作者：Adam Hatch
My school Englist was featured in a recent article in the Kaohsiung Times. Eryk Smith, who was nice enough to come and judge our recent speech and essay contest, wrote a piece for us about the contest and about our program overall.
He had some great observations that I wish I could communicate more broadly to parents and students. I am convinced that if more people knew what we were about, more people would be on board.
Mr. Miyagi was the best teacher.
I’ll start with attention span. I think all adults, since the dawn of time, have complained about kids being unable to focus as well as we would like. Then, the advent of smartphones and social media are the biggest antagonists to teen focus we’ve ever seen.
However, I also want to point out how goddamn busy kids are now and the amount of pressure they face. I work with privileged students who will all go on to major universities, and all they want to do is complain about the studying volume and homework load they have. The way we do school now is to pile work onto kids, too much of it not being particularly worthwhile, and then when they just churn out high volumes of low quality, teachers grade them harshly and parents get grumpy at them.
But what else are they supposed to do? There are only so many hours in a day. Isn’t it unfair to expect kids to spend so much time outside of school preoccupied with school? Of course the work they do is going to be unfocused and they aren’t going to do enough reading – they don’t have any time to slow down and reflect and figure out why the work they are doing might be worthwhile (except as something they need to crank out in order to be “college-ready”).
And that’s just the rich kids. Kids in the US and around the world are seeing education budgets slashed, teachers are leaving the profession in droves because the standards are stupid and the salaries are laughable, and instead of trying to improve anything, misguided professors seem to want to just double down on high-stakes standardized testing, like that isn’t one of the roots of the problem in the first place.
In this academic environment, we are wringing our hands over kids using a tool that gives them a measure of relative freedom and alleviates their workload. If you want kids to focus, give them less shit to focus on – don’t do the lazy thing and blame AI.
And what about mental health and intellect?
I think the most honest definition of intelligence is the capacity to operate adeptly in the environment in which you exist, and so I wonder if kids leaning on AI isn’t just an honest decision about what the environment we have made demands of these kids.
Or you get the FIRE fucks and the moral panic around social media and parents screaming at kids they are mentally ill and anxious because they like to watch TikTok dances. Don’t get me wrong, I think social media is hard on kids, but not always for the most obvious reasons, and I don’t think the move is to condemn another piece of technology that gives kids a brief bit of respite and perceived control in a culture that has its proverbial boot on their necks.
Let me say clearly that AI is a problem for students and for education, and I am not advocating for unfettered usage in classrooms. I know that social media is dangerous in many circumstances. I can feel that kids now are less capable of focusing and engaging in deep reading than in the past.
But I think if we want to fix those problems, we need to take a harder look at how the classrooms, curricula, and conditions that kids face are exacerbating the learning problems we are blaming largely on teen tech use.
Kids need less pressure. They need more freedom and control over their time. They need teachers who are not just good at assigning work, but also good at assessing what work is going to be worthwhile. Sometimes they need to scroll social media and play video games and screw around with friends. If they can do all that, watch their focus and mental health and reading ability improve.