8 ms·

Students are increasingly refusing to go to school

54 points by amichail 3y ago

eh9 3y ago
Americans do schooling wrong, and kids have to worry about getting shot on top of being overworked. I wouldn’t feel incentivized to go to school either.
- YellOh 3y ago
  Yup. From the article: > Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance. That's not a "condition" and shouldn't be de facto medicalized. Treat anxiety when it doesn't match reality, sure, but there are plenty of perfectly logical reasons for students to resist school as it currently exists.
- rajin444 3y ago
  School shootings are still insanely rare. When you account for high crime areas the likelihood of an average kid experiencing a school shooting is so low it should make you question anyone trying to make it seem otherwise.
  - citizenkeen 3y ago
    But the shooter drills are incredibly common. Just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean children aren't often being forced to think about it happening.
  - c00lio 3y ago
    While outright shootings might be rare, bullying by fellow students and teachers is common. Shootings might just be the straw that breaks the camels back.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    > When you account for high crime areas What does this mean? Kids in high crime areas are still kids, you still have to count them when they get shot. The harm of a school shooting is certainly not contained to the specific individuals who got shot either, which if one of these has happened near you you know. Everyone at that school and to some extent the entire city is affected socially and psychologically. They are a particularly powerful terrorism for this reason.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      "School shooting" is a polysemous phrase. There's the very literal version--a shooting that happens at a school--but also a more specific one that refers to a much rarer situation--a lone kid consciously plans to go in and shoot a lot of people en masse, as a kind of suicide that is intended to leave a permanent presence on a community that the kid viewed as having wronged them in some way. The former is much more relevant for policy making, but in public discourse the latter plays the disproportionate, defining role. OP is frustrated by that vacillation. School shooter drills are almost irrelevant for the modal literal school shooting, but they inflict psychological damage on students and even create the archetype of the statistically rarer type in the public imagination.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Not sufficiently rare enough to avoid transforming education in a myriad of ways, from clear backpacks to endless drills to metal detectors at the door to armed people in body armor walking around. And the idea of having to account for "high crime areas" as if it is a normal thing for a subset of the population to be dealing with guns on a regular basis in schools is a very American attitude.
  - yboris 3y ago
    This may be akin to the craze of fear of terrorism that swept the general public after September 11th. I found that craze to be entirely irrational, but it would hardly be appropriate for the same individuals to see their kids as being particularly irrational, if their fear of being shot is real. As far as I can tell, fear of being shot is not the primary factor why students don't want to go to school. The article, for example, doesn't mention global warming / climate change (our planet burning) or AI (possible humanity ending). How incentivized would you be to spend your youth working hard for a future that might not exist?
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > overworked From what I understand, the Japanese K-12 system makes the US system look like Disneyland. They do have kids out of high school that are quite good with STEM stuff, but I have heard that bullying is a big problem. As I am a bit "on the spectrum," my grade school years were absolutely awful. I suspect a lot of folks here can relate, but we have a way of attracting bullies that seems innate. It's crazy. I did enjoy tech school, though, and have done fairly well in the working world.
mschuster91 3y ago
No surprise given the alarming amount of shooting incidents, teachers being banned from discussing certain topics (LGBT, religion, sexuality, history) under threat of losing their license or worse, completely nutty "zero-tolerance" policies, completely overworked teachers, outdated teaching methods, way too much homework, dilapidated school buildings, the pressure from parents (particularly for single children that have to turn out perfect) to make good grades to ensure good career perspectives... if I had to go to school today, I'd drop out as well - and I'm German, we have everything but the first two points as well.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
Interesting that they don’t mention pressures associated with schooling, such as the pressure to get into a good college bleeding into every aspect of the academic experience, or the school shooter drills now normalized. But they do mention anxiety, lol
- foxyv 3y ago
  I was browsing the left side of the internet on my second YouTube profile and ran into Zoe Bee talking about grading and motivation. The takeaway was that it is more about controlling students than education. I think 99% of the anxiety I experienced as a teenager was frustration about the insane levels of control that children are placed under. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew If I had kids of my own I think I would encourage them to skip the last years of high school and just get an online degree if they didn't enjoy themselves. Maybe look into taking community college courses instead after getting a GED. There are so many better options now.
- wingspar 3y ago
  School shooter drills are the modern version of 'duck and cover drills' from the 50's and 60's. https://www.britannica.com/topic/duck-and-cover https://www.britannica.com/topic/duck-and-cover
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Totally understandable. When I was of school age (last millennium) every morning I had a stomach filled with dread. School is a miserable experience of judgement and pressure. I didn't feel like I had the option not to go or I can see myself falling into the same cycle of anxiety and avoidance, especially if I'd had to experience the chaos these kids have had.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I imagine this varies from person to person. Back in the 1980's in the U.S., I found junior high (grades 7-8) pretty unpleasant, but I really enjoyed high school (grades 9-12).
- zx8080 3y ago
  What the hell are they doing to pupils at schools in the US?! I mean, literally, how are the US schools differ from the other countries ones? Please share something, as it's not clear at all for those non-US citizens.
  - V1ndaar 3y ago
    Huh, I went to school in Germany and can relate pretty well with them.
    - jamal-kumar 3y ago
      From what I understand, German school is even more demanding in terms of how they drive you to do well or lose benefits. I can only imagine the stress of things like getting demoted from Gymnasium [1] after not performing well enough due to life stresses during a critical developmental phase in life, or not making Abitur [2] qualifications and not getting that free post secondary. Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
jovial_cavalier 3y ago
I skipped most of high school. I didn't have a condition. High school was bullshit and pointless. Some people expect me to be repentant for this now that I'm on the wrong side of 25, but I'm not. I was right. It was a waste of my time and I minimized my exposure to idiots who thought they had power over my future. Maybe instead of asking what's wrong with these kids that they don't want to go to school, ask what's wrong with the schools that kids don't want to go.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  If you truly skipped most of high school and succeeded, then you're the exception. Most people that take that route end up in a dead-end job, prison, drug addiction, homelessness, or endless other problems. Sure, school isn't perfect and has its issues, but kids skipping school is a big problem.
  - jovial_cavalier 3y ago
    It doesn't matter whether or not being able to get away with it is the norm. If a large cohort of kids are skipping high school, it is likely something wrong with the schools. Maybe we should consider reforming them to be less soul crushing and awful?
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      Of course, people should try their best to fix schools, but in the meantime, kids must attend..
      - jovial_cavalier 3y ago
        Why?
      - YellOh 3y ago
        Why? I feel like the burden should be on the institution trying to waste >1000 hrs per year of someone's time, rather than the person that just wants to not participate in the system.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> Demsky sought help from educators, doctors and counselors, trying to understand what was stopping her son from going to school for nearly a year. Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance. >“It was almost like a revelation,” she told USA TODAY. The psychiatrist basically repeated back the description of the son's behavior and called it a diagnosis (and charged money).
- dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
  Just speculation, but perhaps what triggered relief was understanding that their son was not alone (and thus not "weird") in his behaviour. Giving a name to it makes it sound like a real medical condition and thus something that is affecting the kid, rather than the kid being broken. IMO the name makes it seem _too much_ like a proper disorder, since the kids' actions are somewhat reasonable. If I could've gotten shot at school or had to deal with as much BS as they did, I might have not gone either. I skipped a large amount of my last year regardless since I had turned 18 and could excuse myself. Not anxiousness -- kids just don't like school.
- ec109685 3y ago
  That struck me as weird too, but to be fair, once a disorder is identified then you can benefit from treatment plans that others have found success with.
- achates 3y ago
  She should have at least had the decency to give it a Latin name.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  Can't wait for my primary care physician to do this: Ah looks like a mild case of hurting back and runny nose.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mbfg 3y ago
Letting the police mediate mental health issues seems like a flawless plan.
206lol 3y ago
Our schools are basically prisons these days - we drill kids to get them ready for tests, we demand perfect obedience, and we give kids little to no space to be kids. We're also increasingly letting clueless adults run things (see all the adults who are banning books or worried that there are litter boxes in bathrooms).
CPLX 3y ago
> School avoidant behavior, also called school refusal, is when a school-age child refuses to attend school or has difficulty being in school for the entire day. Several mental health experts told USA TODAY it has become a crisis that has gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic. > "There's no book on this, it's not spoken about," said Demsky, whose son declined to be interviewed by USA TODAY but gave his mother permission to share their story. "It's very scary and parents feel a sense of helplessness." As an old guy I have to say the entire way this is being discussed is completely baffling. I guess in the 90's when me and my friends didn't feel like going to school we were part of a pioneering trend or something. I should have written a book. Instead people got mad at me and told me to stop skipping school. They couldn't see I was a visionary at the time I guess. America keeps getting weirder.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I mean, we tell young people it's important to think critically. Well, this is what that looks like. Why is it a given that going to K-12 is somehow an immutable necessity, especially with the current curriculum and experience what it is? They are right to question it even if the answer ends up being that going to school has value.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    I'm here to tell you that in 1989 we really didn't have any trouble with critical thinking on the topic of going to high school on any given Wednesday. Guided by key 20th century American[0] and British[1] thought leaders we were developing and refining these theories of "immutable necessity" in suburban cars and convenience store parking lots on a regular basis. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  It's pretty weird that people are debating kids going to school, lol...If I told my parents when I was younger that I no longer felt like going to school, they would have bundled me there.
chad_strategic 3y ago
I'm sure with a little more social media and tikTok challenges, everything will be okay!
chad_strategic 3y ago
I'm sure with a few more social media apps and a tik tok challenge everything will be okay!
retrac 3y ago
> “We don’t call it work refusal, we call it unemployment,” he said. Maybe we should distinguish between these categories. Because there does appear to be a relatively new phenomenon -- the never-employed adult. They're not unemployed like some of us are sometimes unemployed. Nor are they disabled. They don't want a job. In Canada, almost 70% of unemployed and not in training 25 - 29 year olds, say they're unemployed because they don't want a job [1]. Speculating here but I would bet lot of them are formerly school-avoidant. They've failed to form typical social attachments, or get positive rewards for the usual efforts. And so they've checked out of society. A lot of them are basically hikikomori [2], dependent on social assistance and ongoing parental support, living at home, rarely going outside. Unsurprisingly, the hikikomori phenomenon is starting to be recognized as a thing not unique to Japan. In the USA sometimes they're referred to as the disconnected youth. [3] [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2018013-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2018013... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori [3] https://www.ssrc.org/programs/measure-of-america/youth-disconnection/ https://www.ssrc.org/programs/measure-of-america/youth-disco...
boeingUH60 3y ago
This may be controversial, but I think skipping school because of "anxiety" is a first-world problem and a sign of over pamperedness. I live in a third-world country with endless issues, and yet hardly see kids skipping school for so-called anxiety. Sure, treat their anxiety and help when you can, but I'll never let my hypothetical child skip one day of school because of emotional issues, and I'm glad my parents never let me do the same...I'ma jack you up and drop at the school gate then come get you when school is over.
- corobo 3y ago
  Best guess you're referring to Nigeria going by your website. > The point of out-of-school learning is to overcome learning disabilities, development of talents, strengthen communities and increase interest in education by creating extra learning opportunities in the real world. > Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world. How would you see them if they're not there?
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    > Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world. I didn't mean to say people don't skip school here, I meant they don't skip because of anxiety...It's usually poverty-related issues or the parents just not caring because they aren't formally educated. For instance, I personally know a couple whose kids don't attend school despite being registered, and they don't care, but there's nothing I can do about it.
    - corobo 3y ago
      It sounds like anyone skipping school for anxiety would just not go to school in that situation. Kids skipping school for anxiety feels like a subset of kids skipping school for an unknown reason. Over-pampering parents that don't care seems worse than any any over-pampering of kids having issues
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Tradent 3y ago
Ban mobile phones in schools. Already being done in other countries: https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-mobile-phone-ban-public-high-schools https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-...
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Mobile phones have destroyed children's attentions, given them new ways to bully and harrass eachother, made every single action that any child does subject to surviellance by their peers, and have completely and utterly destroyed the mental health of our kids, especially young girls. It needs to be banned in schools. This shouldn't even be a question.
emptybits 3y ago
> "Now an officer was at her house, waiting to take her son to school." How or why would police be deployed? Is it a crime (for child or parent) if the child skips a lot of school?
- orbz 3y ago
  Yes, truancy laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy
alexb_ 3y ago
Have we considered that children don't understand what's best for them? Kids never want to go to school. But they do anyways because going to school is extremely important for a child. I never wanted to go to school, but my parents told me to get my ass up and go. Giving children this much agency over their lives when they don't have the maturity to do so is going to cause some really bad consequences. We are in a constant cycle of rewarding children for saying they have a condition. It's very important to give reasonable accomodations to people who have mental issues. But when you are constantly excusing children from accountability if they say the magic words, if you are promoting a culture that celebrates self victimization, and if you frame every single decision in life as one that has no free agency, you create massive problems. You get an uneducated populace that has convinced themselves from the get go that their life is doomed to fail because of XYZ condition someone said they have.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I'm wondering how you draw the distinction between saying that children having disorders means they have no agency and that's bad, but also saying you shouldn't give children agency to make choices. Personally, when I was finally diagnosed with anxiety as an adult it was an opportunity for me to collect the tools required to better myself, it wasn't a way to absolve myself of my responsibilities or "self victimize". Now certainly we should find ways for kids to go to school, but hard assing it seems like a bad way. Once the kids become adults who have had little agency in their lives and an intense hatred of having been forced to go to school how is that going to turn out? Is the hope they'll look back at all the anxiety and go "You know what? that gave me character! Thanks Mom and Dad!"? If we want an educated populace dragging children kicking and screaming through twelves grades seems like a bad plan. You need to instill a love of learning and education that continues after that point. Graduating high school should just be the beginning.
  - pxue 3y ago
    "Mom I'm not feeling well, can I stay home today? Has probably been uttered by majority of school age kid once in their life. It's not something new. Kids are kids, they play by testing limits. How high they can jump, how fast they can run, how much lie they can get away with.
JoshTko 3y ago
Hard to see how much value add k-12 has vs ChatGPT4 (aside from Social interaction)
slashdev 3y ago
I can relate to this. I changed schools because of a move at the start of the sixth grade. It was a horrible experience. I dreaded going back there all summer. My brother and I saw a program on home schooling on TV, and I saw my path out. We begged our parents to home school us. That worked out really well for us in the end. We got a top level education and we learned to be unafraid to learn on our own, whatever we needed. Neither of us finished college, but we’re both reasonably successful today, having found our own path in the world. My brother is a self published science fiction author with over one million books sold. I’m a software engineer and wannabe entrepreneur. We’re both self taught in our professions. School really sucks. I will try my hypothetical future kids on home schooling first to see how they take to it.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
My parents had a pretty genius solution for this. You're sick?, sure you can stay home, but anything interesting or fun was off limits. If you're feeling well enough to be out of bed, you can do homework. That's it. I hate to use this word, but I feel like kids today are increasingly coddled, and it leaves them dangerously unprepared for the hyper competitive world they will face as adults.
Simulacra 3y ago
So are teachers ...
mtriassi 3y ago
Reading this makes me think of that one experiment[0] where rats were put in a "park" with regular and drug laced water. In the absence of enriching activities the rats would opt for drug use to stay entertained. Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of issues with that study that would invalidate it, but I think the lesson still stands, school has become an environment where you're judged on every facet of you existence. Your grades, your clothes, and physical appearance, your social acumen. All this leaves very little space for enrichment via learning and experimentation. Not to mention shrinking budgets and overloading for teachers, making it nearly impossible to be passionate and engaging. It makes me wonder what it would take to get alternative schools in place that take students into the real world, regularly, and have them learn through applying principles from the classroom, or if that would even be effective. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
- orbz 3y ago
  Similar study in humans where people would prefer to electrically shock themselves than just sit bored: https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-...
nilespotter 3y ago
The answer to so much of this shit is common sense. Take away their phone and don't give it back.
orbz 3y ago
I"m seeing a lot of people taking the 'Back in MY day...' approach to this topic. I think in this case there's more at play: School aged children have just gone through a once-in-a-100-year pandemic that absolutely _wrecked_ social lives and completely upended the schooling system. That, and there's growing evidence of neurologic impact from tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease that have _doubled_ in the last 20 years. We're still also figuring out what impact pervasive social media is having on kids. To be clear, none of these are the fault of the children. Each one is outside of their control. Blaming them is doing them a disservice and deflecting the responsibility of the remainder of civilization to provide them a world in which they can flourish.
sashank_1509 3y ago
This is a manufactured problem due to bad incentives. Counselors, Psychologists etc get more work, more importance and more opportunity if they “discover” a condition in a child. In a way they almost encourage parents or children to identify themselves with a condition. And so something like not wanting to go to school becomes “school avoidance syndrome”. The sad part is there is probably a small percent (like 0.1%) of children who face anxiety attacks to go to school, these children give legitimacy to the condition, but then there are hundreds of cases of children who just don’t want to go to school who simply need to be forced. I say this ironically as someone who used to regularly miss a day of school in a week, because I was under high pressure to study and perform (in a developing country) and I didn’t have great friends, my life would have been objectively worse if I was diagnosed with this condition and agency was taken away from me. (I never actually improved my attendance, but I improved my exam scores so it didn’t matter)
0zemp2c 3y ago
failure is the best teacher let them drop out they'll eventually realize, most white-collar work is now not even an aspiration for them but then they get the extra bonus of realizing that in the US, many jobs are performed by undocumented immigrants who exist at or often even below minimum wage...this is where you end up when you have three weeks of high school completed the children of engineers and doctors will be ditch diggers eventually the sprout a grey hair and they can no longer claim the pity often granted to the young...they are just aging manual labor
- YellOh 3y ago
  I disagree on the effects (at least for the average child of a doctor or engineer), but I'm in for letting more students stop going to school. Glad it has some bipartisan appeal.
falcolas 3y ago
My niece is one of these. The solution was to enroll her in an online course where the instruction was done via pre-recorded videos that she could view as many times as needed to get through the material. It's been a huge success for her; she's gone from a D average to an A average, thanks to being able to review the video material repeatedly until it makes sense. And she still socializes with her friends, both in person and online. What it did is take her away from the bullying and hatred for anything different that public schools are rife with.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Does she get tested on the material at the school, where she can't look up the answers on the internet?
  - falcolas 3y ago
    It's a homeschooling program, so no. > where she can't look up the answers on the internet It prioritizes understanding and not memorization. As an aside, it's always fun to read sentiments like this on an internet forum dedicated to a profession that prides itself on their googling skills.
    - alexb_ 3y ago
      You don't need to understand anything when you can google the answer. I can get an A in the most advanced physics class in Stanford if you had the answer sheet to every test right next to me. That doesn't mean I understand it, it just means I have an A on the paper. Except this isn't about advanced physics, it's about basic education that children should know to exist as functioning human beings. You are putting way too much trust in a child to not do what they are being incentivized to do - cheat and get an A while putting in no effort.
      - falcolas 3y ago
        There’s no trust required, I’ve watched her do the tests. Just because there’s no teacher, doesn’t mean there’s no accountability.
ouid 3y ago
I can't speak to the general phenomenon, but I will say that students do not come to college with any mathematical preparation. The ones who learn mathematics learn it here. It's actually worse than this, students have a much easier time learning to program, which they have mostly never done before, than to perform even the simplest identical reasoning in the context of mathematics. I am forced to come to the conclusion that school is so bad that it is harmful to education. This strikes me as something to consider before worrying about whether children are attending. This is, I am assured, the basic right wing agenda coming to fruition. Make (public) schools so bad that people start thinking of them as a waste of money, but the actual work that has gone into making them terrible has been bipartisan. Bad teachers need to be able to be fired, and schools need to compete for enrollment, rather than some secondary measure of performance.
- YellOh 3y ago
  https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
zingababba 3y ago
I skipped as much school as possible. Barely passed. Hated every second of it. Can't even imagine how bad it is now.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Two comments. First, this reminds me of this essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html Especially the second half of it, where he talks about all the things wrong with the current school system. Second, I think the problem is bigger than school. Also seeing massive discussion on HN today: "Americans Have Never Been So Unwilling to Relocate for a New Job", "U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs", and "The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007". The US is having some kind of a crisis in terms of some of the fundamental things that hold a society together. (Though, arguably, being willing to move for work is not one of those things.) America is actually having those issues. HN has talked about most of them before. But seeing them all together on HN today feels almost like an orchestrated campaign of "Hey, America, you should feel bad about yourself". It makes me wonder if someone is running this somehow.
johnea 3y ago
I avoided school. Although in that era we called it "skipping school". We mostly went into the woods and smoked pot, fooled around with our boyfriends and girlfriends, and went for fast food burgers. I barely graduated high school, but went on to get a BS in electrical engineering and managed to have a reasonably productive life. Modern kids are under a constant microscope. No wonder they're anxious. Although it's 1/2 their own fault for the amount of time they spend lost in their own minds (people call it "on the phone", but it's really just an electronically enhanced form of "lost in inner space"). The other 1/2 is their parents, who are stiflingly overberaring. When we walked out of the house, no one knew where the hell we went. The effect of loosing this sense of individual freedom is MASSIVELY underappreciated...
buzzert 3y ago
Is it because students are growing tired of the culture war that seems to be getting fought in the classroom? I think the media may be overemphasizing this, so I would love it if a parent would dispel the rumor, but it sounds to me like there's a lot of subjugation to dystopian stuff like "two minutes hate" and struggle sessions. I can totally see not wanting to go to school because of this. Students saying, "I learn more on my computer at home, why would I go to school where I'm taught to hate everyone and myself."
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  6 hours of class. Classes are 55 minutes long. You have a 30 minute lunch. No other breaks. All the non academic classes are gone. No socializing during class. Prison is better.

54 points by amichail 3y ago

eh9 3y ago

Americans do schooling wrong, and kids have to worry about getting shot on top of being overworked. I wouldn’t feel incentivized to go to school either.

YellOh 3y ago
Yup. From the article: > Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance. That's not a "condition" and shouldn't be de facto medicalized. Treat anxiety when it doesn't match reality, sure, but there are plenty of perfectly logical reasons for students to resist school as it currently exists.
rajin444 3y ago
School shootings are still insanely rare. When you account for high crime areas the likelihood of an average kid experiencing a school shooting is so low it should make you question anyone trying to make it seem otherwise.
- citizenkeen 3y ago
  But the shooter drills are incredibly common. Just because it doesn't happen often doesn't mean children aren't often being forced to think about it happening.
- c00lio 3y ago
  While outright shootings might be rare, bullying by fellow students and teachers is common. Shootings might just be the straw that breaks the camels back.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  > When you account for high crime areas What does this mean? Kids in high crime areas are still kids, you still have to count them when they get shot. The harm of a school shooting is certainly not contained to the specific individuals who got shot either, which if one of these has happened near you you know. Everyone at that school and to some extent the entire city is affected socially and psychologically. They are a particularly powerful terrorism for this reason.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    "School shooting" is a polysemous phrase. There's the very literal version--a shooting that happens at a school--but also a more specific one that refers to a much rarer situation--a lone kid consciously plans to go in and shoot a lot of people en masse, as a kind of suicide that is intended to leave a permanent presence on a community that the kid viewed as having wronged them in some way. The former is much more relevant for policy making, but in public discourse the latter plays the disproportionate, defining role. OP is frustrated by that vacillation. School shooter drills are almost irrelevant for the modal literal school shooting, but they inflict psychological damage on students and even create the archetype of the statistically rarer type in the public imagination.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Not sufficiently rare enough to avoid transforming education in a myriad of ways, from clear backpacks to endless drills to metal detectors at the door to armed people in body armor walking around. And the idea of having to account for "high crime areas" as if it is a normal thing for a subset of the population to be dealing with guns on a regular basis in schools is a very American attitude.
- yboris 3y ago
  This may be akin to the craze of fear of terrorism that swept the general public after September 11th. I found that craze to be entirely irrational, but it would hardly be appropriate for the same individuals to see their kids as being particularly irrational, if their fear of being shot is real. As far as I can tell, fear of being shot is not the primary factor why students don't want to go to school. The article, for example, doesn't mention global warming / climate change (our planet burning) or AI (possible humanity ending). How incentivized would you be to spend your youth working hard for a future that might not exist?
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> overworked From what I understand, the Japanese K-12 system makes the US system look like Disneyland. They do have kids out of high school that are quite good with STEM stuff, but I have heard that bullying is a big problem. As I am a bit "on the spectrum," my grade school years were absolutely awful. I suspect a lot of folks here can relate, but we have a way of attracting bullies that seems innate. It's crazy. I did enjoy tech school, though, and have done fairly well in the working world.

mschuster91 3y ago

No surprise given the alarming amount of shooting incidents, teachers being banned from discussing certain topics (LGBT, religion, sexuality, history) under threat of losing their license or worse, completely nutty "zero-tolerance" policies, completely overworked teachers, outdated teaching methods, way too much homework, dilapidated school buildings, the pressure from parents (particularly for single children that have to turn out perfect) to make good grades to ensure good career perspectives... if I had to go to school today, I'd drop out as well - and I'm German, we have everything but the first two points as well.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

Interesting that they don’t mention pressures associated with schooling, such as the pressure to get into a good college bleeding into every aspect of the academic experience, or the school shooter drills now normalized. But they do mention anxiety, lol

foxyv 3y ago
I was browsing the left side of the internet on my second YouTube profile and ran into Zoe Bee talking about grading and motivation. The takeaway was that it is more about controlling students than education. I think 99% of the anxiety I experienced as a teenager was frustration about the insane levels of control that children are placed under. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew If I had kids of my own I think I would encourage them to skip the last years of high school and just get an online degree if they didn't enjoy themselves. Maybe look into taking community college courses instead after getting a GED. There are so many better options now.
wingspar 3y ago
School shooter drills are the modern version of 'duck and cover drills' from the 50's and 60's. https://www.britannica.com/topic/duck-and-cover https://www.britannica.com/topic/duck-and-cover

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

Totally understandable. When I was of school age (last millennium) every morning I had a stomach filled with dread. School is a miserable experience of judgement and pressure. I didn't feel like I had the option not to go or I can see myself falling into the same cycle of anxiety and avoidance, especially if I'd had to experience the chaos these kids have had.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
I imagine this varies from person to person. Back in the 1980's in the U.S., I found junior high (grades 7-8) pretty unpleasant, but I really enjoyed high school (grades 9-12).
zx8080 3y ago
What the hell are they doing to pupils at schools in the US?! I mean, literally, how are the US schools differ from the other countries ones? Please share something, as it's not clear at all for those non-US citizens.
- V1ndaar 3y ago
  Huh, I went to school in Germany and can relate pretty well with them.
  - jamal-kumar 3y ago
    From what I understand, German school is even more demanding in terms of how they drive you to do well or lose benefits. I can only imagine the stress of things like getting demoted from Gymnasium [1] after not performing well enough due to life stresses during a critical developmental phase in life, or not making Abitur [2] qualifications and not getting that free post secondary. Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago

jovial_cavalier 3y ago

I skipped most of high school. I didn't have a condition. High school was bullshit and pointless. Some people expect me to be repentant for this now that I'm on the wrong side of 25, but I'm not. I was right. It was a waste of my time and I minimized my exposure to idiots who thought they had power over my future. Maybe instead of asking what's wrong with these kids that they don't want to go to school, ask what's wrong with the schools that kids don't want to go.

boeingUH60 3y ago
If you truly skipped most of high school and succeeded, then you're the exception. Most people that take that route end up in a dead-end job, prison, drug addiction, homelessness, or endless other problems. Sure, school isn't perfect and has its issues, but kids skipping school is a big problem.
- jovial_cavalier 3y ago
  It doesn't matter whether or not being able to get away with it is the norm. If a large cohort of kids are skipping high school, it is likely something wrong with the schools. Maybe we should consider reforming them to be less soul crushing and awful?
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    Of course, people should try their best to fix schools, but in the meantime, kids must attend..
    - jovial_cavalier 3y ago
      Why?
    - YellOh 3y ago
      Why? I feel like the burden should be on the institution trying to waste >1000 hrs per year of someone's time, rather than the person that just wants to not participate in the system.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> Demsky sought help from educators, doctors and counselors, trying to understand what was stopping her son from going to school for nearly a year. Finally, a psychiatrist told Demsky about a condition that affects a growing number of students with severe anxiety: school avoidance. >“It was almost like a revelation,” she told USA TODAY. The psychiatrist basically repeated back the description of the son's behavior and called it a diagnosis (and charged money).

dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
Just speculation, but perhaps what triggered relief was understanding that their son was not alone (and thus not "weird") in his behaviour. Giving a name to it makes it sound like a real medical condition and thus something that is affecting the kid, rather than the kid being broken. IMO the name makes it seem _too much_ like a proper disorder, since the kids' actions are somewhat reasonable. If I could've gotten shot at school or had to deal with as much BS as they did, I might have not gone either. I skipped a large amount of my last year regardless since I had turned 18 and could excuse myself. Not anxiousness -- kids just don't like school.
ec109685 3y ago
That struck me as weird too, but to be fair, once a disorder is identified then you can benefit from treatment plans that others have found success with.
achates 3y ago
She should have at least had the decency to give it a Latin name.
pxmpxm 3y ago
Can't wait for my primary care physician to do this: Ah looks like a mild case of hurting back and runny nose.
deleted 3y ago
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mbfg 3y ago

Letting the police mediate mental health issues seems like a flawless plan.

206lol 3y ago

Our schools are basically prisons these days - we drill kids to get them ready for tests, we demand perfect obedience, and we give kids little to no space to be kids. We're also increasingly letting clueless adults run things (see all the adults who are banning books or worried that there are litter boxes in bathrooms).

CPLX 3y ago

> School avoidant behavior, also called school refusal, is when a school-age child refuses to attend school or has difficulty being in school for the entire day. Several mental health experts told USA TODAY it has become a crisis that has gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic. > "There's no book on this, it's not spoken about," said Demsky, whose son declined to be interviewed by USA TODAY but gave his mother permission to share their story. "It's very scary and parents feel a sense of helplessness." As an old guy I have to say the entire way this is being discussed is completely baffling. I guess in the 90's when me and my friends didn't feel like going to school we were part of a pioneering trend or something. I should have written a book. Instead people got mad at me and told me to stop skipping school. They couldn't see I was a visionary at the time I guess. America keeps getting weirder.

foobarian 3y ago
I mean, we tell young people it's important to think critically. Well, this is what that looks like. Why is it a given that going to K-12 is somehow an immutable necessity, especially with the current curriculum and experience what it is? They are right to question it even if the answer ends up being that going to school has value.
- CPLX 3y ago
  I'm here to tell you that in 1989 we really didn't have any trouble with critical thinking on the topic of going to high school on any given Wednesday. Guided by key 20th century American[0] and British[1] thought leaders we were developing and refining these theories of "immutable necessity" in suburban cars and convenience store parking lots on a regular basis. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U
boeingUH60 3y ago
It's pretty weird that people are debating kids going to school, lol...If I told my parents when I was younger that I no longer felt like going to school, they would have bundled me there.

chad_strategic 3y ago

I'm sure with a little more social media and tikTok challenges, everything will be okay!

chad_strategic 3y ago

I'm sure with a few more social media apps and a tik tok challenge everything will be okay!

retrac 3y ago

> “We don’t call it work refusal, we call it unemployment,” he said. Maybe we should distinguish between these categories. Because there does appear to be a relatively new phenomenon -- the never-employed adult. They're not unemployed like some of us are sometimes unemployed. Nor are they disabled. They don't want a job. In Canada, almost 70% of unemployed and not in training 25 - 29 year olds, say they're unemployed because they don't want a job [1]. Speculating here but I would bet lot of them are formerly school-avoidant. They've failed to form typical social attachments, or get positive rewards for the usual efforts. And so they've checked out of society. A lot of them are basically hikikomori [2], dependent on social assistance and ongoing parental support, living at home, rarely going outside. Unsurprisingly, the hikikomori phenomenon is starting to be recognized as a thing not unique to Japan. In the USA sometimes they're referred to as the disconnected youth. [3] [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2018013-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/81-599-x2018013... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori [3] https://www.ssrc.org/programs/measure-of-america/youth-disconnection/ https://www.ssrc.org/programs/measure-of-america/youth-disco...

boeingUH60 3y ago

This may be controversial, but I think skipping school because of "anxiety" is a first-world problem and a sign of over pamperedness. I live in a third-world country with endless issues, and yet hardly see kids skipping school for so-called anxiety. Sure, treat their anxiety and help when you can, but I'll never let my hypothetical child skip one day of school because of emotional issues, and I'm glad my parents never let me do the same...I'ma jack you up and drop at the school gate then come get you when school is over.

corobo 3y ago
Best guess you're referring to Nigeria going by your website. > The point of out-of-school learning is to overcome learning disabilities, development of talents, strengthen communities and increase interest in education by creating extra learning opportunities in the real world. > Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world. How would you see them if they're not there?
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  > Nigeria possesses the largest population of out-of-school learning youths in the world. I didn't mean to say people don't skip school here, I meant they don't skip because of anxiety...It's usually poverty-related issues or the parents just not caring because they aren't formally educated. For instance, I personally know a couple whose kids don't attend school despite being registered, and they don't care, but there's nothing I can do about it.
  - corobo 3y ago
    It sounds like anyone skipping school for anxiety would just not go to school in that situation. Kids skipping school for anxiety feels like a subset of kids skipping school for an unknown reason. Over-pampering parents that don't care seems worse than any any over-pampering of kids having issues
deleted 3y ago
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Tradent 3y ago

Ban mobile phones in schools. Already being done in other countries: https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-mobile-phone-ban-public-high-schools https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-government-begins-...

alexb_ 3y ago
Mobile phones have destroyed children's attentions, given them new ways to bully and harrass eachother, made every single action that any child does subject to surviellance by their peers, and have completely and utterly destroyed the mental health of our kids, especially young girls. It needs to be banned in schools. This shouldn't even be a question.

emptybits 3y ago

> "Now an officer was at her house, waiting to take her son to school." How or why would police be deployed? Is it a crime (for child or parent) if the child skips a lot of school?

orbz 3y ago
Yes, truancy laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy

alexb_ 3y ago

Have we considered that children don't understand what's best for them? Kids never want to go to school. But they do anyways because going to school is extremely important for a child. I never wanted to go to school, but my parents told me to get my ass up and go. Giving children this much agency over their lives when they don't have the maturity to do so is going to cause some really bad consequences. We are in a constant cycle of rewarding children for saying they have a condition. It's very important to give reasonable accomodations to people who have mental issues. But when you are constantly excusing children from accountability if they say the magic words, if you are promoting a culture that celebrates self victimization, and if you frame every single decision in life as one that has no free agency, you create massive problems. You get an uneducated populace that has convinced themselves from the get go that their life is doomed to fail because of XYZ condition someone said they have.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I'm wondering how you draw the distinction between saying that children having disorders means they have no agency and that's bad, but also saying you shouldn't give children agency to make choices. Personally, when I was finally diagnosed with anxiety as an adult it was an opportunity for me to collect the tools required to better myself, it wasn't a way to absolve myself of my responsibilities or "self victimize". Now certainly we should find ways for kids to go to school, but hard assing it seems like a bad way. Once the kids become adults who have had little agency in their lives and an intense hatred of having been forced to go to school how is that going to turn out? Is the hope they'll look back at all the anxiety and go "You know what? that gave me character! Thanks Mom and Dad!"? If we want an educated populace dragging children kicking and screaming through twelves grades seems like a bad plan. You need to instill a love of learning and education that continues after that point. Graduating high school should just be the beginning.
- pxue 3y ago
  "Mom I'm not feeling well, can I stay home today? Has probably been uttered by majority of school age kid once in their life. It's not something new. Kids are kids, they play by testing limits. How high they can jump, how fast they can run, how much lie they can get away with.

JoshTko 3y ago

Hard to see how much value add k-12 has vs ChatGPT4 (aside from Social interaction)

slashdev 3y ago

I can relate to this. I changed schools because of a move at the start of the sixth grade. It was a horrible experience. I dreaded going back there all summer. My brother and I saw a program on home schooling on TV, and I saw my path out. We begged our parents to home school us. That worked out really well for us in the end. We got a top level education and we learned to be unafraid to learn on our own, whatever we needed. Neither of us finished college, but we’re both reasonably successful today, having found our own path in the world. My brother is a self published science fiction author with over one million books sold. I’m a software engineer and wannabe entrepreneur. We’re both self taught in our professions. School really sucks. I will try my hypothetical future kids on home schooling first to see how they take to it.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

My parents had a pretty genius solution for this. You're sick?, sure you can stay home, but anything interesting or fun was off limits. If you're feeling well enough to be out of bed, you can do homework. That's it. I hate to use this word, but I feel like kids today are increasingly coddled, and it leaves them dangerously unprepared for the hyper competitive world they will face as adults.

Simulacra 3y ago

So are teachers ...

mtriassi 3y ago

Reading this makes me think of that one experiment[0] where rats were put in a "park" with regular and drug laced water. In the absence of enriching activities the rats would opt for drug use to stay entertained. Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of issues with that study that would invalidate it, but I think the lesson still stands, school has become an environment where you're judged on every facet of you existence. Your grades, your clothes, and physical appearance, your social acumen. All this leaves very little space for enrichment via learning and experimentation. Not to mention shrinking budgets and overloading for teachers, making it nearly impossible to be passionate and engaging. It makes me wonder what it would take to get alternative schools in place that take students into the real world, regularly, and have them learn through applying principles from the classroom, or if that would even be effective. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

orbz 3y ago
Similar study in humans where people would prefer to electrically shock themselves than just sit bored: https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-...

nilespotter 3y ago

The answer to so much of this shit is common sense. Take away their phone and don't give it back.

orbz 3y ago

I"m seeing a lot of people taking the 'Back in MY day...' approach to this topic. I think in this case there's more at play: School aged children have just gone through a once-in-a-100-year pandemic that absolutely _wrecked_ social lives and completely upended the schooling system. That, and there's growing evidence of neurologic impact from tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease that have _doubled_ in the last 20 years. We're still also figuring out what impact pervasive social media is having on kids. To be clear, none of these are the fault of the children. Each one is outside of their control. Blaming them is doing them a disservice and deflecting the responsibility of the remainder of civilization to provide them a world in which they can flourish.

sashank_1509 3y ago

This is a manufactured problem due to bad incentives. Counselors, Psychologists etc get more work, more importance and more opportunity if they “discover” a condition in a child. In a way they almost encourage parents or children to identify themselves with a condition. And so something like not wanting to go to school becomes “school avoidance syndrome”. The sad part is there is probably a small percent (like 0.1%) of children who face anxiety attacks to go to school, these children give legitimacy to the condition, but then there are hundreds of cases of children who just don’t want to go to school who simply need to be forced. I say this ironically as someone who used to regularly miss a day of school in a week, because I was under high pressure to study and perform (in a developing country) and I didn’t have great friends, my life would have been objectively worse if I was diagnosed with this condition and agency was taken away from me. (I never actually improved my attendance, but I improved my exam scores so it didn’t matter)

0zemp2c 3y ago

failure is the best teacher let them drop out they'll eventually realize, most white-collar work is now not even an aspiration for them but then they get the extra bonus of realizing that in the US, many jobs are performed by undocumented immigrants who exist at or often even below minimum wage...this is where you end up when you have three weeks of high school completed the children of engineers and doctors will be ditch diggers eventually the sprout a grey hair and they can no longer claim the pity often granted to the young...they are just aging manual labor

YellOh 3y ago
I disagree on the effects (at least for the average child of a doctor or engineer), but I'm in for letting more students stop going to school. Glad it has some bipartisan appeal.

falcolas 3y ago

My niece is one of these. The solution was to enroll her in an online course where the instruction was done via pre-recorded videos that she could view as many times as needed to get through the material. It's been a huge success for her; she's gone from a D average to an A average, thanks to being able to review the video material repeatedly until it makes sense. And she still socializes with her friends, both in person and online. What it did is take her away from the bullying and hatred for anything different that public schools are rife with.

alexb_ 3y ago
Does she get tested on the material at the school, where she can't look up the answers on the internet?
- falcolas 3y ago
  It's a homeschooling program, so no. > where she can't look up the answers on the internet It prioritizes understanding and not memorization. As an aside, it's always fun to read sentiments like this on an internet forum dedicated to a profession that prides itself on their googling skills.
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    You don't need to understand anything when you can google the answer. I can get an A in the most advanced physics class in Stanford if you had the answer sheet to every test right next to me. That doesn't mean I understand it, it just means I have an A on the paper. Except this isn't about advanced physics, it's about basic education that children should know to exist as functioning human beings. You are putting way too much trust in a child to not do what they are being incentivized to do - cheat and get an A while putting in no effort.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      There’s no trust required, I’ve watched her do the tests. Just because there’s no teacher, doesn’t mean there’s no accountability.

ouid 3y ago

I can't speak to the general phenomenon, but I will say that students do not come to college with any mathematical preparation. The ones who learn mathematics learn it here. It's actually worse than this, students have a much easier time learning to program, which they have mostly never done before, than to perform even the simplest identical reasoning in the context of mathematics. I am forced to come to the conclusion that school is so bad that it is harmful to education. This strikes me as something to consider before worrying about whether children are attending. This is, I am assured, the basic right wing agenda coming to fruition. Make (public) schools so bad that people start thinking of them as a waste of money, but the actual work that has gone into making them terrible has been bipartisan. Bad teachers need to be able to be fired, and schools need to compete for enrollment, rather than some secondary measure of performance.

YellOh 3y ago
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

steve76 3y ago

[dead]

zingababba 3y ago

I skipped as much school as possible. Barely passed. Hated every second of it. Can't even imagine how bad it is now.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

Two comments. First, this reminds me of this essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html Especially the second half of it, where he talks about all the things wrong with the current school system. Second, I think the problem is bigger than school. Also seeing massive discussion on HN today: "Americans Have Never Been So Unwilling to Relocate for a New Job", "U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs", and "The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007". The US is having some kind of a crisis in terms of some of the fundamental things that hold a society together. (Though, arguably, being willing to move for work is not one of those things.) America is actually having those issues. HN has talked about most of them before. But seeing them all together on HN today feels almost like an orchestrated campaign of "Hey, America, you should feel bad about yourself". It makes me wonder if someone is running this somehow.

johnea 3y ago

I avoided school. Although in that era we called it "skipping school". We mostly went into the woods and smoked pot, fooled around with our boyfriends and girlfriends, and went for fast food burgers. I barely graduated high school, but went on to get a BS in electrical engineering and managed to have a reasonably productive life. Modern kids are under a constant microscope. No wonder they're anxious. Although it's 1/2 their own fault for the amount of time they spend lost in their own minds (people call it "on the phone", but it's really just an electronically enhanced form of "lost in inner space"). The other 1/2 is their parents, who are stiflingly overberaring. When we walked out of the house, no one knew where the hell we went. The effect of loosing this sense of individual freedom is MASSIVELY underappreciated...

buzzert 3y ago

Is it because students are growing tired of the culture war that seems to be getting fought in the classroom? I think the media may be overemphasizing this, so I would love it if a parent would dispel the rumor, but it sounds to me like there's a lot of subjugation to dystopian stuff like "two minutes hate" and struggle sessions. I can totally see not wanting to go to school because of this. Students saying, "I learn more on my computer at home, why would I go to school where I'm taught to hate everyone and myself."

Gibbon1 3y ago
6 hours of class. Classes are 55 minutes long. You have a 30 minute lunch. No other breaks. All the non academic classes are gone. No socializing during class. Prison is better.