Children have lots of agency to make choices in the school system. They are constantly given the choice to do their work and listen to their teachers, or to be

Children have lots of agency to make choices in the school system. They are constantly given the choice to do their work and listen to their teachers, or to be someone who is lazy and doesn't learn anything at all. We have completely destroyed the punishment for being lazy and uninterested, so naturally children will take the path of least resistance. I have ADHD. It makes me so unbelievably upset when people use the fact that ADHD can bring academic problems as a get out of jail card when they have academic problems stemming from their own laziness. It makes it so much worse for people who actually have ADHD too, because they get lumped in with the group of children who don't want to do their work. That's what I mean about self-victimization - by proclaiming yourself as a victim of your circumstances, you are absolved of responsibility and consequences for your actions. Not that schools nowadays even have much of that - kids now get so much leniency with ideas like "50 is a minimum grade" that you can just move from grade to grade not having learned anything. How do you instill a love of learning when your competition is social media and smartphones that are designed by the smartest people in the world to be appealing? You can only make so much of learning fun. At some point, you have to buckle down and actually learn the stuff. You can't always make learning something that you love and want to do. Sometimes you just gotta know how to do algebra, and schools can't make algebra preferable to TikTok in a classroom. It's just not possible. And maybe children need to learn they can't always do what appeals to them in the immediate.