What's Happening to Students?
Here's the latest news from the zombie wars
A frustrated teacher recently took to social media with a desperate warning:
You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….
They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
They just care about the next fix—because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.
They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.
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How bad is it for educators right now?
Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.
This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:
I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021….I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn't comprehended the material before, but hadn't faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn't care….
Since 2021 I've been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn't performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.
I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.
I’ve made a similar claim in this article—where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.
Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing—and at an accelerated pace.
Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis—and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists—shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.
This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.
Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.
Below are more ugly numbers from another in-depth study—which looks at how children spend their day. It reveals that children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens.
YouTube usage for this group has more than doubled in just four years.
Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles.
In other words, these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system.
This is why teachers are speaking out. They see the fallout every day in their classrooms.
I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”
But that’s just sophistry and spin.
Parents, for example, have no doubts about the danger—because they see it happening right before their eyes.
But let’s give tech companies some credit. They have improved one skill among current students—cheating, which has now reached epic proportions.
The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!
The professor caught them in a simple way. He simply uploaded a copy of his final exam on to the web, but with wrong answers.
“Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class,” he adds. But “40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions.”
Another teacher shares a similar lament: “I used to teach students. Now I catch ChatGPT cheats.”
I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.
Tech companies know exactly what they’re doing.
Microsoft researchers recently published a study showing that excessive use of new tech leads to a “deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
Theses innovations “deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared.”
Facebook did similar research, with similarly frightening results—and they worked hard to bury the results. We weren’t supposed to see the charts below. But a brave whistleblower took photos and leaked them to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, an internal study at OpenAI shows that the two most commons uses of AI by students are (1) writing papers and (2) avoiding reading assignments. Other popular uses are answering exam questions and solving math problems.
None of this is a secret—the dysfunctional impact of new tech on students has been documented by study after study. Youngsters are under assault by tech leaders.
That’s how they meet their profit targets.
I only have one positive angle on this.
People are now aware. The blinders have been lifted from the public’s eyes.
Big tech has destroyed its credibility—and all the billionaires in Silicon Valley can’t restore it. They can buy lobbyists and co-opt “experts” with their cash. But the evil they are doing is now apparent to all unbiased observers.
Maybe they can stall change in Washington, D.C. by controlling politicians—at least for the time being. But they can’t stop the backlash that’s rising at a grass roots level.
That’s why the response to zombie culture is happening away from the limelight—in homes, schools, city council meetings, town hall gatherings, and other places where parents, teachers, and concerned individuals gather.
But it would be wise for our political leaders to take notice, and give their support. Even better, I’d like to see the leading tech companies admit that there’s a huge problem here, and they must fix it—because they caused it in the first place.
Do you think that’s too much to hope for? Do you doubt that the CEOs of Apple, Meta, Alphabet, X, and other tech empires will help us avert the coming crisis?
They might not have any other option. Their own management teams and employees are also parents, and just might rebel.
There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example.
And I’m convinced many of them will.
Yes, the palace guards are more powerful than the emperor. So we have legitimate reasons to hope that Silicon Valley itself might someday heal itself—and thus help heal the victims of their overreaching.
In the meantime, we should continue to push at the local levels. We need to find programs and initiatives that work, and share them. We need to raise awareness. And we need to do what we can to protect those most at risk.
Others will join us in time.
And let me make one final plea to those working inside these tech empires. Raise your voices, start a petition, sign an open letter, speak out in private and public. Push back!
There are others like you who are just waiting from someone brave enough to take the lead. That person could be you.
@ted -- I run a 21 year old nonprofit that teaches music in juvenile prisons. I echo the experience that those kids are more interested in learning and no access to cell phones is a definite factor. All our students are enrolled in High School while incarcerated and I was initially shocked at their interest in school work. One student explained to me that having less to focus on has made him realize that learning can be fun and valuable. We use music as a vehicle to teach life skills and working with these kids has been a life changing experience for me. Here's a 90 second trailer for a mini documentary I'm working on about our program called "Beats, Bars & Beyond": https://youtu.be/4dDLZVEoqBQ
I also notice an insensitivity to events around most of these phone zombies. The other day on a subway train, when it jerked forward after a stop, an elderly woman took a tumble, landing on her back. My wife and I went to her aid as the majority of others in the vicinity either stayed glued to their phones, or they only looked up for a second or two. No one else lifted a finger. Luckily the woman was all right, but witnessing such indifference has stayed with us as much as the fall of the woman. Strange times.