It's not just in schools that these children are misbehaving. It's anywhere. Speaks to basic parenting disintegrating. Schools deserve a lot of the blame, but if the child was at home during COVID, who was not teaching them manners? Parents. Schools deserve a lot of flack, but you can't blame them for kids being disrespectful.
It’s the phones and access daily, minute by minute, to online disrespectful behavior. They are drinking in all the disrespect they see online.
I work in a high school and teach social skills groups. It used to be just my autistic students who needed help understanding social norms. Now I feel like most students could benefit from my groups. Many of my own kids’ friends in middle school and high school won’t even look me in the eye when I address them. But that starts at a young age and teaching kids to get comfortable with politely addressing adults from the beginning.
There will come a time when another virus will upend our routines and doctors and epidemiologists will advise how best to contain it. It seems that this will occur sooner than we would like with the H5 bird flu on the rise and now infecting people (https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html). We now know that lockdowns are disruptive and costly safeguards but unless we can quickly target and isolate known cases and swiftly prevent a contagion, we will probably be in a lockdown situation once again or if not, we risk having many more millions of people die. We humans have been through this many times in our history. Viruses can be extremely deadly and humans are not invincible. How we prepare and react must be prioritized now for the good of all.
I'm very worried about what will happen if there's another pandemic so soon. Most conversations about school closures have been so one-sided (this post acknowledged the need for them but many never do).
The effects of mass lockdowns were awful, especially for kids. The alternative to lockdowns would've been worse. We should have been figuring out how to better weather pandemics so we wouldn't have to do lockdowns and could manage them better when they are necessary. Instead most are going to fight against any suggestion or guideline to change their behavior in anyway to stop the spread.
I agree, Mia. We were caught off guard by Covid-19 and didn’t prepare well as a nation for it. The CDC was underfunded and Fauci did his best but set up for failure. We didn’t imagine how to implement better solutions than massive lockdowns, which clearly reveal a lack of planning. They are like firefighters pouring water on a blaze to control it and leaving behind so much damage. That’s kind of immediate and necessary reaction need not apply to a pandemic response if we prepare but it seems we’re not.
Here in PA, we have a number of schools that are going with the YNDR approach- phones in locked bags during the day. Believe it or not, while an imperfect solution, it’s helped.
Attire is also an issue here. In the US, too many adults dress like kids, making it hard for the kids to know how to dress when they are adults.
It's tough to know how to teach my 1st grader to behave in school. I basically just let the teacher do her job of gaining his conformity and compliance. I don't have a window into the classroom, so there's not much I can do from the sidelines.
I send him to our local public school because it's the best option on balance for us. Yet I still feel somewhere deep down that traditional schooling is a "daily incident of classroom incivility" against the dignity and integrity of students.
I wonder if some of the increase in incivility directed back at schools and teachers is happening because students were exposed to even more horrible and pointless conditions via virtual schooling than they were used to from in-person schooling. Thus jaded, they probably don't give a darn now.
I do support phone-free schools. But it's kind of ironic that it's the most boring hours of life, the ones you'd most like to ignore by scrolling on a phone, that happen to have the best chance at solving the coordination problem to ban phones during.
Great article. This is roughly consistent with what I have observed. Personally, as a former homeschooler, and a member of Generation Z, I have found other homeschooled adults easier to get along with. If you have been raised without smartphones, your world perspective and values will be very different from ninety percent from the people around you. Have you thought about founding a social organization for people living without smartphones and tablets? My thoughts on the issue are outlined here.
I have two school-aged children who never did online learning (they were too young during COVID) and I wonder if there is data on how kids who were not in school during COVID behave? I would be curious how those students fare given we can’t point to online learning as affecting their behavior.
I appreciate this reminder that we have an obligation to send courteous kids into the world because I believe it’s true!!
It's not just in schools that these children are misbehaving. It's anywhere. Speaks to basic parenting disintegrating. Schools deserve a lot of the blame, but if the child was at home during COVID, who was not teaching them manners? Parents. Schools deserve a lot of flack, but you can't blame them for kids being disrespectful.
It’s the phones!!!!!!!!!
It’s the phones and access daily, minute by minute, to online disrespectful behavior. They are drinking in all the disrespect they see online.
I work in a high school and teach social skills groups. It used to be just my autistic students who needed help understanding social norms. Now I feel like most students could benefit from my groups. Many of my own kids’ friends in middle school and high school won’t even look me in the eye when I address them. But that starts at a young age and teaching kids to get comfortable with politely addressing adults from the beginning.
There will come a time when another virus will upend our routines and doctors and epidemiologists will advise how best to contain it. It seems that this will occur sooner than we would like with the H5 bird flu on the rise and now infecting people (https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html). We now know that lockdowns are disruptive and costly safeguards but unless we can quickly target and isolate known cases and swiftly prevent a contagion, we will probably be in a lockdown situation once again or if not, we risk having many more millions of people die. We humans have been through this many times in our history. Viruses can be extremely deadly and humans are not invincible. How we prepare and react must be prioritized now for the good of all.
I'm very worried about what will happen if there's another pandemic so soon. Most conversations about school closures have been so one-sided (this post acknowledged the need for them but many never do).
The effects of mass lockdowns were awful, especially for kids. The alternative to lockdowns would've been worse. We should have been figuring out how to better weather pandemics so we wouldn't have to do lockdowns and could manage them better when they are necessary. Instead most are going to fight against any suggestion or guideline to change their behavior in anyway to stop the spread.
I agree, Mia. We were caught off guard by Covid-19 and didn’t prepare well as a nation for it. The CDC was underfunded and Fauci did his best but set up for failure. We didn’t imagine how to implement better solutions than massive lockdowns, which clearly reveal a lack of planning. They are like firefighters pouring water on a blaze to control it and leaving behind so much damage. That’s kind of immediate and necessary reaction need not apply to a pandemic response if we prepare but it seems we’re not.
Here in PA, we have a number of schools that are going with the YNDR approach- phones in locked bags during the day. Believe it or not, while an imperfect solution, it’s helped.
Attire is also an issue here. In the US, too many adults dress like kids, making it hard for the kids to know how to dress when they are adults.
My parents would never let me be rude to them or anyone else. The current generation of parents obviously doesn't know how to stop this.
It's tough to know how to teach my 1st grader to behave in school. I basically just let the teacher do her job of gaining his conformity and compliance. I don't have a window into the classroom, so there's not much I can do from the sidelines.
I send him to our local public school because it's the best option on balance for us. Yet I still feel somewhere deep down that traditional schooling is a "daily incident of classroom incivility" against the dignity and integrity of students.
I wonder if some of the increase in incivility directed back at schools and teachers is happening because students were exposed to even more horrible and pointless conditions via virtual schooling than they were used to from in-person schooling. Thus jaded, they probably don't give a darn now.
I do support phone-free schools. But it's kind of ironic that it's the most boring hours of life, the ones you'd most like to ignore by scrolling on a phone, that happen to have the best chance at solving the coordination problem to ban phones during.
Great article. This is roughly consistent with what I have observed. Personally, as a former homeschooler, and a member of Generation Z, I have found other homeschooled adults easier to get along with. If you have been raised without smartphones, your world perspective and values will be very different from ninety percent from the people around you. Have you thought about founding a social organization for people living without smartphones and tablets? My thoughts on the issue are outlined here.
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/for-a-future-worth-living-in
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/computational-independence
Good post. There is good evidence for Gen Z being low on all of the Big Five personality traits — https://open.substack.com/pub/digitalnativesclub/p/gen-zs-personality-matters-more-than?r=av41s&utm_medium=ios
I have two school-aged children who never did online learning (they were too young during COVID) and I wonder if there is data on how kids who were not in school during COVID behave? I would be curious how those students fare given we can’t point to online learning as affecting their behavior.
I appreciate this reminder that we have an obligation to send courteous kids into the world because I believe it’s true!!