Students not going to school is becoming a mental health crisis
Effect > Cause
As a journalist, I really hate it when my soda foaming up and exploding causes the can to get super shaken up.
Imagine getting that so backwards. Students aren’t going to school because there is a mental health crisis, which is caused by sending them back to school during a plague and tell them every day how likely it is they’ll get shot while they’re there.
Watch them blame lockdowns instead of being forced to return during a pandemic and school shootings
I'm skeptical of this being pandemic related solely because I never see kids wearing masks at all, but obviously they don't have the money to buy them for themselves if their parents aren't masking and are more likely to just stay home in general so it's hard to know for sure. I haven't seen or heard a single teenager be like "it's fucked up everyone's pretending COVID disappeared when it didn't". I think anxiety is just getting worse in general and the pandemic and greedflation et al. are causing their home lives to be worse.
Consider that damaged health from Covid infections might be a factor
We also can’t discount the role advancing technology is having in atomizing and alienating kids from one another. I think it compounds the mental health crisis and especially adds to social anxiety
“it’s fucked up everyone’s pretending COVID disappeared when it didn’t”
i mean who hears anything beyond ironic jokes about school shootings until one happens and they do a march all the adults ignore?
Not all homeschoolers are religious weirdos. My kids have been pressured to return to school, but they refuse to go. I was miserable at school as a kid, pretended to be sick many times so I could stay home, and would have been overjoyed if I could have just stayed there and studied on my own. I might have been drawn to high school for hormonal reasons but elementary and middle school were terrible.
Now, is it possible to like a thing religious weirdos also like without exposing a deep deficit within you? Of course! I’m sure many of them like pizza because pizza is fucking awesome. Shit, Donald Trump loves shiny shit, and so do I. But if you’ve just entered a room, and you find yourself surrounded by religious weirdos, you should probably ask yourself how you got there and what you need to do to leave.
(Unless, of course, you’re there on purpose. In which case, congrats on finding your tribe.)
Is this really a new phenomenon or something that has always existed that they're sticking a name to?
Like, did this exist when schools were shittier places where teachers would punch students that misbehaved?
Is it created by social media? Or is something else in society uniquely creating it now?
Serious question.
Afaik truancy has always been a problem that, surprise surprise, correlates strongly with race and poverty in the usa.
Oh, it happened. But you weren't allowed to protest or you would get beaten up. You just went to school every day and pretended everything was fine at 14.
How many old people come out nowadays with their abuse stories at school and say "it sucked, but that's how it was back then"? We didn't suddenly become snowflakes who can't take hardships, we always knew what it was, but we just weren't allowed to call it out.
So like, what are the rates?
If I was running this group the very first thing I would be looking to do is establish whether this is a crisis or whether they're just part of a crowd that has always existed but hasn't been organised into any form of group that could seek political/social resolutions to the problem. It's kind of essential information.
Before you can address the problem you need to know where it really comes from, and people really aren't good judges of that. You really need to dig around.
I know multiple people whose kids are too anxious to go to school and they have to call or text their kid to coax them to school every morning. I didn't know a single family/kid like that even 15 years ago (rural area though).
School avoidance is not a concrete diagnosis and looks different in every child. Some students consistently miss a couple of days a week, while others may leave during the day
anecdotal, but my circle of friends did this in year 10 and 11
it was mostly to go do drugs and the odd burglary, but :vivian-shrug:Lmao there was a whole year where students bunked off half a day to rob a nearby industrial estate. We must have stolen thousands of dvds from that place.
In my experience it is getting worse. This behaviour has always been common in the cohort we once called "smoke pit kids", ie kids who were typically from poorer households with less support from guardians, but it's now expanding into kids from more "regular" backgrounds. (As far as I can see the rich kids are still thriving.)
Obviously letting social media companies malformed children's brains for profit + climate change is affecting mental health and we all know that. There is another factor I don't think people might have considered that's a little more subtle:
When it became normalized/encouraged for students to stay home if they feel sick, even if the symptoms were not observable to parents, there are certain students who really struggled /still struggle to use this power responsibly and have started to use it to avoid any anticipated negative interaction at school. Spotty attendance records are way up, and would you be surprised there is an overrepresentation of these types of absences on test days, or even local "feeling sick" for the blocks where there might be an assignment due?
I'm not trying to argue that this culture of staying home when sick is bad or that we shouldn't trust kids who say they're sick, but I think it sometimes goes overlooked that kids aren't smaller adults, they have brains that are still developing and some kids really struggle to use this power responsibly, instead use it as a tool for avoidance and end up digging themselves a hole.
When it became normalized/encouraged for students to stay home if they feel sick, even if the symptoms were not observable to parents, there are certain students who really struggled /still struggle to use this power responsibly and have started to use it to avoid any anticipated negative interaction at school. Spotty attendance records are way up, and would you be surprised there is an overrepresentation of these types of absences on test days, or even local “feeling sick” for the blocks where there might be an assignment due?
Can you expand on this? It's not something I'm familiar with and over here we pretty much still pack the kids off to school if they're not showing an abnormal temperature on thermometer.
Well for several years when schools were in session during the pandemic, students were (correctly) encouraged to stay home if they had any symptoms that could be consistent with having covid. However, many of these symptoms are not detectable by any exterior evaluation, like fatigue, body aches, headache, or nausea.
As a result there has been a subset of students who have taken advantage of that ambiguity and used it to stay home when they are otherwise well for many different reasons.
Ahh I see. I'm not aware of that having been a trend here but could be outside the circles involved. The majority of focus I hear on schools at the moment is teacher's strikes, particularly because they're probably the strongest union and most damaging strikes to do in the UK. Schools act as childcare allowing people to work, without schools people also stop working so a teachers strike effectively causes a knock-on general strike of sorts. Could be that this organising is overshadowing these kinds of trends being talked about.
Yeah honestly I don't think most people are aware of this pattern, which is why I mentioned it.
"The mental health infrastructure was never designed for this level of need."
psychology is a counter-revolutionary attempt to rationalize bourgeois dictatorship
To a degree. But also the ability to deal with stress is a necessity in any social order, and both higher level education and being a teenager inevitably carry a great deal of stress as part of the package. Psychology as a means of shaping humans into disposable cogs is bad. But a deep understanding of psychological experience and the ability to provision care during periods of crisis can be incredibly good.
We've built the Torment Engine and now a whole bunch of people are screaming in pain. Yes, by all means, turn off the Torment Engine. But idk if I'd argue that providing relief to its victims is counter-revolutionary. No more than a crutch is counter-revolutionary to the guy whose leg fell into a capitalist's wood chipper.
They'll never learn how to handle active shooters if they don't go to school
how the fuck can you just refuse to go to school my parents would not have tolerated that
Honestly if a student is refusing school there's not much a parent can do, whether they "tolerate" it or not
There are plenty of things a parent can do. Some good, some decidedly not so good.
I know people who simply transferred to different schools, because the social stigma they accumulated made being at the current campus unbearable. I know people who showed up to school with bruises, because their parents thought physical abuse was a productive motivator. The parental toolbag has a lot in it.
But when the school campuses are being turned into these ugly, miserable, claustrophobic dungeons, the lengths parents need to go to in order to get kids back in there get longer and longer. Also, there are parents who may look at a campus as so trauma-inducing that they refuse to send their kids back.
Plenty of parents will happily write a sick-letter in or otherwise provide cover for a kid that's going through some shit and can't bare showing up in the classroom again.
You wrote a lot of things that don't relate to my comment. You shouldn't assume that because a student is refusing school that a parent "tolerates" that and hasn't desperately tried many different interventions, in my experience the parents in these situations are at their wit's end, having tried everything they can think of.
At the end of all of these interventions a child may still refuse to go to school and at that point a parent is not really able to just make them go.
At the end of all of these interventions a child may still refuse to go to school
If you want to go all in, there's CEDU and the Behavioral Modification Boarding Schools.
The kind of place where they literally grab you out of your bed in the middle of the night and drag you into a van.
This is an increasingly common option for parents, particularly wealthy parents, with disobedient kids.
