rendered unto us? A utopia of ignorance?
Is it because there’s no immediate consequences? Can kids no longer understand long-term rewards because they’ve grown up with immediate gratification? Is it because they don’t expect consequences because there are none? If you show up late to work, you don’t get to work. If you don’t work, you don’t get money. If you don’t get money, you don’t eat. You need money to fulfill needs, like food and shelter. I mean, do they not have a concept of the future?
What kind of jobs do these kids expect to do without a high school diploma? Even with one, college graduates are working as baristas and waiters. And there aren’t enough jobs to go around, because old people aren’t retiring, because there isn’t enough Social Security to live on. What possible hope does a drop-out have? The only thing I can think of is drug-addled criminal, dead at 25 or 30.
Does this come from all the terrible anti-school cartoons we watched as kids? Do they still show those? I think they watched stuff like Bluey, Peppa Pig, SpongeBob, Naruto. Nothing that particularly screams out “school is for losers” or “school is torture” like we did–Saved by the Bell, The Wonder Years, Beverly Hills 90210, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. All these movies and shows implied school is like prison–where you’re socially outcast, forced to do drudgerous pointless work you don’t want to do, bullied, experience failure, and maybe get raped.
Are they simply not thinking about it? I mean, when you’re in high school, it can feel like “this is it” because you haven’t known anything else. You’ve been stuck in the same fishbowl as whoever happened to live in the same neighborhood as you. You haven’t had a chance to make your own decisions, in spite of puberty bolstering them to do so. So though part of you knows you will live through this, another part only knows the fishbowl. And it can get frustrated and nihilistic and hopeless. The Internet might be making this worse or better, I can’t tell. You’d think being exposed to a globe full of people and cultures would alleviate the heartache, being able to “find your people” better, but it can also give you FOMO.
The Internet can also make it feel like everything’s hopeless, especially these days. AI is taking over jobs. There’s a natural disaster every two weeks. Nobody’s doing a thing about climate change. We’re all obese. Billionaire criminals are in power. There’s a president half the country hates, letting his non-citizen buddy fire everybody like the two Bobs in Office Space. But are they even paying attention to that kind of thing?
I grew up in the Reagan years and I had no idea what was going on globally–the Cold War, Iran-Contra, Air Traffic Control strikers, Gorbachev, the KGB. The world certainly had reason to feel hopeless–maybe they felt the same way they do now–but I was oblivious. Maybe it’s that the world is unstable, rather than on a downslope. Any effort to fix it feels like throwing a cup of water on a forest fire. Trump’s trial for a crime he committed in 2016 wasn’t held until 2024. And by the time sentencing could occur, he was president. The world can’t act fast enough to stop someone who can break shit up faster than it can be blocked or put back together. And you are just 1/8,205,273,340th of the world–what are you going to do about it? But I’m getting off track.
Society is doomed for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of working men months with thousands of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumbass to bring it down again.Jason Pargin
No matter what the state of the world is, you’ve still got to eat. And to eat, you’ve got to do some work. That’s a foundation of civilization–trading goods and services. You can’t be floating in the world like a marshmallow in hot chocolate. It’s like they think the goal of life is to do the least amount of work as possible, as if that’s the endgame. As if you get scored based on how much you were able to achieve by doing as little as possible.
If you don’t decide what you’re going to do with your life, life is going to decide for you.
