Teachers Blow The Lid On What Is Happening In Schools And Why Gen Z Is Struggling

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** We’ve seen the same headlines over and over: Gen Z isn’t dating, or driving, or drinking, or making friends, with record numbers of young people today living with ...

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This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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We’ve seen the same headlines over and over: Gen Z isn’t dating, or driving, or drinking, or making friends, with record numbers of young people today living with their parents and refusing to build careers well into adulthood. These statistics paint a grim picture of my generation, but beyond our specific cohort, they point to an overall culture of dependency that is antithetical to the free citizenry our democracy relies on — a culture that was built by the failure of our institutions, and especially our schools.

As veteran teacher Paula Edwards (not her real name) told IW Features in a recent documentary, “If we don’t have a literate society, we really don’t have a free society.” She recounted the abysmal classroom environment in the New Mexico public schools she has worked in, from deteriorating academic and behavioral standards to ideological indoctrination.

Edwards reached her breaking point and transitioned from teaching to coaching after a second-grade student who was not potty-trained allegedly began smearing feces on his peers when he was angry and wanted to skip his lessons. In this single anecdote alone we can identify several failures: of the state not to assess the child’s home environment, of the school to allow a child who was not potty-trained to be in a general class, and of the school not to remove him from the classroom, give him the environment he actually needs, and protect other children from being traumatized by his behaviors. It’s not the child’s responsibility to train himself in basic functions; it’s the duty of adults, who either failed him or, in the case of teachers like Edwards, were not allowed to give him the help he needed.

This is perhaps an extreme (albeit not rare) case, yet such bad outcomes as this arise precisely because of an educational philosophy that has prevailed in schools for decades, even in less difficult situations than this student’s. Generations of students have been coddled to their own detriment, being given passing grades they do not deserve and free rein to act out and hurt themselves and others in the name of “compassion.”

Of course, there is no compassion at all in enabling students’ worst behaviors. The behavioral anarchy that has come to dominate far too many schools around the country and make teaching an impossible profession has its origins in Obama-era policies that essentially considered any form of discipline as a potential form of discrimination. While those were revoked federally during the first Trump administration, many states still have unviable policies that make disciplining students impossible and that encourage the sort of conduct that has led to educators like Edwards fleeing the teaching profession.

The Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports system, which was formally enacted by New Mexico in the last decade, after being introduced by the federal government in the 1990s, forces teachers and administrators to ignore negative behavior and reward positive behavior through prizes and tokens, which amount to “bribery,” as Edwards puts it. These gamified incentives inevitably disappear in the adult world, and yet the responsibilities of adult life remain. So then what? Students who have never acquired the discipline to succeed in school are naturally going to struggle with adult life, rendered incompetent and unable to participate fully in society as adults.

Sometimes, this type of dependency is not just passively but actively encouraged by the school system. In a particularly horrifying anecdote, Edwards told IW Features how the Bureau of Indian Education schools teach Native American children how to fill out welfare applications. Instead of teaching them to read with evidence-based methods and enabling students to lift themselves out of poverty when they grow up, Edwards said, these schools teach students a different lesson: “Be dependent for the rest of your life.”

It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. We have the status quo we have because we choose to tolerate it. We spend billions of dollars on education as a country as it stands, and there is nothing stopping us from redirecting that money from failed progressive endeavors to student behavior reforms and evidence-based instructional methods that actually work. As Edwards advocated, “Get your indoctrination out of the classroom and get us back to the basics. School is for getting our kids to read and write and do math.”

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Neeraja Deshpande is an Independent Women policy analyst and senior IW Features contributor.