17 Comments
Sep 8Liked by Peter Gray

After six years teaching at very affluent private schools where kids were under intense SAT and college pressure, this research and analysis all back up my anecdotal beliefs. It’s not just the pressure itself; it’s the lack of unstructured time, time to daydream or read for pleasure or make art or write stories or spend time with family. Even studio art is an advanced placement class now. Athletic programs and travel sports teams take up the children’s remaining time. As for social media, that is more of a symptom than a cause. When you are under so much pressure and your time is so overstructured, scrolling on your phone is all you have the bandwidth for, and kids find it to be an easy, mindless escape.

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I find that to be true as an adult as well. Being tired or not being allowed freedom to move around (e.g. being stuck with a baby or a sick toddler) means the only stimulation I get is from my phone. I notice when I post things to my substack on weekends, no one reads it, because they are busy doing things IRL. But Monday morning and everyone with a desk job logs on and engages. Being stuck at a desk with colleagues you aren't connected to leads you deeper into your phone.

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Yes! Definitely noticed first within myself!

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It’s an interesting hypothesis. I would be curious to see the comparison in mental health between public school children under Common Core and private school children using their private curriculum. I attended a private elementary school which had at least 2 hours of homework a night through eighth grade and Phillips Academy Andover which had at least 4 or more hours of homework nightly, alternate Saturday classes and mandatory afternoon sports, with days at leader running 8-5 pm. The pressure there was intense, but I would not say that I or my peers suffered worse mental health than our public school friends did *at the time* which was the ‘80s (so there was no common core in public school). Likewise, we had dozens of contemporaries in private schools throughout New England who were by and large under similar academic pressure and did not seem less mentally health, and perhaps even more so in terms of maturity and stability. Admittedly this is not a “scientific” assessment but it does pose a plausible comparison opportunity. If the “academic pressure” of a curriculum change can be said to have impacted mental health, it would be interesting to see whether it was due to academic pressure per se, or something particularly insidious or defective about the Common Core design itself. I can say with certainty that the pressure of rigorous private schooling - both here and abroad where I’ve also studied - has turned out some of the healthiest and capable adults I have met in my life.

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What I've found in my own journey dealing with stress is that it's UNSOOTHED stress that's the problem. If you're in some very exclusive school that prizes achievement, it's probably also structured so students get a lot of attention from teachers and things are structured around high-pressure situations with corresponding opportunities to blow off steam. Like maybe post-exam fun events. Plus they probably don't have too many kids who struggle with academics, and have some level of homogeneity that way, so they are able to structure things tailored to a specific kind of student. It's possible also that students who go to such schools tend to be from families who get what it involves and are able to tailor things to suit the students' schedules and social life.

I personally think the issue with public school is the broken relationship between teachers and students, and reducing teacher quality. Good teachers would be a source of soothing for students in one way or another. But the way things are structured, it seems like teachers are another source of stress. IQs of Education majors are now among the lowest for college grads of all majors. Teaching is a less attractive profession for many reasons, including that women have more options and common core and other policies have made teaching in public schools stressful at best and life-threatening at worst. So teacher quality is lower, and policies that make teachers into automatons that follow policy blindly probably make teachers less effective and students more estranged from teachers because the teachers aren't able to nurture attachment by being responsive to the kids' needs.

At the core, it's basically this - teachers are less able to be responsive to the needs of their students for various reasons. As a result, students have their stress go unsoothed, which makes them needier and more liable to act out, setting off a vicious cycle.

I'm seeing this at the daycare/preschool level. Toddlers don't get enough attention, teachers struggle at classroom management - I see young women with Early Childhood Education degrees fail to manage the class as well as housewives with a high school education or lower running a co-op i went to did 35 years ago. Kids end up quite stressed out and come home and act out. Parents think they are doing it wrong because the kids are "so well behaved at daycare".

I wouldn't be surprised if that can be generalized quite easily to grade school.

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Yes! Mental health does not suffer by stress alone: some (many) kinds of stress are good for us — defining the type of stress that harms us more specifically (the type that makes us feel helpless? Unneeded? “Typical”?) might be the key.

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Indeed; stress is a powerful force shaping human development (and can result in a diamond as much as a disaster). There was a LOT going on at the time we're tracking this "generational" change in stress, so we should be very cautious in putting too much weight on any one factor. Parenting styles changed, financial crises, political strife, etc., Children are major attennas of many inputs, even many they do not fully cognitively recognize, so we might need to be talking about constellations of conditions - much like we did when we talk about Baby Boomers raised in the immediate Post WWII period. It's equally possible that mental health challenges were caused by what we did NOT do as much as what we DID: ie., helicopter parenting may have caused positive stresses to NOT be applied and therefore undermined development of certain resilient traits, moreso than the introduction of a flawed pedagogical approach in primary schools...

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I agree with much of what you say here, Peter. However, as a former teacher, I think it would be worth looking more closely at the time between NCLB being passed and the passage of Common Core. I think you may be underestimating how much schools changed after the passage of NCLB. The shifts were more varied across the country as every state was implementing school change differently--as opposed to Common Core, which aimed for more national consistency. I'll direct you to a few various studies I've come across (in no way comprehensive) about changes after NCLB. No Child Left Behind: NeglectingExcellence, Marcia Gentry, 2006, is fairly comprehensive. https://web.archive.org/web/20170809054152id_/http://www.geri.education.purdue.edu/PDF%20Files/GENTRY/2006._Gentry._Neglec.pdf This one (2009) looks at how teacher professionalism shifted after NCLB: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0742051X09000900 And here's one from 2010 about arts devolution in schools after NCLB: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10632913.2010.490776

I think you are correct in saying that things may have worsened after the passage of Common Core. But I would argue that while the rates of teen suffering between 2009 and 2013 may be partly attributed to the passage of Common Core, they may be more closely tied to the fact that these teenagers were the products of a changed educational system. Fifteen-year-olds in 2012 had been kindergarteners when NCLB was implemented in 2002. Their entire educational experience had been less child-centered, less oriented to play and problem-solving. I know that you--if anyone!--understand the value of these experiences in childhood. I believe that the effects of NCLB on these students was cumulative, impactful, and really hit once they became teenagers.

All to say, I agree with your thoughts about school pressure being a major cause of the changes in youth mental health starting around 2010. With admiration and respect, I'd simply encourage you to look into how much education changed in the years between NCLB and Common Core. It may have had a more cumulative effect on this shift than you may be recognizing.

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I forgot to mention that my personal expertise is with kids and writing. When I was a teacher in the early ‘90s, I was trained in teaching writing through daily writer’s workshops in the classroom, a child-centered method that tends to be very engaging to students and was fairly widespread at the time. By 2010 the workshop approach had virtually disappeared from classrooms due to NCLB, a situation I researched for a feature article I was pitching. That shift happened in the years before Common Core was implemented.

You might be interested in this article in The Nation, which came out weeks after the passage of NCLB in 2002. The author, Stephen Metcalf, explores the origins and the underbelly of NCLB. The article is shocking and heartbreaking. Metcalf writes about how the right pilloried “child-centered education” as a liberal fad and how they quickly undermined the approach with textbook-driven curricula. All of this played out well before Common Core was implemented. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/reading-between-lines/

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Peter, what are your thoughts on the role of educational technology in all of this? If you follow the timelines of increased mental health issues, the increased use of technology in schools (& big tech profits) follows the same path, especially with the introduction of 1:1 devices. My argument is that not only does learning through a digital format decrease achievement (studies are showing that comprehension/math on paper is stronger etc.) it is also impacting social skill development/emotional regulation, significantly increasing screen time use during the day, reduces the ability to think critically and impacts social connectedness. My theory is that the unvetted technology products along with common core is making children more susceptible to the harms of social media. If children were thriving in schools and more socially connected in real life, social media would have less of an impact on them.

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I've worked on edtech products and I read a recent book about whether Ed tech benefits us (whose title I can't recall). Edtech shows great promise when used in schools that already have good resources, and they don't move the needle much w when used in bad schools. Ed tech folks including academics do a lot of research on the products they are making, there are a lot of very dedicated people in the space. Also they tend to be motivated by their own memories of going on the internet and learning and want to recreate that for other kids.

But the thing everyone misses either out of ignorance or political correctness, is that this only really happens in environments where the kids are already oriented to learn. Kids in under resourced settings just use their school laptop to play games and get on social media.

The book I read suggested that what helps kids learn from edtech is good teachers who teach them how to learn and have structured activities to do so using edtech. Just like anything else in teaching. The teachers are what matters in the end.

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I am sure there are very dedicated and passionate people working in the edtech area with the goals of helping education not hurting. My experience has been, no matter how many resources a school may have, when you give a child a device, the internet is always attempting to rob their attention. Children are becoming passive learners and the leaders in edtech even admit that they need to create products to provide dopamine hits. There is no evidence that giving a child a 1:1 device under the age of 14 improves their learning. I would bet that if a true research study were completed, the harms would far out weigh any benefit. There are a number of wonderful teachers that struggle because there is a constant battle for attention. I have read many studies that edtech companies use to push their products and they are very weak. The cognitive process required to learn how to read, write and do math is complex and is an intricate multisensory process. All that is lost when we hand a child a device. For the majority of students, especially middle school and younger, technology should be significantly limited in schools.

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Totally agree with you. Even in great school districts, being given a device means even if they aren't using the device in school for fun, they end up doing so at home, causing more conflict with parents. It feels like too much trouble and not enough benefit to bring in apps to learn from. Kids need good teachers essentially, that's all there is to it, and that's not going to come from a device.

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18th-year high school teacher here. Mr. Gray strikes me as largely correct. Schools have been transformed since NCLB, and not for the better. Many who graduated before, say, 2008, wouldn’t recognize education if they stepped into a classroom now. The joy has largely been sucked out. This is also largely why so many veteran teachers are leaving the profession and why so few students today want to become teachers.

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Thank you for addressing those questions and clarifying your point of view of each one. I especially appreciated your reference to FREE TO LEARN. It does such a great job of laying a foundation of understanding about human learning ,and allowing each child's human potential to flourish.

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Haha! "In the After Babble Substack". Zing! I'm sure that's no typo, and I'll be chuckling about it all morning long.

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author

Oops. That actually was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to change it now.

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