this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Teacher here. Kids want the quick dopamine hit from their phones and their school-supplied chromebooks. They do not want to take the time to try something that might be hard, and they do not want to stretch their brains at all
People said that about newspapers, too.
The issue isn't the device, it's the lack of restraint the kids were never taught. Of course they want that Dopamine hit. It's free. Same reason very few people seek the satisfaction of building your table yourself, when you can buy one.
Not to say kids aren't worse, they are, and it's awful, but it's a symptom, not the problem, in my opinion. The problem is they have no goals. Where do they wanna end up? The world is fucked, and most of them talk about the future as if there isn't one. They won't own a house, they won't get enough to live off of with a job, a good job is locked behind ungodly amounts of debt, and the world is literally on fire. Then, the people who should fix it, the people who get elected, are selling them out for money instead of fixing it. There's no point in doing hard things if there's nothing to gain from it.
Kids won't improve until the world does, because they have no reason to put down the devices. The devices offer a hollow life, and that's more than real life is willing to give them.
Sorry about the rant, I just think it's important to keep the focus on the problem. Kids engage wherever they get the most reward. It's our job, not teachers, to make real life better, and it can be. Until then, sorry about the kids. I'm trying to raise mine to value what there is to value, but they definitely suck right now, even if it's not their fault.
But the device makes it easier to lack self-control
If you only have self-control because you have no outlet for boredom, you don't have self-control.
My dad used to get bored and go out in the woods and stick firecrackers into frogs. A lot of people in his generation died doing stupid things because they were bored. They didn't have phones, so they must have had self-control? Nah.
The kid won't be better without the device. They're not bad kids now. They're reacting, really badly, to an awful situation. It just so happens (not a coincidence, though, they're linked) that this particular technological innovation was at a similar time as all the shit above.
^
You can upvote instead of making an entire comment, FYI
Gee thanks, I didn’t know that
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
for those that do not get the reference, this is a quote that is generally attributed to Socrates or the like. I seem to recall once seeing some discussion to the effect that it isnt actually a quote of his, and is actually from some guy in the beginning of the 1900s paraphrasing some ancient greek writers, though I dont know for sure, but either way, its a pretty old quote and as such is used to demonstrate that the sentiment that "the children of today are worse than they used to be" has been around for longer than modern technology, and may be as old as civilization itself if not older.
Respect is earned. And a lot of these adults have given zero reason for them to be respected. Children are not servants, that's a wrong and stupid way to look at it.
Kids doing weird stuff that doesn't totally conform to the culture is not a respect thing. Its just the evolution of culture. For example when I was a kid, painting your fingernails was almost unheard of. Basically only the hard-core emos or a rock singer or something would do it.
These days you see young kids painting their fingernails and it's not a big deal to anyone. I'm the Socrates here because I think it's weird but I try to stay open minded that things are different now and will continue to change into ways that will seem stranger and stranger to me
For the uninitiated this is a qoute from Socrates.
I'm not pro child and I'm not a child myself, at least by age, but you make it sound like children should just fall in line and be mindless servants. Half the stuff you listed I think are improvements to my upbringing.
Respecting elders is bullshit after a point. Respect everyone, but elders don't deserve some specialty treatment. I have never stood when someone enters a room except for a bride at a wedding or to greet that person. There are very few people that deserve people to stand on arrival, and for everyone of them, it depends on the setting. Nobody always gets a standing arrival. Contradiction is healthy within reason. Asking question and countering statements isn't bad when it's honest.
All that said, there are definitely traits that I think are bad with today's youths, but they aren't worse than previous generations, just worse in different things. For example, I bet less kids today smoke cigarettes compared to 10 years ago.
It’s a quote that gets attributed to Socrates showing that the issue of one generation complaining about the following generation is a tradition as old as time itself
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt
The user you replied to is repeating a fairly well known and old quote, not directly arguing that children behave as servants. It's a quote that gets used a lot in discussions about "kids these days", the point of sharing it is usually to demonstrate that adults have always said this about children, and thus also to imply that the kids really haven't gotten significantly worse in the present generation, people just think they have because they remember themselves or previous generations as kids through the lens of nostalgia or such.
I think it's more that most of us don't remember ourselves as kids.
I remember myself as a kid, I was an asshole. My friends were assholes. We were only slightly restrained by the fact that we had no internet so our assholery was contained withing the limited physical space we could access.
Please stop saying "dopamine" when you mean "reward".
Brains don't work like that. Nerves don't work like that.
Dopamine is indeed a chemical that brain nerves use for signaling. However, it is not used exclusively for pleasure signals. It is used for, among other things, reward-motivated behavior — but that includes aversion, that is, avoiding things that you've learned to stay away from. That's literally the opposite of the pop-culture use of "dopamine".
The actual chemical dopamine is also used in basic motor functioning. Impairment of that dopamine pathway is involved in Parkinson's disease; and medications that increase dopamine, such as L-DOPA, are used to treat Parkinson's. These medications are not addictive drugs; thus further disproving the pop-culture impression of "dopamine = do it more!"
"Why go for anything other than the low hanging fruit?" - Our monkey brains
But seriously why innovate? Great inventors and innovators are often described as crazy or mad because the risk of failing when creating something new far outways the chance of success. Most people choose to stick with something that works that has a guarantee of some success rather than risk it all on something new.
Innovation isn't an all or nothing thing, you don't need to "risk it all on something new". Unless it's huge leap in an unknown direction
Some of us have an insatiable need to create stuff and for those of us who are less that great at things like drawing, music, sculpture and more in general art (hehe!) that need ends up channelled into inventing stuff that "ticks", be it software or gadgets.
The problem is not lack of innovators, the problem is that nowadays you have to somehow monetise innovation because it needs to pay for your life, which in the rentier economy we have nowadays costs a lot (especially because of the ridiculous prices for housing) or you have to spend most of your time working for somebody else to get the money you need to survive, and the work culture in certain areas (like software development) eats more and more of your personal time so there is no personal time or energy left to indulge in scratring your own innovation itch.
(From what I've seen the same kind of thing is happenning in the arts side of things: in some places you either accept you have to be poor for the sake of Art, or you give up on the whole thing unless you can come from well-off families who will sustain you "until your career takes off". For example in the modern UK pretty much no new actor or actrice comes from a social class below the high middle class, which didn't use to be the case for example when Michael Caine was starting his career).
It's not lack of boredom that's killing innovation (including innovative new stuff in the creative arts), it's lack of time because unless you're born in the Owner Class, you have to spend most of your time running on the Owner Classe's treadmills to pay the Owner Class for a place to live and for life's essentials.
Do you think that's an issue with the way the school lessons are setup and structured or more due to their home situation?
And even if it is a largely "at home" issue, do you feel like there's any room for solving this on the schooling side?
Isn't that what schools have to teach them?
It's a difficult ask, but if we consider schools the social equalizer and teacher of knowledge and work (approach, mindset, finding success), then learning why the devices or platforms influence us the way they do and how we can stick to tasks to complete them must be taught in schools.