The long-looming crisis in Western education is fully upon us. Due to uncritical programs that blindly touted the supposed benefits of technology in classrooms and well-intentioned but misguided counselors who shifted the focus of education from the pursuit of knowledge to the coddling of children’s feelings, Generation Z will be the first in U.S. history to score lower on cognitive measures and academic tests than previous generations.
“And to make matters worse, most of these young people are overconfident about how smart they are,” Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath told the New York Post. “The smarter people think they are, the dumber they actually are.”
Consequently, it is our duty as teachers to scrap the technological and child worship that has failed a generation of students.
Horvath, a cognitive neuroscientist and former teacher, noted that lower test scores are directly related to the amount of time students spend on computer screens in school. He claims that unrestricted access to devices has weakened rather than strengthened learning capabilities. Horvath told Congress that Gen Z has scored lower than their predecessors on every cognitive measure tested, including basic attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive functioning, and general IQ, despite going to more school than previous generations.
“So, why? What happened around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development?” Horvath asked Congress before concluding, “The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning.”
Many of us in the teaching profession have aided and abetted this cognitive decline by accepting new technologies in the classroom without question. Although great teachers and philosophers like Neil Postman warned us decades ago to resist “technology for technology’s sake,” well-meaning administrators adopted innovations without considering the impact they would have on children. Postman presciently argued that we were in danger of “deifying” technology. Evan as far back as the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau warned us that “Men have become the tools of their tools.” Modern educators did not heed these warnings; on the contrary, they embraced technology and ushered in a Huxleyan brave new educational world where information worship replaced thinking, and students’ attention, focus, and time were hijacked by devices.
Since the turn of the 21st century, too many educators have conflated access to information with the accumulation of knowledge. Along the way, Aristotle’s idea of seeking eudaimonia (the pursuit of the good, the beautiful, and the true) was replaced with a frantic desire for instant gratification.
Rather than the numerous trainings designed to help teachers integrate new technologies into the classroom, we might have benefited from simple philosophical discussions centered around the concepts of techne and episteme in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In short, we could have discussed and debated how much of our work was dedicated to technical skill development rather than helping students understand why something is true through systematic study, logic, and deduction.
This negligence has produced a narcissistic generation unable to place itself squarely on the historical timeline, resulting in the irrational belief that the world today is worse than it has ever been. Consequently, not only do we face a crisis in education, but also a teen mental health crisis stemming from a Faustian bargain that sacrificed the quest for meaning and purpose with the voluntary embrace of information overload and the nefarious practice of encouraging young people to constantly focus on their feelings.
The teen mental health crisis is the tragic consequence of Western educators succumbing to a “devouring mother” approach to counseling and teaching. This is most saliently represented in social-emotional programs that fetishize kindness and make weakness a virtue. In 2018, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff masterfully documented how these “good intentions” were “setting up a generation for failure.” Such misguided empathy has led many students to wallow in “learned helplessness,” a condition that Psychology Today defines as “when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so.”
Rare is the teacher today who has not faced “learned helplessness” in the classroom. In a perverse play on the old Soviet joke, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” some modern teachers can be heard saying, “We pretend to teach and they pretend to learn.” Other, more cynical teachers say, “We give them the answers. They write them down. And we call it learning.” Alas, our noble instinct to help in the short-term is leading to long-term suffering, prompting the Atlantic to note, “At elite universities and law schools, upwards of 40 percent of students now qualify for accommodations, and an increasing number for mental health issues such as anxiety or depression.” (RELATED: Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Dumbing Down of America)
Despite this bleak picture, there is much that teachers can do to confront the challenges posed by the current crisis in education. However, since the most effective measures are rooted in what some progressives might vituperatively smear as the white patriarchal past, it is likely that those attempting to implement them will be labeled as severe, harsh, unkind, and, of course, racist. Still, there might not be a more essential and life-saving endeavor than encouraging students to pursue the Greek virtue of wisdom through self-control, courage, and justice. Unfortunately, our current system has produced too many young social justice warriors who exude misguided courage, little self-control, and absolutely no wisdom.
Another challenge is that, sadly, many young people are being indoctrinated to believe that, rather than making oneself physically, emotionally, and intellectually strong, true virtue lies in being a passive and weak victim. To combat this tragedy, teachers should introduce students to the fact that being weak has never been and will never be a virtue. As Dr. Jordan Peterson has stated, “Don’t confuse weakness with moral virtue: I’m harmless, therefore I’m good. If you’re harmless, you’re just weak. And if you’re weak, you’re not going to be good.”
Although today’s secular educators might be reluctant to admit it, many have corrupted Christ’s message that the “meek shall inherit the earth” to mean that the weak will one day rule. However, the true meaning of the message is rooted in the ancient Greek concept of praus, or strength under control. Thus, the strong who sheath their swords but are always ready for a fight will inherit the earth. And it is the strong who bear the responsibility of protecting the weak.
Consequently, it is our duty as teachers to scrap the technological and child worship that has failed a generation of students. This can be accomplished through a return to the rigorous reading, writing, math, and physical education programs that made the United States a leader in education in the 20th century. We must reconstruct schools to resemble sacred places where young people are pushed to build the necessary intellectual, emotional, and physical strength to survive and thrive in a competitive and unfair world.
That used to be education’s mission. It should be again.
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Dana E. Abizaid, a freelance writer and teacher, has written for The Daily Caller, Forbes, Salon, and The American Spectator among other publications.
