My neighbors, lovely, smart, kindly people, are trying to persuade us to try out Netflix's new series "Adolescence." A sentence or two into the description we were doubtful. It's a mockumentary about a 13-year-old UK schoolboy who kills a schoolgirl. The show immediately shocks some audience members by portraying a school in complete chaos. What could be the cause of this collapse? I hope I won't ruin the suspense by revealing that the culprit is social media. Apparently neither parents nor schools have any power to detach children from the pernicious influence of the outside culture.
I'm sure if either parents or teachers made any attempt to turn off the phones, even during class, they'd be brought up on hate crime charges.
My verdict: for decades now the schools have been in the control of crazy people, and kids need to get sprung out of them. It would be bad enough if all that was happening was mission creep, so the eternally and rapidly ballooning budget was only eaten up by all the non-education goals, such as adult employment programs, babysitting, and political indoctrination of captive audiences. But increasingly the kids not only don't get an education, and not only have their time wasted and their intellectual dignity assaulted, but they also are lucky to survive without serious injury.
4 comments:
I'm pretty sure the high school down in Sylva installed a cellular disruptor/jammer. My phone won't work at the grocery store across the street, or the hardware store across from that either. Good decision if so.
This is a good read about university students today:
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
Apparently the ethnicity of the murderous boy is quite um, different than the real boy he is based on.
I have been thinking about the damage that schools and culture do to very talented students who will go off and be part of the ruling class. I can forgive them being bad at educating - that has always been true - but miseducating them is much worse. I will be posting on it, but it's not quite clear in my mind yet.
We blame social media, but isn't it just a mirror on our society? Do other societies have the same problems as we do as a result of social media? If not why not? I seem to recall hearing that Finland and Japan (I think- my recollection is blurry) did not seem to have the social media damage we do. Maybe we're blaming the wrong thing... Why are we so vulnerable to it?
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