Did you know a recent survey found half of all college students had attended mental health counseling? And that in the past two years, suicide attempts for teenage boys are up 25 percent? And for teenage girls, 70 percent?
I learned that listening to Johnathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, on Free Thoughts with Trevor Burrus. As Haidt puts it, “this is a tidal wave of anxiety and depression.”
What the hell is going on?
After listening to the podcast I ordered Haidt and Lukianoffs’ book and have yet to read it, but this seems to be their argument: We are teaching children poor ways to cope with unpleasant situations. We have taken away free play from children, given them a never-ending world of social media, and bureaucratized every element of life on campus. Come adulthood, we have not prepared them for how to deal with situations as mundane as disagreement.
This makes a lot of sense to me but I want to focus on a related concept: self-esteem.
We all need self-esteem. Life is a miserable slog if you don’t believe you have anything of value to offer to the world.
The risk to self-esteem is how social media contributes to this anxiety crisis. As Haidt and Lukianoff put it, imagine the worst aspects of high school didn’t end when the bell rang, but followed you home at night through Facebook and Twitter. The self-doubt, the comparisons to others, the manipulation, it’s inescapable.
This sounds right to me and it drove home to me what I think is a serious problem. School is bad for self-esteem.
I am a very confident person. I have been for almost all of my life, with the exception of junior high. I was really hung up on the desire to be popular, particularly in the sense of high status. It was a zero-sum game. Most people I know would say the same. We can look back as adults and realize our middle school popularity did not determine our adulthood happiness, but in those years it felt all so important.
For years I have been intrigued by the idea of homeschooling. I have not had direct experience with it but my handful of friends who were homeschooled are all “well-adjusted” and speak positively of their homeschooling experience.
A part of me finds school very strange. Our plan for how to help children become adults is to put them all in a building together, where they form their own little society and hierarchies, where the expectations are very different from those of adulthood? My observations of homeschooling are that they are a bit better about their daily routines reflecting “real life”. The current system makes sense for us adults, it’s just specialization and division of labor for tending to children, but I’m skeptical it is best for the kids.
This is probably my most jumbled blog post yet. I have a bunch of thoughts on these topics that I’m still trying to work through and clearly articulate. There are of course other factors, such as a parenting culture increasingly uncomfortable with free play. For now I’ll close with this: While I think we are teaching young people to over diagnose anxiety there is a real crisis at the current moment. The way we go about school is hurting, rather than helping, the problem.