Students are less independent than they were 10 years ago, according to 82 percent of teachers in a EdWeek Research Center survey. Many blame helicopter parenting and screen addiction, reports Arianna Prothero.
Kelly Knight, a high school teacher in Texas, bases grades on students' environmental science projects. She gaze a zero to student who didn't turn in the project. A few periods later, the mother was calling and sending emails, then complaining to the principal. "There is no incentive really for students to put in any effort because since COVID, they have had helicopter parents protecting them from everything.”
"She worries that students are getting set up to fail in the real world, where employers and professors won’t make exceptions for excuse after excuse and probably won’t respond well to a parent calling to defend their child’s work," writes Prothero.
Travis Lawrence, a middle-school principal in Wisconsin, believes "the decline in adolescent independence is primarily caused by kids spending more time on screens and less time engaging in unstructured play," writes Prothero. While the pandemic made it worse, the decline started before 2020.
“I think there is connection ultimately to cellphones and social media, because you see instances of this prior to 2020,” he said. “I see kids having less of an ability to socialize, less ability to problem-solve, less independence, and more reliance on somebody else to come and do things for them.”
Sage on the Stage tweets about catching a student cheating. Twenty years ago, he writes, a teacher would say, "I caught you cheating, now I have to tell your parents and the principal." Now, Sage writes, "it's the student saying 'you caught me cheating, now I'm going to tell my parents and the principal."
In The Teen-Age Disengagement Crisis, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop have advice for parents on how to encourage their children's sense of autonomy.
Half of the middle- and high-school they interviewed are in "Passenger Mode," they write. They're coasting along in school, doing the minimum to get by.
I call these "zombie students," the "educationally undead."
Anderson and Winthrop think students would be more engaged in school if they were pushed to "think deeply and apply what they know in class to solve real-world problems."
I have my doubts. I was a very engaged student in high school, but I never solved any real-world problems. Do they mean math problems that offer more realistic scenarios that me trying to calculate the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow? Or: Submit a video, a poster and a 300-word essay on your solution to climate change?
In any case, they don't think schools will be redesigned any time soon, so the solution is for parents to get their kids to do the work.
Nagging doesn't work, and can make the teen feel like school is their parents' job, Anderson and Winthrop write. "Sometimes the negative consequences of not getting work done or failing an exam are exactly what a kid needs to feel motivated. By giving teens the freedom to fail something — a test, a quiz, meeting a homework deadline — parents put them in control, which (over time) does feel motivating."
It's not just that students are disengaged from school, the Monitoring the Future survey shows. Teenagers are less likely to get a drivers' license or an after-school job, all key signs of independence. They're less likely to date or even to go out with friends. Teen sex and pregnancy rates are down, as are drinking, smoking and drug abuse. Teenagers aren't just turned off by the Pythagorean Theorem. They don't want to do anything.
Via Noah Smith, here's a "depressing" chart.
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