The Anxious Generation - One teachers experience

After reading Jonathan Haidt's latest book, The Anxious Generation, I was left wondering: Is it really this bad?

Having worked as an educator with elementary-aged students (K-8) for over 15 years, I paid close attention to Haidt's data, especially for ages 10-14. Throughout the book, I juxtaposed my experience with his findings to make sense of my day-to-day experiences as a middle school teacher. Often, data-driven books like *The Anxious Generation* highlight trends across demographics but fail to capture the nuances of daily life in the classroom. This is understandable; no author can account for every variable when proposing a hypothesis. Instead, we rely on large data sets to determine trends.

The trends presented in the book are indeed disheartening. Teens and pre-teens, both male and female, are experiencing a mental health crisis. Haidt connects this trend to the rise of the social media generation, who now spend the majority of their lives on a device.

So, what does this look like on the ground from a teacher's perspective?

I've often suggested that the pandemic was a significant factor in the decline of Gen Z's mental and physical health. The uncertainty around the role of school in the early days of the pandemic created a chaotic environment, prompting questions with no clear answers. I remember pondering:

What are the minimum requirements for online learning?
Should it be asynchronous or synchronous?
Should students be required to participate in some capacity?
Do they need to have their cameras on?
Should they be graded?

Amid the chaos, norms for online learning were formed across Canada and the US. Younger students were taught synchronously in a traditional style, while older kids had opportunities to work asynchronously. There were problems with both, but we hoped that throwing enough spaghetti at the wall would at least stave off some of the learning loss. As expected, students with attentive parents, access to resources, and a reasonable sense of self-discipline soared above those missing one or more of these variables.

Many students suffered alone, inevitably leading to an increase in anxiety and depression, much of which still affects them today. However, something happened during the pandemic that many educational leaders missed: 

Students learned that school was optional.

The middle school students I taught during the pandemic checked out when forced to learn online. In some cases, I never heard from them at all, nor did they respond to emails. They never got punished for this. When deadlines came and went, I was not allowed to fail students. At the time, it seemed the right thing to do. However, as more assignment cycles passed without submissions, it started to stick. Students realized that school was optional.

When things returned to normal, the vibe of school changed. Students seemed less motivated to participate in school and definitely less intrinsically motivated overall. It's hard to pin down the exact vibe, but it seemed that the wind had been taken out of their sails. It was almost as if they didn't know why they needed to be in school other than their parents making them.

Along with the wave of indifference came a tsunami of identity crises that shook the foundations of school cohesion. Middle school students began identifying themselves in the third person, using they/them pronouns. Some went further to identify as the opposite sex. It wasn't just one or two; it was more than half in some classes. Just a mere two months prior, they had been wonderful, loving students with little support required. Now, they all seemed to have issues—anxiety, depression, ADHD—and were happy to tell you about it and even more excited to use it as a way to avoid actual school work.

In times of rapid, drastic change, real leaders emerge. Unfortunately, in many cases, including mine, leadership embraced this new world with little critical thought about the long-term consequences.

Students were allowed to hide their identities from their parents, meaning they could show up at school and change their name and gender, and teachers were not allowed to mention it outside the school walls. Students would come to school with what appeared to be cuts on their arms, and all I could do was hand the case to the leadership.

The trap that school leadership fell into was directly connected to one of the great untruths from The Coddling of the American Mind: "Always trust your feelings." As Haidt and Lukianoff explain, ideas like "personal truth" and "lived experience" too often place feelings on the same level as facts. Feelings, of course, are subject to countless cognitive biases. Facts are facts because they're exempt from feeling.

When we let young people, who are in the midst of puberty's emotional rollercoaster, believe their feelings are the truth, we end up with students identifying as different names and pronouns at school. A leadership team that supports this untruth creates a negative feedback loop where anything goes at any time because students feel like it should. As Katharine Birbalsingh suggests, students need tight guardrails because the world is a big, unknown place. Having boundaries allows them to explore within those boundaries while mitigating danger. This doesn't mean smothering them with rules; it means enforcing the rules to provide the 'safety' that students seek.

Educators have let students' feelings drive their learning, resulting in a curriculum focused on student motivations rather than school goals. A great example is the reduction in the rigor of mathematical education. In California schools, algebra has been removed from the 8th-grade curriculum. In Ontario, 9th grade has become de-streamed (meaning no advanced classes). The goal wasn't to punish the smart but to help motivate the bottom-of-the-curve students who may "hit their stride" as they mature. It was thought that difficult math would turn students off the curriculum before they matured enough to "really get it." Unfortunately, there is no statistical evidence supporting this assumption. Jo Boaler, the Stanford math educator who led this charge, has recently come under fire for manipulating data on this very issue.

Another important variable is social media. The Anxious Generation beautifully describes the overt effects of social media on kids' mental health, so I won't delve deeply into it. (As I write this, my 10-year-old is endlessly scrolling YouTube shorts on his tech time. More about this in another post.) However, there are downstream effects that the book doesn't explore enough. One significant change I've noticed over the years is groupthink. While the book mentions the susceptibility of females to groupthink, it is a larger issue than we imagine. Many middle school students will be captured by groupthink in an attempt to fit in. It has become increasingly ideological over the years. Pronoun usage is the most obvious example. Often, those students who use different pronouns do so as a cluster of friends rather than being the only one in a friend group to do so. In my experience, it's the students traditionally labeled as part of the outgroup. This makes intuitive sense—one way to differentiate yourself is to change your identity entirely.

The speed and intensity of this change is directly influenced by social media. From my experience, there is a direct correlation between the amount of time someone spends online and the degree to which they echo a specific doctrine. Students who spend time on platforms like TikTok are driven by algorithms into feeds where their ideas are easily validated without criticism or critical thought. When these ideas are brought into school, teachers are forced to either validate, ignore, or push back. In our current educational environment, validation seems to be the only viable pathway. Ignoring is something I've practiced with the intention of protecting my job. Pushing back is the ultimate no-no and, in the one time I tried, landed me in a meeting with the head of the school.

What can educators do to ensure students have an environment that both challenges their learning and makes them feel secure?

One idea is to remove the focus on lived experience and instead focus on innovation. By innovation, I mean inspiring students to create concrete solutions to issues. For example, take history as it is, and instead of trying to rewrite it, have students focus on the innovations that made the world the place it is today. Slavery, or in Canada's case, the treatment of Indigenous people, is a hot topic in education. When teaching these issues, the focus is almost entirely on the disadvantages of the legacy of these systems. Teaching students that the legacy of the system is inherent today and is essentially stuck unless we make drastic 'equity' changes is not an effective means to change that system. Certainly, teaching the dark side of history shouldn't be ignored in education. However, it would be much more beneficial to students to show how changes were made to improve the lives of disadvantaged people. Britain outlawed the slave trade and used its powerful navy to enforce the rule against other sovereign nations. Without this action, slavery would have taken much longer to dissolve.

In Canada, students should be taught the policies that were put in place to help support the Indigenous people to thrive. These include tax benefits, grants, and other government programs implemented federally to correct some of the misgivings. The students can then examine the success rate of these programs and develop strategies to continue to integrate marginalized individuals into society. The trouble with only showing the dark side of history is that it inevitably leads to activism in the form of protest. When students are taught that everything is systemic and cannot be changed, it often results in very binary thinking. Sure, this can be effective in some cases. However, it is such a common tactic now that its effectiveness has been greatly eroded. Blocking traffic in the name of climate action ends up losing public support, not gaining it. Teachers who promote this methodology would argue that 'awareness' of the issue is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, the internet age has created an environment where we have theme days, weeks, months, and even *seasons* for all kinds of issues. We've over-saturated the attention market.

But is it really that bad?

The culture inside educational institutions has changed enough that it is increasingly difficult to challenge ideas constructively. The trouble I have experienced is related to the degree and intensity to which ideas and concepts are implemented. For example, our school raises the pride flag at the beginning of Pride Month in a school-wide ceremony. I objected to having students from K-6 attend this ceremony, citing that it is largely irrelevant to their stage of development and may cause confusion, especially if some of these issues haven't been discussed at home. The blowback I received from what I thought was a reasonable question was intense. The organizers of the event couldn't fathom why I would question anything about it and felt personally offended that I offered such a suggestion.

This is the difference between five years ago and today. People are so entrenched in their beliefs that it is almost impossible to have a difficult conversation. The result is that these ideas do end up going too far. In one heinous example, a grade 9 student stood up at a school-wide ceremony during a sombre assembly reflecting on the Montreal Massacre and said she was scared to leave the house because white men were going to rape her. Instead of being reprimanded, she was celebrated as brave. The slippery slide into aggressive activism happens when we don't put up appropriate guardrails for students. Educators have created an environment where students' thoughts and feelings are paramount in the classroom. It is believed that unless kids feel safe, they will not learn. This would certainly be appropriate for the pre-internet generation, but in today's student body, who are chronically online, it doesn't work because they end up bringing their polarizing beliefs into the classroom without any challenge from the adults in the room. 

Educational leaders need to decide what exactly the purpose of school should be. What should the students look like when they graduate? What are the non-negotiable skills they should have? How will you know they have those skills? Once these questions are answered, you can work backward to find the classes, programs, and extracurriculars needed to produce high-functioning students who are prepared to enter the next phase of their educational or life journey. When you use this lens to view the purpose of education, you quickly realize that safetyism, pronoun usage, and critical social justice are not key initiatives for producing flourishing students. Educators often need reminding that we are not substitute parents and certainly don't hold the moral high ground over them.