What's Happening to Students?
Smartphones, Attention, and “Digital Drugs”
- Many link student disengagement to phones and algorithmic feeds, describing them as “digital cocaine” or “digital drugs” engineered for constant dopamine hits.
- Others push back on crude “dopamine addiction” language, seeing it as a metaphor: kids “behave like addicts” even if there’s no clinical withdrawal.
- Several note this isn’t just “screens” (TV, games existed before) but phones’ ubiquity, personalization, and endless short-form content.
School Phone Bans and Classroom Dynamics
- Strong support from some for outright bans in school; several report bans working fine where implemented.
- A major obstacle is parents who want continual access to kids, or who already rely on screens as pacifiers from infancy.
- Critics argue bans treat symptoms: students turn to phones because school feels irrelevant, boring, or like “child prison,” especially in underfunded, securitized environments.
- There’s disagreement over whether disengagement reflects tech alone or larger educational and social failures.
Education System, Incentives, and Cheating
- Commenters describe Goodhart-style “metric hell”: grades and test scores over learning, grade inflation, and perverse incentives that reward cheating and cramming.
- LLMs and the internet are seen as accelerating longstanding problems: students chase grades with solution manuals, GPT, and copying, then forget material.
- Some argue college and especially humanities courses no longer convincingly lead to opportunity, so many students treat degrees as hollow credentials and cheat instrumentally.
Generational Mood and Structural Doom
- Older commenters say this era’s malaise feels different from past crises: less a concrete enemy, more a nebulous institutional and digital destabilization, plus climate and democratic backsliding.
- Others insist “every generation thinks it’s different,” citing long histories of youth/decline panics.
- Economic hopelessness (housing unaffordability, precarious work) is seen by some as the real driver of apathy: why invest in a rigged game?
Parenting, Childhood, and Free Time
- Sharp criticism of parents who hand toddlers tablets and never teach boredom tolerance; others counter that modern safety norms and fear (of “Karens,” police, shootings) make offline exploration harder.
- A minority describe deliberately low-screen, highly engaged parenting and homeschooling, claiming markedly more curious, kind, and focused kids as a result.
Technology’s Double Edge and Regulation
- Several note AI and the internet can massively accelerate learning and creativity when motivation exists, but also supercharge distraction and misinformation.
- Proposals range from school bans to China-style youth limits, to regulating addictive design patterns like infinite scroll and short-form feeds, treating them more like drugs than neutral tools.