[catapart]

Yeah; this all rings pretty sound to me. I've worked with 14-17 year olds most of my adult life and everything comes down to how the kid does in their "home" environment. More specifically, how their closest people treat them, rather than any action they are taking.

Kids - even 17 year olds - are infantalized and treated as if they don't have anything to contribute. They are "supposed" to just do what they are told and follow a "normal" path of going to school and then getting a job and working. A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge. A job that will force them to wake up early and commute late and leave them with no time or energy to engage in the hobbies that they never actually cultivated because doing metalworking is too loud and doing programming is wasting time on a computer and flight training is too expensive and, and, and, and...

The amount of success I've had just VALIDATING kids is fucking incredible. Talk to them as if their idea is worth hearing, and then ask them questions that make them challenge their own ideas. Whether it's about a project they think would be cool, or about how they feel about something that happened with their parents. When they can devote time to think about it, without feeling like discussing it is an attack on anyone or an imposition to the listener - they sort shit out just like anyone else.

And whenever I find myself kind of marveling at - say - an 11 year old speaking with what feels like emotional intelligence beyond their years, I remember that in the early 1900s, 11 year old's might have been fucking floor managers at a textile industry, or pickaxe-swinging coal miners. Kids are entirely capable at 11 years old and it only comes out if you engage them in ways that hone that capability. Which should obviously NEVER be forced or coerced labor. But you can talk to them like they are adults.

In any case, I've been mentoring kids since before cell phones and not a damn thing has changed. If the kid's distracted, you don't need to worry about what is able to distract them - you need to worry about why they were bored enough (or preoccupied) to get distracted in the first place. And that's really the heart of the whole thing: people really want for the kids or the "mentally infirm" or the OTHER to have to do better when the simple truth is that the person needs to be doing better. The parent, the teacher, the mentor, the friend; they have to be meeting the HUMAN BEING (who happens to be a child) at their level rather than feeling disappointed that the kid didn't meet them at some other level.

[bluGill]

I suspect you are cherry-picking. Not that your observations are wrong, but your validating kids seems like something that is very important a set of kids that I could see someone having a job dealing with, but that doesn't mean all kids need that - the set that doesn't isn't the set you will be working with.

> A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge

We need to be careful here. While kids should have some opportunities for what they are interested in, the world doesn't need many professional video game or sport players. We need to force kids who are really interested in some things to learn skills that the world will need once they grow up. We are not in a "post scarcity" world, and there is no reason to think we will be, so they need to learn useful skills to contribute to society. It doesn't take long to teach someone to run a pick-axe (assuming they are physically able and we don't care much about safety) - but glad the world needs skills that are much harder to learn.

[catapart]

The kids I worked with were engaged in an entertainment opportunity, rather than some kind of mentorship for troubled youths, or scholarship. I worked with posh little kiddos and literal charity cases (kids enrolled via charity organizations) and everything in between. Some kids were "forced" to be there, some kids weren't. Some kids were physically healthy, some kids were ailed.

I won't belabor the point, but while I will always provide for bias in my consideration, my sample subjects are the absolute least of my concerns. It was a wide enough variety, and I've compared it to enough adult-oriented psychoanalytical literature, that I feel comfortable speaking confidently about it.

As far as needing to be careful, I agree! We should ALWAYS be careful when doing things in the interest of other people and children especially. I fully support mandatory learning because even aside from practical skills, an ignorant populace is empirically more likely to foment and tolerate a fascist government. I think kids should be forced to learn all kinds of things, and a much wider variety of things than we currently teach. Where I make the distinction is that I think they should also be ALLOWED to learn the things they WANT to learn. By which I mean we shouldn't just tolerate it, we should make explicit space for it. Whatever it is. And that can be distasteful to a lot of people, but the situation - now - is that a kid CAN learn about anything they want to learn about, via the internet, so your option is to facilitate that curiosity into either satisfied disinterest or an upstanding pursuit, or to calcify it as a taboo.

It may be audacious to talk to kids in graphic or sensational terms about violence, but when their school getting shot up is a real daily possibility, it's disingenuous to NOT talk about it. THEY will be talking about it. So when YOU don't talk about it, they can feel how artificial it seems, just like anyone else.

So, yes: learn arithmetic, so you can learn algebra, so you can learn geometry, so you can learn physics. But if we have to cut chemistry to make room for some individual learning time, let's do it. Shove the practical parts of it into a cooking class and leave anything more complex to higher or elective ed.

[sceptic123]

Yes, I feel that a lot of things touted are the symptoms and not the causes. Interested to know if the quantity of kids you are seeing having problems is increasing though?

[catapart]

Well, for starters, I haven't been doing that kind of work since just before COVID, so I don't know if my metrics would still mean anything.

But, that aside, it's an odd thing to try to contextualize. Do I THINK that there were more kids that were "troubled"? No, anecdotally, I don't think I saw anything that I would consider alarming. But I never really saw any kid as "troubled". Just "focusing on the wrong thing" or "thinking about it in a confusing way", or "trying to reconcile two incompatible ideas/philosophies", etc.

Meanwhile, my peers would complain about things being "worse" or specific kids being "unable to work with" or whatever. But when the kids were shuffled and it was my time to work with them, I didn't really have any issues. There were kids trying to tear down the walls, sure, but that's a lot of fun if you chase it. And, more importantly, it's physically exhausting. So sooner than later, all of the kids just want to chill. And once they're chill, they like to discuss all kinds of things. Especially if they can be related to the physical activities they were just doing. And since kids are generally ignorant, you can take all kinds of winding paths of rhetoric to link one idea to another, and they tend to stay excited to chase the logic (learning is fun; it's part of why we play video games).

So, answering your question is kind of odd because while I would say "no", that may not be your standard of measurement and I'm just one anecdote anyway. If the statistics say it's getting "worse", I can trust that, personally. Just - like you said - I tend to think of the "worse" as describing the cause, not the symptom.