One of my siblings is going to school once a week, I think lockdowns definitely fried some brains.
I think lockdowns definitely fried some brains.
Lol, love seeing chud convoy talking points here on hexbear.
Was it getting infected with a disease that causes brain damage 4 or 6 or 8 times already, watching their parents and guardians do nothing but feed them back into the meat grinder so they could go back to work?
No, it was the month they did remote school two years ago.
Yeah people don't seem to realise that in some parts of the world remote school has been normal for decades. There are rural parts of my country where they had to do that long before covid.
What I think had more negative psychological side effects was watching grown boomers throw tantrums over wearing masks. Why would kids take anything seriously after that? Adults can't even do the bare minimum so why should they?
Nah Covid lockdowns definitely did something. Not saying they weren’t necessary, but the haphazard way it was done because America can’t think of anything through all the way means tons of kids fall through the cracks more than they already do normally. My wife is dealing with 4 year olds with pretty bad behavioral issues that clearly began when lockdowns started. Like these are clearly lockdown babies who were given unlimited access to technology and the internet and then all of the sudden had it taken away and now they have to sit in school in a regimented environment. How do you expect them to adjust to that? They can’t, they react like drug addicts having their drugs taken away. Not to put the blame on them, but this whole thing was not done with any thought at all and this is one of the consequences.
My wife is dealing with 4 year olds with pretty bad behavioral issues that clearly began when lockdowns started
how were 6 month olds so wildly affected by lockdowns in spring 2020?
Can’t say for sure, but we think it’s a combination of parents working more since Covid unfortunately killed a lot of people especially older people who would theoretically be the support structure for daycare while the parents are working. Then there’s the addiction to technology, which was already bad pre Covid, but during the lockdowns and now post Covid is probably worse than ever. Also this isn’t something that just effects the prek kids, there is notable behavioral issues with all grade levels. I know it sounds like bullshit, but I’m telling you something happened to make these kids start acting this way and I don’t think the general assumptions of this thread that the lockdowns had no affect isn’t a very good one to take. The reason I bring up the smaller children at all is because the prevailing assumption ITT is that the reason these kids are acting this way is because of a generalized sense of despair, which might be true for older children, but doesn’t explain anything for the younger ones who as you said were only months old during the lockdowns. They barely have a concept of the color blue let alone any idea that climate change or fascism is a thing.
It’s very easy to think that teachers are just complaining and kids are no different than before or that they’ve always been like this, but when multiple veteran teachers are telling us first hand that these are easily the worst classes they’ve had in their careers that shouldn’t mean nothing. Teachers spend more time with the kids than their parents do pretty much, their first hand accounts should be taken seriously.
I do not like this idea that lockdown is a mere inconvenience like having to take the stairs instead of using an elevator. It's very obvious lockdown, even the quarter-ass lockdown the US tried to implement, would have a negative effect on people. Only a particular type of ND could actually thrive under lockdown conditions. However, despite the negative effect, lockdown is overall necessary if we want to actually live in a post-Covid world and not be forever stuck with Covid. It's like a medicine with pretty terrible side effects but that is also the only way to treat a particular disease.
In my more cynical moments, I believe the US essentially did the worst of two worlds. The US only did lockdown enough to tank an entire generation's social development, but Covid was still allowed to let it rip, so now you have kids with poor social skills and a body ruined by Covid.
Not as much as the millions who died and the new realization that you will never be safe again
Nothing covid did caused a such psychic trauma as millions of deaths. Now we all live knowing if there was a world ending threat the government wouldn't do anything to stop it or help. People used to not know that before. It is alot for a regular person to deal with
i mean the remote school went for a very long time from March 2020 until end of 2021 and early 2022. staying inside all the time could indeed change people's perceptions. like how most people don't even have proper timeline of events during lockdowns because of lack of anchor points.
Was it getting infected with a disease that causes brain damage 4 or 6 or 8 times already
yea i didnt say actual covid caused brain damage didnt make it worse.
watching their parents and guardians do nothing but feed them back into the meat grinder so they could go back to work?
what are you supposed to do? work went back to 'normal' before schooling did.
edit: i think people on this site look at western lockdowns during March 2020 and government assistance given during that time and think 'pog' but people's experience with lockdowns weren't the same in the Global South because there was no welfare or stimulus checks because of World Bank/IMF imposed deficit constraints. Many global south countries still haven't recovered from it (K Shape Recovery).
Maybe in some places lockdown went on for that long, but many places (including here) it was all of a few weeks and yet these problems are seemingly universal across the west (or at least North America).
It's the same as the argument that rampant sickness is from immunity debt. If the damage came from lockdowns, why is it just as bad or worse in areas that didn't have lockdowns or had short lockdowns? It's because it's being caused by COVID.
Not assigning blame to working parents who had no choice, just explaining how a stark early lesson in the capitalist meat grinder might change how you think.
Yeah whenever people talk about the “problems caused by lockdowns” my response is “what lockdowns”
The “lockdown” here started on March 17th, 2020. By May pretty much everything was open, including bars. Schools reopened with the new school year, with a mask requirement (only thanks to the county going against the state’s ban on mask requirements for schools) that ended by the end of December.
They did nothing to improve ventilation, space requirements, etc. and obviously COVID spread rapidly in schools immediately. These kids just had an early end to the school year and then saw their parents thrown to the meat grinder before being shoved into one themselves. Oh and when they went back the school shootings went right back to higher than ever before.
One of the main reasons “kids are so bad now” is they literally don’t see a future, they’ve seen how little their lives are valued and while the kindergarteners may not understand climate change, middle and high schoolers definitely do and are staring down the barrel of it going “Oh none of this matters”
Part of the trauma for me was the lack of willingness to lockdown
Same. The realization that the society I live in is run by a literal death cult and they will do nothing to protect people’s lives. I am a fundamentally different person now than I was in February 2020 and that is the main reason.
For me it was the fact that what precautions they did take seemed to only be the most obnoxious, least effective versions, but then we were still allowed in the break rooms like normal, completely defeating the purpose of any of the previous measures.
And then people would get mad at me when I didn't take it seriously. How can I? Nothing is being done! All things that need to be done to contain it aren't happening and aren't being enforced. To think that you, individually, can stop COVID spread when every factory in the nation is still operating full-bore and the worst delivery and food-service jobs are still running around is a fucking joke.
We made vanity food items and we were still considered essential.
The only people I know that got any time off for this stuff pretty much so jack-all all day anyways.
bro I went through the lockdowns. Yes a lot of kids got covid but fucking every kid went through lockdowns, and it has had a marked impact on us. All your classes just became a joke and then the summer was basically identical to the school year, and you couldn't see your friends and all the summer activities were canceled and you spent all damn day with your parents OR your parents were considered disposable by society OR their work directly involved covid so you had that hanging over your head. The lockdowns were necessary, and should have been stricter, but that does not make them a good thing and doesn't mean they didn't have some very bad consequences for the kids that went through them.
We shouldn't allow our understanding of phenomena to be determined purely by our opposition to the ideas of specific groups of people. That is basically the way in which chuds and to a lesser extent libs approach their analysis, and it's part of why they end up with such an incoherent understanding of things.
It's pretty clear that the need to socially isolate from one another for months at a time during the early period of covid had effects upon people. These have been shown in academic and governmental research. Hell, the entire experience of the pandemic was extremely traumatising imo. To be open to the idea that lockdowns had effects upon people's mental health, or upon the development of children (particularly young children for whom a few months is a significant period of their lives) is not to say that the lockdowns weren't necessary. But to deny any effects because you recognise that there was a need for lockdowns but see such a recognition as a chud talking point is ultimately to engage in the same kind of anti-scientific thinking as anti-lockdown chuds
I will say that lockdowns definitely affected my brother and I. My family was pro lockdown, even when our society wasn’t, so we self quarantined for a year and a half, starting halfway through my senior year of highschool and ending my sophomore year of college. In my case, I missed everything freshmen use to get acclimated to campus, and lost all social intellect. It took until this year and a lot of therapy to regain some modicum of self respect, and even then I’m not to where I used to be. As for my brother, he missed all the same things but for middle-high school, and he became a germaphobe who could not leave the house. He’s since been diagnosed with ADHD-OCD.
Average rent, 2000: $602
Average teacher salary, 2000: $41,807
Median house price, 2000: $119,600
Months to save difference between recommended housing budget (30% of gross) and rent to afford 20% down-payment:
(119600*.2)/((41807/12)*.3-602) = 54. If your 5-year plan is to have a house, you get there 6 months early (not really; teachers start at a lower wage)
Average rent, 2023: $1372
Average teacher salary, 2023: $66,745
Median house price, 2023: 430,300
Same calculation:
(430300*.2)/((66745/12)*.3-1372) = 290.
It's far harder to let some asshole kid push you over the edge when you're on the path to home ownership versus when that's either never going to happen or decades away.
I think it is more covid causing brain fog, as well as them not seeing the point of trying in a dying world and getting sick of the charade of capitalist society rather than the lockdowns themselves.
Why in God's name would these kids care about playing house while the walls are caving in? Why would they respect a delusional society run by delusional adults?
They might not fully understand the nuances of the situation, but kids are smarter than people give them credit for. They know they were thrown to the wolves. They can sense that shit is collapsing and that the adults don't care about them.
My wife is a teacher currently working with pre K, but most of her time she’s worked with 4th and 5th graders. She tells me that there is definitely something going on and it was probably caused by the shutdown. It’s not that the shutdown was not necessary, but to be completely honest most people do not give a fuck about their kids development and during that time it’s hard to believe kids weren’t just on their phones and iPads the entire time watching garbage instead of being in school learning SOMETHING. She very much describes it as drug addicts having unlimited access to their drug of choice and then one day having it taken away. Of course they’re not going to adjust to the situation well. Again not saying the lockdowns weren’t necessary, but it really shows how little we're prepared for anything like Covid. I see a lot of people in this thread saying some wild shit that feels out of place with my wife’s experience at the time and also what she’s experiencing now.
Covid frying brains + kids wondering what the point of education is because there are no jobs + lib teachers not knowing how to deal with fascists or communists + teachers being terrified of losing their jobs if they say that Columbus wasn’t a saint (for instance).
I don’t see how so many people are saying this. My wife is dealing with similar problems with children as young as 4 they don’t know how to write their names let alone know what anything you’re describing even is.
Wouldn’t this be covered under covid frying people’s brains? Or are their parents too desperate and exhausted from working all the time to teach their kids to read?
From what I understand it is pretty typical for these kids to not know how to write their names yet. Like the curriculum is very much still “this is the color blue” “it is now nap time”. You still have to do everything for them they are basically still babies. But that wasn’t the point I was making I can see how that would be confusing because of the way I wrote it. It is not the fact that they can’t write their names that is concerning, it is the behavioral issues that are clearly present in kids this young because they are issues that are directly related to being born around the time lockdowns were occurring. I’ve written some of them out in other comments ITT.
I do a little work with dogs on the side and lockdown puppies often have behavioural issues
just badly socialised, more aggressive to unfamiliar men than usual. (not that surprising animals get more aggressive when scared and are often more likely to view men as a threat)
bullying smaller dogs because they couldn't be socialised as puppies etc
A lot of the same then. Some kids have fear of strangers even if it’s just a new student while others are more physically aggressive towards others and the staff. The general consensus is that this year has been the worst class the school has seen.
As a teacher, I think this sort of doomerism about adolescents is both pointless and overblown.
Inevitable result of a purposeful plan to push for home schooling which basically requires the dismantling of public school institutions. All the teacher union busting and hyper fixation on which specific books some teenagers are reading and showing up to harass teachers and administrators over non-legitimate issues broadly (CRT, etc.)
It's the cross between hyper capitalistic and hyper religious society (or rather, those who are religious are militantly religious and want to force everyone else to follow their bullshit).
The trend will continue until... well, everyone already knows.
This is in no way the fault of zoomers and younger. They are victims if anything. This is the fault of capitalism ultimately and the privatization of everything including things which SHOULD be held sacred. Education, medical care, firefighters, etc. When they get privatized (or were never public) there is no longer any incentive to retain good teachers or to even teach for teaching's sake. It's all itemized and commodified. Every kid is potential profit.
And of course the religious zealots have their own agenda which is just a race to who can come up with the most homophobic, transphobic, racist, etc. bullshit inevitably leading directly to some sort of Nazi-like Christo-fascism.
Yay
This is something that definitely feels like is happening. A LOT of teachers have quit and are quitting because of Covid and its consequences. There’s no way that doesn’t lead to more privatization and home schooling where crazy chuds start raising their kids like “proud patriots” or whatever.
It's been the plan for like 100 years, no joke.
Ever since the formation of public schooling in the US libertarians and Christians have been trying to tear it apart.
In the beginning public schooling was extremely popular due to obvious reasons. Parents generally want to see their kids get educated and do better than them in life. So the dissenting voices were ignored easily.
Since the 1960s up until today (the end of segregation- classic American moment for people to lose their shit) it's been a simmering subject. COVID and just broadly the last decade or so seems to be pushing it into a full boil.
They're smart enough to not openly push for abolishing education (usually) and that's why they push for state sponsored school vouchers which shifts funding from public -> private.
Yeah seeing the death of public school in real time is fucking wild. Especially the school voucher shit, it’s like watching the 2008 economic crisis as a Marxist and saying “WHOA DO NOT DO THAT OH MY GOD” but for public education.
being a Marxist is like being the only one who knows fire safety at an indoor fireworks show and no one listening to you.
Didn't CRT and Transphobia culture war shit get much worse during COVID Era too? Especially because of constant right wing propaganda being fed to people, lack of access to treats, people being mad at basic health measures like masks etc.
i think the there has been effects on children outside U.S. too. in many global south countries, covid resulted in children dropping out of school and working. im not from the U.S so i do not have any empirical evidence about it (because all the research on this is western-centric) but i do think 2020-2022 did fuck up children psychologically.
I suppose an easy analogy (in the US, but other countries have right wingers copying the US. Brazil is an easy example) is how right wingers set up the dominos for literal decades for the fall of legal abortion (overturning of Roe v Wade).
In that case Trump being elected and/or RGB (supreme court justice) not resigning in a timely manner under Obama weren't the reason for the overturning of abortion as a right. It was just the last piece in the tower to be knocked out causing the whole thing to collapse.
I don't disagree that covid absolutely melted brains. But it's not JUST covid in a bubble. Covid mania (and, yes, lingering disabilities or after effects from the disease itself) was just adding accelerant to a fire that right wingers have been building for, I don't even know. At least 60 years (guess which ruling they really hated? Yes, that's right, Brown v Board of Ed that forced the end of segregation. So racists said "welp, I'll pull my kids out and teach them at home!") but the anti-public school freaks have been around since the beginning of US public schooling.
It's a really hard and stressful job and you get paid really badly for it. I haven't watched the video and maybe it's just a clickbait title, but the generational framing here seems unhelpful and misleading. Teaching has had a very high percentage of people leaving the profession for a number of years now. The reason is that teachers are underpaid, overworked and honestly underappreciated. This has only gotten worse and worse as neoliberal reforms have restructured both the profession and society. That might create the appearance of 'teachers can't stand the new kinds of young people we have now', but that isn't the underlying reason for people leaving the profession
I often try to reframe the same thinking when my mother complaints about her students. It is true that for the last 2-3 years though that the kids had an especially bad behavioral track, but with the new class the consensus seems to be more that they're better behaved in a general sense. I also try to point out that her generational framing is inaccurate since they're literally children and children of any generation can be absolutely awful. I also try to point out that in general most of the families that "aren't involved" likely aren't lazy, but instead overwhelmed with keeping above water that enforcing education becomes a lot more difficult.
Then there's the job itself, she's usually putting in 10 hours a day at school, brings home work some times, they don't get the planning periods they need, shortstaffing sometimes requires them to cover other teachers' classes, the special education department was gutted with them mainlining all but the most disabled of those students, they're constantly making changes in processes that really have no need beyond some administrator looking like they're doing something which leads to things needing complete reworks, when administration comes around they'll either spout out empty platitudes or just mostly ignore anything of import, administration will tear teachers down for not being a textbook teacher, and it goes on and on with stuff I don't see coming home. For all of this, my mother hasn't gotten a raise in like a decade now, she's at the top of the pay scale and at best she gets cost of living increases that maybe amount to a few hundred a year. I make more than her at the bottom of most nursing pay scales. When I first started at the hospital I made 28/hr, I make 40/hr outside of the hospital and make more than my mother that works more than I do because she's salaried. She also has way more qualifications than I do, I have a 2 year degree, she's Masters+.
All this is to say that in a similar fashion, I saw the video, thought the framing was reductive, and didn't click. Maybe they explain it better, but the generational framing when there's so much more to it, even if just clickbait, means that they're not properly looking at the underlying problems.
Completely! The demands made on teachers are completely untenable. My ex worked in a primary school and they would go to work at 7am, get home at 8pm, and then work the whole of Sunday doing marking/prep. They ended up leaving the profession because the stress made it physically impossible for them to continue. Most public sector workers are compensated appallingly, especially when you consider how important the work they do is. It's such a waste of resources to spend all this money and time training people for a profession only to place them in conditions where 50% burn out within 5 years. The Graeber argument about the inverse relationship between the usefulness of labour and its compensation feels so accurate
The YT comments complain/mention everything but that the system in which the parents exist they are workers first, child makers second, and actual child rearers a distant third.
you simply can't have widespread failure of the system without it being a problem of the system
if people en masse fail to use the system properly then the system should have accounted for that. For example if a business requires you to make all orders by app but no one does and they all try and order at the counter the system is wrong and just needs to let them order at the counter. The system should be designed to fit the reality of how people try and use it
If we relly on parents to help their kids with their homework and teach them to read but parents are in large numbers either too tired or just not interested enough to do so then we need some kind of after school state funded program to do it.
The fact that conservative erosion of the US' education system has continued unabated throughout my entire lifetime makes me want to roll over and crumble to dust, but that's not a thing I can do
school system is fucked up from cuts. Don't entirely agree with the way the song puts it but it's the rough idea
real uptick in gangs grooming children to sell drugs lately too
We need a site wide rule against this generation xyzwuh bullshit tbh, i mean look at this thread.
Lockdowns may be part of it, but I think that like nurses, teachers are collectively hitting a breaking point of being underpaid and understaffed where a lot of them just don't see the career as viable anymore.
The lockdowns caused a lot of stress, with people being put out of work and all sorts of shit we didn't deal with in a good way. All public help was temporary and never guaranteed in the first place. Rich people got a lot of free money in forgiven loans, though, so... cool?
Anywhere form 1-2 million people in the US died, 1 million are officially covid plus another million or so excess deaths, and several more million were disabled or got hit with severe long term health issues. Do you think having something like that happen to a caregiver would improve or hurt academic performance?
This includes a lot of teachers, as people who work with the public were hit pretty hard. Basically everyone who works a public job has been pushed to do more with less across the board, because there has been less workers to go around. If the bosses think they can get away with less workers they'll work you more until things start failing. "Aw shucks, it's a shame you have to do the job of three people, but nobody wants to work anymore. :(" This might be a bigger problem with GOP dominated states because they actually want public schools to fail.
Covid also causes brain damage and we are mass exposing kids to it, who then expose their families to it, thinking it's NBD because it's relatively rare for them to die from it. Who cares, whatever, it's just a cold. What would mass brain damage in kids look like anyway? Behavior problems? Memory problems? Impossible to say. What even is brain damage, anyway? They probably just need some tough love.
Also, If you look at the stats, some states did better than others, it doesn't necessarily show the lockdowns themselves caused all the problems. IIRC, Florida was doing worse than California in terms academic scores, even though Florida ended the lockdowns ASAP. California scores improved slightly during lockdowns. Every state had to scramble and had to figure something out with little guidance and some of them did poorly.
