Kids have been soaked in the news that we're all doomed because of climate change, and they won't ever be able to afford the American dream, no matter what.
Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it.
They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary.
I feel that people that graduated high school in 2020 had the worst experience (at least in the US) of any cohort in at least 50 years. They didn't get to experience really the end of high school, and those that started college in the fall didn't really get to experience the beginning of college, when many people make lifelong friends. Now they're graduating in 2024, where the vibe on many campuses is one of division, suspicion and despair over the Israel/Gaza war, and they're likely to see greatly diminished economic prospects (especially compared to anyone who graduated college in tech from say 2010 to 2021). Not to mention the general "vibe in the air" is one of pessimism in the US.
I have a ton of empathy for these people, and it makes me count my lucky stars for being a Gen Xer. Honestly, I feel like Gen X is the luckiest of all the generations. People generally don't blame us for f'ing everything up, we had the luck of growing up before the Internet and smartphones where we still got to just play and have relatively unstructured "kid lives", many of us graduated into the booming, optimistic 90s. Many of us got to buy houses before they became unobtainably expensive. Sure, we had the epidemic of parental divorce, and if anything that hope of the 90s has, at least for me, turned to jadedness in many areas, but I just feel so lucky to have been born when I was.
I'm approaching 40 and I'm pretty worried about climate change and don't really think I can afford the American dream. I can't imagine staring down six or seven decades into the future at this point.
Every generation says this, they still showed up and did the work. Do you honestly think a teenager that was drafted into WW1 wasn't scared for their future? What about people in the Spanish Flu or Polio epidemics? People in the 50s thought we'd all die in nuclear war. It's so annoying that people think our circumstances are worse than our ancestors. They aren't, unless you're literally at war, your life is better than anyone before you.
Anyhow, kids are skipping school because their parents allow them to, it has nothing to do with "climate change," "COVID," or "the future." Parents should be heavily punished for truancy of their children, it's a form of child abuse/neglect. That's regardless of income, poor kids can't get out of poverty if they have no means to do so. That can be unpopular, it's irrelevant if it is. Kamala Harris got flack for that, but it's absolutely good to punish parents that allow this. If you disagree, you live in a bubble.
One of the lessons I learned as a kid that I’m trying to pass onto my kids: don’t let school get in the way of learning.
There are things schools can’t or won’t teach and unfortunately for them, there value was significantly tainted when parents got to see what was happening every day in the classroom.
I’m pulling my kids to go to see the solar eclipse in Texas next week. They’ll get to experience something that won’t happen again in the US for another 20 years, get to visit family they rarely see, and go to parts of the country they’ve never been to. Obviously I find more value in that than the day of school their missing.
That's great, but that's not why these stats have gone up so much, and while that is technically "truant" in Germany, it's not in the US. The kids in these stats aren't going on fieldtrips or even vacations with their parents (it's funny that you can tell the wealth class of this little forum based on people making this claim.) Their parents are at work most of the time or maybe even just sitting at home with them. If you've ever grown up in a poor area, it's much easier to understand why the stats are going up.
Are you saying that this generation is somehow different from all the others not because of their optimism for the future, but because they lack work ethic? I think that elders have been complaining of following generations' work ethic since pre-history. But I distinctly remember kids being optimistic (I thought irrationally so; I was a pretty miserable child before it was cool) about the future when I was in school. They all thought they were going to get handed a lucrative job after they finished a four-year degree at some luxurious university.
No, I'm not blaming the kids. I'm blaming the parents, I felt like I made this pretty explicit in my second paragraph. Virtually no kid wants to go to school. That's irrelevant. Some kids don't want to eat anything but junk food. You shouldn't let them. You're the parent. You cannot allow your kid to be truant. You are nearly guaranteeing them poverty, that is abuse and neglect, and it should be punished. There are some stories here of people saying it worked for them, this place isn't "most people," most people on HN came from families with money or had opportunities bestowed upon them. Reeks of privilege.
Forget the doomerism of what a child might think, again it's about perspective. That's not even why these kids are skipping class to begin with, that's just some invention people here have said. We're talking about kids that can barely read or write, not HN poster kids with educated parents or good surroundings. People are skipping classes because their parents allow it, kids will look for excuses and always have. The parents should be held liable, and it's not just bad for the kids, it's bad for all of society. People arguing in favor of truancy are totally detached from reality for -most- people.
It's funny - in a sense I pretty much agree with you; I had to be cajoled into school and everything as well and found it fundamentally miserable. Certainly I understand that without an education the future is quite grim (especially for me as I have some physical disability). But after that treatment, I decided it was not something I could ever put a child through, so in that sense I have some sympathy for these parents. Though to me the solution is obvious; simply don't have children.
I think people should have kids, society and humanity cannot survive without children and children can be a gift. However, if you're going to be a bad parent and don't see their lives as your responsibility, not just for their own sake but for the sake of society... don't have kids. But if you do, and you -allow- your kid to be truant or become a criminal, etc., you should be punished and held personally liable.
Do you think people set out to be bad parents? And do you think that they can be punished into being good parents? It seems pretty tough to me.
And yes, the idea of having children in order to feed them into the same meat-grinder of education and employment that I went through in order to perpetuate some cycle for reasons unfathomable to me is about the least convincing reason to do so. I used to think I was an outlier, but as fertility rates fall near continuously, I'm beginning to suspect that I was just early in realizing it.
For most of human existence, the great unwashed masses were illiterate, and society seemed to plod along just fine.
Where's the sense in forcing children to spend the best years of their lives as automatons to an education system, just to be baristas at Starbucks anyway? Everyone simply can't work a white collar job, somebody has to clean the toilets. We should at least let those people enjoy their childhood.
Your argument is basically "the poor should stay poor and uneducated," which I reject, and society should reject. Kids that are truant are more likely to become criminals (idle hands and idle minds do bad things a lot of the time,) be homeless, draw welfare, require public support, etc. That's not ideal. We can easily stop that from happening, we should not encourage it. You say they'll work at Starbucks, it's just as likely they will just not have a job at all.
Some truancy is because their parents can't enforce what their kids are doing (though some are just really bad parenting), or are too poor too (work double shifts, etc.) We can support those people with social programs, while also making sure their kids go to school and making sure the schools are funded, even hinging the programs on truancy. Incentives work.
Look this sounds really good on the internet, but this is disconnected from reality.
The kids chronically truant are POOR and have no structural support at home. They are not depressed upper-middle-class-kids. The more-informed (albeit misinformed) demographic you're describing is not the problem.
This is exactly true. The doomerism might affect a few, and I'd suspect more in college, but at the elementary and high school level there are much simpler and obvious explanations.
In addition, the constant blaring reminder that adults all around you will not protect you physically if it comes to that.
The fact that "school shooter hero" even has to be a term is absurd and embarassing for us as a country.
Even when I was in high school over a decade ago, the fact that we could have a school shooter was constantly present and I was always running exit plans. I do have anxiety issues but I can't imagine what it is like for children now.
Fear it? I would be embracing it. Send my allocated AI entity to work and send me the checks. In a sense it is like having a body double go to school for you.
Consider the filter bubble your friend from the other side of the political aisle is in. The kids have their own and they don't have any real life experiences to weigh against it.
They know they don't have a future. They have no evidence to the contrary.
Why would they care about school?