I just had a long visit with a high school teacher who doubles in physical education and some basic sciences classes. I recall his type from when I was in school. Earnest, rough, true blue, cares about the kids, does his job, and so on.
During the lockdowns, like many teachers, he started a side gig. He buys and sells mattresses, of all things, and he’s doing well for himself just in his off-hours. He has no debt, no employees, and very low real estate costs. To trade with him requires an appointment, but it’s worth it because his prices are far lower than the retail outlets. And he’s able to keep up with his teaching position at the same time.
Sensing a kindred soul (his shirt said “freedom”), I gradually stepped into forbidden territory. I asked him how the students are faring given the lockdowns and some two years of fake education. Wow, I hit a nerve. He explained how lockdowns were a complete disaster for the kids’ health. It isn’t possible to be a phys-ed coach on Zoom. He ended up just telling the kids to run around the block and report back on how it went.
In other words, the whole thing was a joke and everyone knew it. He saw the kids getting ever more cynical about the entire enterprise, and not just his fake classes but everyone’s classes. All of his fellow teachers were busying themselves with other projects, selling things, starting businesses, remodeling homes, taking trips, whatever. The kids, meanwhile, learned quickly that they could game the system and essentially do nothing at all.
Then it all became a mutual grift. The teachers were glad for a break while getting paid, and the students found out that attending school was optional. They lost all sense of meaning and purpose, and it hasn’t come back. They lack direction. They don’t take the “adult world” seriously. They’ve come to believe that everything is fake, all systems are scams, nothing is real, and everyone is part of the same hypocrisy.
Not even grades mattered much.
By the time they came back to classes, they had discovered weed. It was now legal in many places and available for everyone. The halls of most schools in the United States today stink to high heaven of marijuana. This was never true in the past but now it’s inescapable. There’s no chance of keeping it out. The cops have given up. The sniffing dogs themselves can’t zero in on the source because it’s everywhere and in every form. There are vape pens, old-fashioned cigarettes, edibles, and goodness knows what else.
The word is that this stuff is safer than tobacco and ultimately harmless. In fact, for young people, it can be disastrous. The ages of 16 to 19 are the exact age in which young people’s brains begin to adapt and develop emotional intelligence. They deal with stress and anxiety. If there’s a drug out there that smears a gauze over the experience, it can have serious consequences for the whole of life. It can even lead to schizophrenia and a fundamentally broken personality.
Aside from substance abuse, my new friend called out the astonishing illiteracy of this generation of high-school students. They don’t read. Many can’t read. If they do pretend to read, it doesn’t stick. That’s because nothing sticks. They’re barely going through the motions of normal life but otherwise lack drive, see no future and don’t care about it anyway, and presume that the whole system is corrupt so they might as well be corrupt, too.
As for math, history, literature, and science, it’s rare to find a kid who’s even slightly interested. This is the public schools, of course, and the private schools that didn’t close don’t have these same issues. For the most part, life went on as normal with little learning loss. But that group is a small percentage of the whole.
One might suppose that getting a job would help, but it’s extremely difficult to legally work as a teen; it’s also frowned on by peers. From the 1950s to 2000, employment among 16- to 19-year-olds was 40 to 50 percent. In the late 1970s, the labor participation rate among this group was fully 60 percent! This was how kids gained a work ethic, learned about real-world tasks and bosses, learned to interact with adults, and began to manage money.
After the turn of the century, there was a sudden drop. Today, fewer kids work than before the lockdowns. Less than a third hold jobs, even though the demand for good workers in the service industry is very high. As a result, they lack skills and experience beyond essentially goofing off. That’s all they know.
This is a whole generation that just can’t be bothered to do real things, whether school, sports, music, or work.
So what’s interesting to these poor kids? For some, it’s gender issues. They toy with the possibility that they’re born in the wrong bodies. Girls are really boys and boys might really be girls. It’s all bonkers, but it’s the new thing. So this coach has started to expect big “coming out” announcements that John is really Jane and Jane is really John. He doesn’t take any of it seriously anymore. Nor does anyone. They’ve concluded that this is just the latest nonsense put out as an excuse to avoid the drive to an adjusted excellence.
The seeds of all of this were planted long before, although the school closures turned a bad situation into a total disaster. The kids are doing lifetime-level damage to their brains, bodies, and spirits. Parents are at a loss as to what to do about it. Some turn to more meds. And parents have their own issues dealing with economic decline and many intensifying life stresses.
