The nation’s second-largest teachers union said Thursday it was losing patience with social media apps that it says are contributing to mental health problems and misbehavior in classrooms nationwide, draining time and money from teachers and school systems.
It wasn’t really intended to be, as that is a larger conversation. But I didn’t mean it the way I suspect you thought I did, in a boomer “tight pants and rock music are all of society’s ills” way.
My take on it is that ever since corporations got away with prioritizing shareholder profits over everything else, the safety nets that kept families strong started to crumble. Parents had to work more hours, people were more stressed, neighborhoods became more distant, urban spread increased. Add that to hysteria over crime and we get parents that aren’t able to raise kids and think schools can do it. No sense of community responsibility and no safety net of a village helping to raise the kids because everyone’s at work and scared that someone’s going to shoot or kidnap them. So you get generational radicalization with acting out behavior getting worse and worse.
Social media makes all this worse because it optimizes for engagement, and nothing gets engagement like misery and jealousy all while giving an illusion of actual socialization. COVID was gas added to this fire that has been burning for decades.
I definitely agree there. Which is a challenge in and of itself. Like I said, this is a multi-pronged issue. It didn’t get to where it is quickly and it won’t get fixed quickly either. It will be a generational effort. And I don’t think all the fix actions needed are agreed on or even known.
I think part of it will be strengthening neighborhoods and creating a sense of community and pride in it. Another part is allowing parents to actually parent and giving them the tools that their parents didn’t pass on to them because they probably didn’t have them either.
It’s a large conversation to have.
I think this is a really great response; I agree with you on a lot of this. I (personally) think we need more of this sort of dialog and less “American society is crumbling.” I hope you’ll agree here/try to keep that in mind as much as possible. IMO some outwardly expressed optimism and hope is really important and can go a long way towards fighting the collective depression and overwhelming feeling that we’re up against an insurmountable force … IMO we can get through all of this, we just have to work together and have constructive discussions on how.
There’s definitely been some dropping the ball by previous generations, and I hope (and if we try, know) we can do better in the coming years.