What's Happening to Students?
Many commenters link students’ apparent apathy, anxiety and inability to focus to smartphones and algorithmically optimized “digital drugs,” arguing for school bans, stricter parental limits, and even China-style regulation of youth screen time. Others counter that phones are a symptom rather than the root cause, pointing instead to misaligned, metrics-driven education systems, worsening economic prospects, and loss of faith in the value of schooling and degrees. Across both views runs a deeper concern that today’s incentives—whether in tech, policy, or education—are systematically undermining young people’s attention, motivation and trust in the future.
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.