Comment by milesrout
18 days ago
If you ask peolle whether they're stressed of course they say they are. But they are objectively living in less stressful times than parents in the years in which young men were sent off to die in the trenches, but their younger siblings and young children still got better educations than kids are getting today. So maybe self-reported parental stress isn't actually the issue. Maybe we need to accept the issue is low standards at every level of education and teachers being unwilling to teach basic grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc. because they are seen as "old fashioned"?
If the standards are high, and cohorts can't meet them because they are setup to fail, what will we do then? If we already don't have sufficient resources for folks to meet the bar at scale, there will be nothing for those who need help over the hurdle (remedial help), correct? It's not the fault of the fish when you ask it to climb a tree and it can't. Unreasonable expectations, and all that.
I am fairly confident nothing is going to change (we are not going to suddenly enable parents more time to be involved parents [1], fund K-12 at appropriate levels (federal gov destroying education funding systems [2], etc) and the winning move is to convince young people to not have kids versus telling parents and students they aren't trying hard enough while we give them scant resources and support, based on all available information. Shades of the US parent version of the Kobayashi Maru or War Games ("The only winning move is not to play.").
If you think the problem is teachers or parents in a vacuum, you have not consumed enough data. These are systems problems.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/worki...
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percentage-of-public-schoo...
The people who lived through those times in the trenches tend to pass down their stress to their children if it's not adequately addressed first. Then they get told that because they have it better than their parents, their stress is irrelevant and they need to forge on regardless.
I think this is a multifaceted problem more complicated than just runaway stress, the state of education, or addictive technology. All of these systems feed back into each other to create a perfect storm.