I once read a joke as a teenager that resonated with me:
Student 1: "Did you know that ignorance and apathy are the two biggest problems in America?"
Student 2: "Don't know and don't care!"
As I come to the end of my third year as a high school teacher, I genuinely think this joke was on to something. Student apathy and ignorance seems to be at an all-time high.
According to a paper published by the Social Science Research Network in 2011, 8 years before COVID-19,
"Student apathy has risen to a level that places education in the United States at serious risks. The current U.S. student has become an unmotivated apathetic individual with a lack of interest, goals, and determination to succeed in the academic curriculum. The United States has fallen out of the top 10 countries in education levels of students and continuing on a downward spiral. Student apathy has been cited as a serious problem by 29% of teachers ranking higher than all other areas as exposed in a 2008 survey of public high school teachers. The students tested against 14 major countries places the United States at number 11 in the current ratings of education levels. Student apathy must be identified and changed to overcome the continued short comings of education in the United States."
And since COVID this problem has only become worse. Institutions like the Brookings Institute and the US Department of Education have also begun studies on post-pandemic trauma to the education system. The US Department of Education also reports that "as of October 2022, 4% of all public school teaching positions were vacant... 18% of public schools had one teaching vacancy and 27% had multiple teaching vacancies." Teachers are vacating the education profession en masse since COVID. Many theories have been proposed to explain this exodus, from low teacher pay to the deprofessionalization of the field to the behavior problems present in students. And all of these theories hold merit.
However, if there is one thing above all that concerns me about the future of education and the future of educators in the field, it is student apathy. Students just do not care. I have been teaching high school for three years, my first year being 2020, and I have never had to fight my students to care like I have this year. And this goes beyond not being grade motivated. This is doing the bare minimum to achieve a 69.5 in the class, if they even bother with that. This is not showing up to school because they don't "feel like it," with consequences like failing, not achieving credit, or having to go to Saturday school or summer school just rolling off their backs. I cannot count the number of students I have heard this year say things like, "I'll just go to summer school. It'll be fine."
What are teachers to do in an environment where they are having to churn out enough enthusiasm to not only make otherwise boring content fun to learn but to also operate in an environment where consequences for behavior hold zero weight. Being the only one in the room who cares about the success of my students is the most exhausting state. So it's no wonder that teacher burn out is at an all time high. Add to that the societal pressures on the teacher - oh and by the way, no one blames the students for their own apathy- and we have created a recipe where even the most passionate teachers run out of passion. Even the most inspired teachers run out of inspiration. Teachers are EXHAUSTED physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Teachers thrive on person-to-person feedback from students. Imagine being a comedian in a room full of people who were forced to be there, who have no desire to hear you, and who could care less about the consequences that could be enforced upon them for this apathy. You wouldn't want to be a comedian for long. That is unfortunately the daily reality for a teacher. I have poured hours into engaging lesson plans, only to have my students complain that they are expected to move around the room or that they have to interact with their peers. They want to be spoon fed exactly what they are to know and they want to regurgitate it on a multiple choice test and dump the information.
In my sociology class this year, in an act of near-desperation, I asked students what things I could incorporate into class to make it more engaging and fun. Here were their top responses: free time (as in time I can stare at my phone) received 25 votes out of 103; nap time received 22, study hall (when asked what this was to them, it was another free time) received 21 votes; softer lighting received 21 votes, more engaging vocabulary received 8 votes, and hands-on learning opportunities and learning games each received 3 votes. 6 votes out of 103 total involved an actual instructional strategy. The rest had to do with free time or ambiance. After literally asking the students what THEY wanted, I realized that learning is at the bottom of that list. How does a teacher handle that?
And solutions are a struggle. A quick Google search of what to do about apathetic students is a glimpse into how the majority of both the education and non-education worlds would approach this scenario. Blame the teacher. So many different articles suggest that the teacher should be more engaging, the teacher should allow more choice in the classroom, the teacher should plan for more hands-on lesson experiences, the teacher should go to more professional development and stay excited about their job so that enthusiasm rubs off on the students. However, I guarantee that you can put even the most excited, engaging, and enthusiastic teacher in a classroom day after day with apathetic students, and the influence will occur in the opposite direction. It's simple math...one enthusiastic teacher in the face of 100 or more (or 25 in the case of elementary) students who make it very clear that they do not care day after day after day... that enthusiasm just will not survive.
So since society clearly wants to blame the teacher (at least according to the internet), and the issue is clearly not the teacher, who is to blame in this search for a solution? Is it the student? How could it be? High school students in particular are living through one of the most difficult periods of their life. I have maybe a handful of students who actually get 6 hours of sleep each night between 8-10 hours in school, working part time or full time, contributing to their families, homework, sports and other extracurriculars, etc. They are under constant social pressure to perform, to compete, to know exactly what they want to do with their lives at 16 or 17 years old, to always be moving. We start the American hustle and bustle early, and frankly, these CHILDREN (lest we forget they are indeed children) are EXHAUSTED! According to the CDC, teenagers need 8-10 hours of sleep each night, and over 70% of them do not acquire the recommended sleep hours. And lest we forget the results of chronic sleep deprivation, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute reminds us that sleep deficiency is linked to many chronic health problems, including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression. At this point, blaming the students for the apathy that likely comes from literal exhaustion seems cruel.
On top of that, they are going through a period of intense physical and social change. They are not yet adults, but they are expected to behave as such. Their hormones are raging, and the vast majority of them have no idea how to handle them. They are simultaneously confronted with a highly sexualized culture and expected not to have any desire to engage in it. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that teenagers spend around 9 HOURS on their phones each day. NINE HOURS! And as a teacher, I believe it. I have never seen a student balk like they do if you threaten the phone. This year I implemented a policy that students had to leave their phones in the classroom when they went to the bathroom, and it cut bathroom visits in half and bathroom time from 15 minutes on average to 2 minutes on average. Turns out the stall door is really boring to stare at.
So we should not blame the teacher, and we should not blame the students. Should we blame the parents? As a teacher, my initial instinct was to blame the parents. If parents would just x, y, or z, these students would be motivated to care more. If the parents would establish a work ethic or a set of standards, students would feel motivated at school. While some of that may be true, I have also seen normally highly motivated students this year get so overwhelmed that they just shut down. Parents don't explain that. I have dealt with parents who seem at their wits' end because they have done everything they know to do, and they cannot seem to make their child care about school. While blaming the parent seems expedient for teachers, I think this may only serve to isolate the one person who could be our true ally in student success. Now, there is definitely an area of growth for parents being more involved in their child's school experience. While I have called parents who genuinely care, I have also called (and left voicemails for) parents who have completely checked out of their child's life. I remember one conversation I had with a mom my first year whose child was online. Three weeks of school had passed, and this student had never signed on to a single digital class session. I called mom to figure out what was going on, and she was completely unaware that school had even started. (It was mid-September, and this child had already received his school technology.) The level of checked-out was extreme in this case, and as the last three years have progressed, I have seen many occasions of this type of parental abandonment. So this is not a free pass for parents. Ultimately the environment that parents create in their homes around academics and learning in general is has a massive influence on creating either a lifelong avid learner or an apathetic, checked out, unsuccessful student. However, blaming the collective "parent" for the collective apathy of students is not entirely accurate.
What about societal pressures? Could it be possible that student apathy could be an anxiety response? The sheer number of things that the average high schooler currently has to manage would boggle most adult minds. Could their developmentally immature brains be so overwhelmed that they simply shut down as a coping strategy? Again, I think the theory is a valid idea, but show me a single group of high schoolers in the last 50 years that weren't under some level of pressure to get it all figured out. There is something massively distinct about this particular group.
Student apathy is not a new phenomenon, to be fair. Generation after generation has made comments on the lack of responsibility and care taken by the next one to care for the world and the culture they are bestowed. Part of that is simply the age of human we deal with here. However, the LEVEL of student apathy we are seeing now seems unprecedented. And the only thing we can truly blame at this point is the advent of social media. A study from the University of North Carolina shows that adolescent neural development is impacted strongly by the drive to check social media multiple times a day, if not be constantly engaged. I had my sociology students this year compute an average of the amount of time they spend on social media using their screen time calculators. My high school students averaged 7.5 hours a day during the week and nearly 12 hours a day on the weekends. That is almost an ENTIRE wake cycle in an average day. Add to that the that we now know, according to multiple studies, that social media creates increased feelings of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and loneliness - on top of the volatile developmental period that teenage brains are going through, and we have a recipe for absolutely not caring about school. How could they when they have been bombarded with all the ways they aren't good enough all weekend? Or all the reasons that they shouldn't care? Or how about the constant stream of (utterly false and ridiculous) "Why wasn't I taught this in school?" videos. Life feels unreasonably insurmountable in those moments, and their developing teenage brains are not equipped to handle the pressure. In the grand scheme of things, school just feels like the least important thing they could engage in. Social media promises so much but then delivers so little, but the hardest part of this is that they cannot disconnect from their artificial realities long enough to realize they are artificial. And reality just doesn't hold the same dopamine spikes for their addicted brains.
I predict as a teacher that as we move forward, apathy in the classroom will increase or decrease in relative proportion to screentime and specifically social media time. Parents, do your children a favor and remove them from the addictive appendage they can't seem to live without. It won't be easy. They're addicted. But ultimately your job is to do the best for them whether they like it or not, and I challenge you that the best thing you can do for your child in this moment is limit the phone. Make the hard choice. Teachers fight the phones on the daily. I have to remind students nearly constantly to put their phones away. I brought back paper work this year to limit time spent on screens. To see a radical shift in student apathy in the classroom requires a radical shift in our approach.
Sources:
AACAP. (n.d.). Screen Time and Children . American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Retrieved April 17, 2023, from
https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-
Watching-TV-054.aspx
Benders, David S., Student Apathy: The Downfall of Education (December 5, 2011).
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1968613 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1968613
Bwbieltz. (2023, January 3). Study shows habitual checking of social media may impact young
adolescents' brain development: UNC-Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.unc.edu/posts/2023/01/03/study-shows-habitual-checking-
of-social-media-may-impact-young-adolescents-brain-development/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, September 10). Sleep in Middle and high school
students. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved April 17, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/features/students-sleep.htm
Delarosa, J., & Elias, J. (2022, December 6). Forty-Five Percent of Public Schools Operating Without a Full Teaching Staff in October, New NCES Data Show. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved April 14, 2023, from https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/12_6_2022.asp#:~:text=As%20of%20October%202022%2C%204,percent%20had%20multiple%20teaching%20vacancies.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). What are sleep deprivation and deficiency? National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. Retrieved April 17, 2023, from https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep-deprivation#:~:text=Sleep%20deficiency%20is%20linked%20to,adults%2C%20teens%2C%20and%20children.
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