What's Happening to Students?

it’s called a flipped classroom and students universally hate it.

What percentage of the population are in K-12 any given time -- 15%? 20%? To have 1-1 tuition for all of them, we'd have to have at least that many adults also in education.

it also doesn't work for a single student case if you only start talking to them after they are already highly already at a point where you can say they have developed a sever attention deficit due to addictive dopamine loops

like you know the station most teachers are exposed to as the problem can already have takes deep root before the child goes to school

My apologies. But I don't know how you can genuinely listen to hundreds of students every day, much less engage them each individually. Glad you're out there doing your best anyway.

Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat.

Apply this to middle/high school students and you're going to get a lot of students being annoyed since they're being challenged, are feeling stupid, and don't know how to deal with that feeling of being stupid; especially given that many of them don't see the point in attending school since they feel like it isn't helping them.

There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

> Always not sometimes.

always if objectively non lobby-corrupt thought throught

if regulation is to much captured by lobby-corruption or ignore facts because of ideology thinking(:1) it can be very bad, then you can for example easily end up with what I like to call "red hearing regulation". A regulation which doesn't fix the problem at all but if you are naive looks like it might and prevent any further regulations from being done because it's already there. Or you can end up with monopoly-like companies cutting of access to markets for competition.

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(:1) to be clear I mean the innocent interpretation of that phrase, not the one a lot of right wing propaganda in many countries is using regular where it often means "take this out of context potentially outright lying statements and treat them as obvious facts while claiming all other facts are ideologist driven fake news and then complain why no one want to have fact based discussions with you anymore"

> The 80-hour workweek isn’t some grand anomaly; it’s simply the natural outcome of the fierce competition in China’s market. If you want a good job, you have to give it your all—because if you don’t, there will always be someone smarter, faster, and more determined waiting to take your place. It’s not personal; it’s just how the system works.

this is a very long way of saying "too many people"

> Isn't this what sensible parents should be doing?

yes _parents_, but we are speaking about state actions (which could require companies to give parents tools to help them handle this this (:1))

and that affects parents, and teachers, and what is tough, and how society in general treats such things, and which things get which age rating etc. We need to convince society that this dopamine cycles are similar bad as drugs, only forcing it down their throat is not going to end well

and I was also focusing a lot in the comment on from which angle states approach that actions

> targeted online advertising

while that is a problem, it isn't the core problem here

the core problem is dark patterns intentionally designed to make apps/sites maximally addictive

even if we didn't had any ads at all many apps(and co) would likely still do that, so that they can e.g. sell more micro transaction (like think 0.2ct per short watched, small enough to seem nothing but if you doom scroll for two+ hours every day adds up (~120$/€ a year). Heck even without micro transactions it still does make "statistics look good" some it probably still would be applied quite often.

No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.

Precisely. I moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I got a more wholistic picture of the public education system than most. I’m not sure I met a single teacher that wasn’t overworked. In the richer areas teachers typically wanted to teach; in the poorer areas even that often wasn’t true (An issue of filtering and work environment, not a personal failing thing). I once had a history teacher who only showed movies for the entire year I had her. With us placated, she’d go lounge in the corner. But even the teachers who gave a damn couldn’t do much with the absurd ratios; it was impressive they even managed to keep kids in their seats and fights from breaking out.

Any time the instinct to further police kids in schools arises, I get defensive. I know what that environment is like for the kids in it, and anyone would look for an escape while trapped in there. Schools right now function as weird little child prisons, somewhere to put kids while their parents (those who aren’t rich enough to do otherwise) go to work. If the schools aren’t gonna get any better (certainly not under this administration), then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

You meant parents for sure. It all starts at home, don't expect better behavior than parent is showing and enforcing.

> I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times

Quite the opposite for me. I don't have a problem with their opinion pages, because it's labelled as such and is at times interesting. I wouldn't trust their reporting though, least of all the numbers.

> To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems

I agree. I think the key point from the article is this: "they behave like addicts". The "dopamine" part is inessential to the diagnosis. Smartphones are like a drug, similar to or analogous to a drug. If they were literally a drug, causing overt physical withdrawal symptoms, then we might have taken the problem more seriously already.

dopamine self regulation is easier to think of.

>So I'm genuinely intrigued: what could be the underlying cause(s) of that feeling of hopelessness?

As another commenter pointed out, the teenagers are already well aware of the world around them. But for the kids, the point stands.

Maybe it has something to do with the other adults' attitude? When I was a child, my parents were poor and I was a rather bright one. I distinctly remember adults around me viewing education as a ticket to a better life. Nowadays, it feels like this is not really the case. Maybe the children don't understand what is going on, but maybe they do understand what adults/teenagers around them feel?

Kids DO realize those concerns though. It may not be at the same conscious, rational level as an adult, but they absolutely recognize that they are living in a broken world and being forced to play a rigged game.

I laughed.

(And by the time we're 45, the bar will have moved up to 50+)

Don't we all love German law...

Where I live, code requires that if you build a fence, it should not block the view and should be lower than 1.6/1.7m. So you cannot build a full fence for privacy or to block road noises.

Some neighbours wanted to build such a fence, because the road passing by is busy and noisy. So they build a "fake" pre-fence to code, next to the road, and 2 meters back, the first allowed distance for any construction, they build a "natural" 2.5 meter high "fence" of stacked wood to dampen the noise and have some privacy.

The town hall is furious, but cannot do anything, because nothing prevents you from stacking wood 2.5 meters high. The winters are harsh in the mountains, after all. And even the locals a few villages down the valley were impressed and laughing about it.

Western USA. Due to rarely used loophole in my county this is all legal if you DIY everything (no commerce so most regulation drops off) and I got permit explicitly exempting from code inspection.

Cool story but most houses here are old and grandfathered (think baloon framing without blocking) in and built before modern codes whereas mine incorporates modern fire mitigating materials and techniques like platform framing with blocking, egress windows, fire rated drywall, etc. Mine is actually safer than most of the neighborhood, I am poor not stupid.

Generator, a cistern, and a diy septic system will get you started

I remember being scared of nuclear war as a child in the 80s. But even though that cast a pall of fear, only 2 superpowers had them in world-ending capacity, and they were self-interested enough that MAD could maintain the precarious balance.

World War I was long and devastating but there would be an end to it; wars don't continue forever by default. WWII was potentially cataclysmic but we were fighting coherently with a unified front, throwing everything we had towards beating it. You could buy war bonds, grow a victory garden, ration your use of gasoline/rubber/steel; do your part and we'll get through this.

The modern issues like climate change are global, imminent, and increasingly present, and there's no contemporary feeling of solidarity and effort against them. We've been told annually that the window to save ourselves is closing rapidly, and yet carbon emissions are still increasing. That's right, they're not going down too slowly, they're still going up.

Pick another modern issue, like education (which is arguably a root solution to these other issues). It's getting worse, so are we trying like hell to improve it? Teachers are trying but can't seem to move the needle. And the US is about to dismantle its national Department of Education to improve "efficiency".

I've looked at the situation and despite a desire for optimism, I have to be realistic. All efforts against the current slate of problems are off by an order of magnitude. Please, tell me a story, any story at all, for how this gets better within our lifetimes, without science fantasy like colonizing Mars or limitless fusion power (as though either of those things would help anyway).

Today's situation is not very similar. Previously we worried about specific threats. The Axis Powers, the Soviet world and its influence, even nuclear war. We had a pretty good characterization of what the threat was, even if it was devastating, even if we didn't have a great plan to prevent it. We knew how it would manifest.

Today we are facing a sort of nebulous destabilization of social institutions and norms that seems to be related to digital computing and communication technologies but we can't nail down what particular aspects cause the problem or how it manifests. We are not sure if any particular problem is related to The Problem or not. Some people don't believe that The Problem exists at all. We have no idea what the consequences could be if The Problem is not addressed, nor do we have a good way to tell if it's currently getting worse, barring some kind of unexpected catastrophe like a bunch of high-ranking government officials accidentally inviting a journalist to an illegal chat room where they are planning air strikes.

Perhaps none of this means that The Problem is worse than anything we have faced before, or even as bad. But humans have always gotten through our problems by turning our intellect onto them, and it frightens us when our best weapon doesn't seem to be working.

What is the Internet doing to society? That's the trillion-dollar question.

Yep, one of my favorite tradesmen is Larry Haun. He started carrying tools for carpenters for pay as a young kid -- which today would be illegal. Imagine being in school and learning math and science in the context of how it tied into building a house . Suddenly the majority of it is useful.

Perhaps the problem is in part kids aren't economically 'exploited' enough so they have basically nill solidifying the utility of their schooling.

> The average suburban school kid has relatively little idea of how the world works and what workers actually do, and why, in part due to a culture of corporate secrecy.

What workers actually do is easy to find out. The problem is rather: for quite a lot of jobs, as a school kid, you'd rather come to the conclusion that if this is what life is about, you should rather commit suicide as soon as possible.

Similarly, understanding how the world works, gives you an insane hate for a lot of people (i.e. makes you a misanthropist). Beginning from politicians, ending with basically everybody (you get to understand that the (irrational and clearly not in their long-term self-interest) behaviour of many people around you causes perverse incentives for the markets).

Are these really the lessons that children should get?

Yes, I am very black-pilld.

for sure; leafy greens don't "want" to be eaten. "Eat your veggies" is very understandable though. And the lack of seasoning and preparation is a big problem for why kids don't like their veggies. Soggy mash from the microwave with no salt? No thanks.

Veggies prepared well is great. So is education. Most of public school is simply mass market soggy, saltless, microwave veggie plates.

And we did go out to play.