Illinois Wants Schools To Fix Mental Health, But They’re Driving the Crisis

Illinois Wants Schools To Fix Mental Health, But They’re Driving the Crisis

To repeat an accurate and well-known phrase, the kids are not all right. In fact, our kids have fallen behind previous generations on a lot of metrics. It may seem like hyperbole to blame schools for this, but stick with me for a little while. Let’s start with maturity level. By the time our kids reach graduation day of high school, I bet a lot of you parents have seen this up close. A lot of our kids don’t even want to get a driver’s license anymore. Recent federal data found that only 25% of 16-year-olds had a driver’s license, down from almost 50% in the 80s. For God’s sake, they made a movie once called License to Drive, all about the primordial romantic desire to drive a car. [Music] It’s as American as apple pie or cowboys, an active demonstration of freedom and independence. But today’s kids increasingly couldn’t care less. I can hear the refrain now in my head. Okay, boomer, who cares? And fair enough. Although I am a Gen Xer, so there. I’d argue this is an important right of passage that teaches you a lot of different lessons. But maybe in the age of Uber, things have changed. Other cultural warning signs are much, much more serious. The levels of anxiety, depression, self harm, and mental health problems in our children have skyrocketed. Not with every kid. There’s a lot out there who are doing great, but there are a lot of kids out there who are really struggling. About 40% of 12th graders think it’s hard to have hope for the world. More than 30% wonder if there’s a purpose in life. You can see from this chart, those numbers have been getting worse and worse for decades. According to the CDC, among kids 12 to 17, in just one recent year, 15% had a major depressive episode, 37% had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. That’s disturbing, but this is terrifying. 19% seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% tried to kill themselves. So, how does school factor into all of this? Well, when kids are on summer break, they are less likely to kill themselves. And when they go back to school, suicide rates go up. Same with emergency room visits for mental health crisis. They dip a lot in the summer and go way up when kids are in school. They’re struggling with who they are, what they want, what they believe, and where they’re going to go from here. Now, obviously, it would not be fair to blame schools for everything. But on the other hand, these Prussianstyle prisons, and they are built by the same firms that build the prisons, are where millions of kids spend most of their time. These are the places that increasingly have taken more and more responsibility over our kids’ lives. So, it’s fair to say that our schools are fundamentally failing kids. And make no mistake, it starts hurting them right away. Curiosity dies fast in traditional public school. And many measures show it. For example, kids under five are thought to ask anywhere from 70 to several hundred questions a day. If you’ve had kids, you’ve been showered with their why. Why? Well, in retrospect, I made some really bad choices after high school. Yeah, we we got to get going, buddy. Why? Within just a few years of being in school, asking why dies and the number of questions a student asks a day approaches zero. That’s odd because if school is supposed to be where you do your brain work, you would think you’d be asking more questions, not less. Curiosity is essentially the primary engine of ongoing lifelong learning. And school kills it. Sounds very authoritarian and Prussian, doesn’t it? Don’t ask questions, just do what you’re told. No wonder kids become depressed. Being a happy, well-adjusted adult requires having agency in your life of mastering yourself and knowing that you are ultimately the one in control of how you navigate the world. Psychologists call this an internal locus of control and it is the most consistently correlated measure of human happiness ever studied. Government school is designed to crush that explicitly. Being trained to follow authority and submit yourself to a vast, impersonal, standardized external system couldn’t be a better formula for misery and learned helplessness. It’s an attack on the cornerstone of happiness and adulthood. And here’s one more big problem. As if I haven’t loaded you up with enough already, I’m sorry, but we must face the darkness together before we can find the light. And our boys have definitely been left in the dark. school contributes to the boy crisis we’ve seen documented again and again in books like the war against boys by Christina Hoff summers and the boy crisis by Warren Ferrell both guests of the show school for most people in most places is structurally rigged against boys and towards girls what do I mean by structurally well number one about 75% of teachers are women and the number is even higher in elementary schools that ratio is a bad starting point because boys actually do better when they learn from men. And yet in modern America, boys come to school and they have no male role models except maybe the football coach, which wouldn’t be great in any case, but it’s even worse because most kids don’t actually play a sport. You ever played football? No. Do you like football? No. Boys need male role models, and at school, they don’t get them. There aren’t even men around in the schools to understand what boys need. That in a vacuum would be bad enough, but it gets worse because America leads the world in fatherlessness. So, kids often have no male role models at home either. A fifth of all children encounter no healthy, functional male role models in their lives. Not at home or at school. That is a recipe for disaster and a recipe for the slew of academic, behavioral, and mental health problems our kids clearly have. Here’s the thing, and this shouldn’t be controversial to say, but boys are different than girls. Well, you don’t say. Boys are ready for academics and abstractions at different times in their lives. In this case, later. They are wired to prefer spatial and experiential learning. Boys process physically more than verbally. Girls, on average, are the opposite. Instead of understanding and respecting that, we pump our boys full of drugs like rolin to make them less restless and more like clay to be molded. Case in point, boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as girls. If you’re going to design a school system that’s better for girls than boys, this is it. Sitting still at a desk all day, being talked to or lectured at and yelled at if you squiggle or get ants in your pants. That’s the problem we face. A recipe for disaster on multiple fronts. And the results speak for themselves. Boys do worse than girls in school in nearly every subject. Then the crisis exacerbated by school spreads throughout society. Boys commit more crimes than girls. They are five times more likely to commit suicide and in the worst cases become notorious for school shootings and other atrocities. Rebel educator writes, “Around puberty, boys need elders around to help them become men. Otherwise, they form gangs with no wisdom from older males and are prone to devolve into violent thugs. The elders provide the vision to direct the boy’s more primordial aggression. The same article quotes an African proverb that is perfectly apt. The boy who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. Meanwhile, we’ve also created a perfectly terrible breeding ground for some of the worst anxieties that trouble boys and girls alike. Fundamentally, it’s a situation in which for the first 18 years of your life, you’re wasting your time in an environment that is inhumane, sometimes physically unsafe, and you’re forced to be in rooms with people who often hate you, bully, and abuse you this year. Sorry, you’re in the class with the mean girls, so they’re going to treat you like trash and try to destroy your self-esteem for the next semester. You’re like really pretty. Thank you. So, you agree? What? You think you’re really pretty? Oh, I don’t know. Good luck with that. You are stuck there to be tormented and no one’s coming to help you. That’s it. That’s your experience now. Even when they aren’t getting assaulted, all of the students are just thought of like numbers on a spreadsheet. Little automatons that Prussia would have loved. Separated for some reason by age, just like a slaughterhouse separates broiler chickens by size for food processing. This is factory farmed education and it’s not how most of society functions. Think about it. Nowhere else in nature does age segregation like this occur. It’s not part of our familial structure. Siblings are varied by age. It’s not part of spouse selection. Most married couples aren’t the same age. And it’s certainly not part of the workplace. Studies also show that kids learn better when they’re in a mixed age environment. Younger kids learn better from older kids than they do from adult teachers. And older kids retain better when they’re forced to engage in active recall, which is what kids do when they have to reaccess information to explain it to others, especially the younger kids in their class or group. Life simply doesn’t mirror our rigid school structure. But that’s exactly the point. What we do to our kids in school is not natural. It’s unnatural. It’s an abomination. And instead of understanding that and fixing it, we continually double down and make school a bigger part of our kids’ lives. By trying to tackle every single problem at once, schools have actually made many problems worse. What do I mean by that? School has expanded along every dimension. It has attempted to become the single source of social policy for kids and families. It’s now the place where you try to solve poverty and malnutrition through meal programs and afterchool programs. For example, school is now the place where we try to solve for early age child care. We call it universal prek or head start, but really we should call it taxpayerf funed babysitting. It’s almost like a babysitter’s club because prek isn’t worth much from an academic functional perspective. The claims that there’s research showing that entrance into prek has some impact later in life are nonsense. That’s not me talking. It’s the government itself. The Head Start impact study, first released by the Health and Human Services Department in 2010, then updated years later, found that the benefits of the program were minimal and they basically disappeared by first grade. It’s not school, it’s child care. And not just early child care. School is 7 hours a day with activities after because it keeps kids busy while parents are at work. And let’s face it, that turns out to be the primary value proposition for most people to send their kids to the free school they’re forced to pay for in their neighborhood. Well, it’s time to pick a school. What’s the name of that one down the street? I can’t remember. Anyway, we’re already getting taxed on it. We both have to go to work. Johnny’s got to go somewhere. Screw it. Let’s just send him there. Well, he might as well go there. We did, and we turned out fine. How bad could it be? How bad could it be? Actually, really, really bad. Because it isn’t just the test scores and the waste. It isn’t just the mental problems. It isn’t just that they aren’t learning. Sometimes it’s what they are learning that’s the problem. That comes back to the curriculum and those all powerful politically driven unions with their radical progressive politics imposed by centrally planned government standards. Even if government teachers are good, they’re still faced with the dilemma of teaching what they are told to teach. And since the state itself and union power are often the deciders, progressive ideology is what we get. Maybe you’ve heard about some of these books in public elementary schools. Maybe actually you’ve seen them where your kids go to school. Woke baby, anti-racist baby. A is for activist. Gender queer. Stuff like this isn’t just feverdream headlines on right-wing exfe feeds. This stuff is real and it’s a problem. And it isn’t just books. In schools across the country, it is now shockingly common for even the littlest kids to be exposed to critical social justice themes and ideas from gender fluidity to racial politics and identity scapegoating to radical alt histories that present our country as a villain born in 1619 and in desperate need of radical communist revolution. In fairness, President Trump has issued some executive orders trying to rein in the worst excesses of woke critical justice ideology from being taught in public schools, at least if they’re going to get federal money. There is also another truth, and this one is delicate. Sometimes the problem is the teachers themselves. My room does not have a flag. It used to be there, but I took it down during CO because it made me uncomfortable. We’ve been talking about gender and skin color and consent. Like I I have an Antifa flag on my on my wall. Um and a student complained about that. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great teachers and a lot of them aren’t ideologues, but a lot of them are. And a lot of it starts with the institutional training. Most teachers have a degree in education, not whatever the discipline is that they teach. What I mean is your math teacher often didn’t study math. They got a degree in education. That’s their diploma. And those are the most woke degrees you can get. Two plus two equals 4 is white supremacy. These are the ones steeped in identity politics and intersectional critical social justice. But don’t take my word for it. Consider this 2018 word salad vision of woke pedagogy written before the word was abandoned by its original proponents. The socopolitical context of schooling demands that teachers acknowledge the ways that their students and their own experiences are shaped by the intersections of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other discriminatory factors. To engage students in pedagogy that connects with their lived experiences and that equips them to critically examine inequities, teachers must refute colorblind pedagogy in favor of woke pedagogy. Woke pedagogy like critical multicultural education is defined by teaching practices that integrate critiques of contemporary justice related issues with academic content in a learning environment that encourages introspection, interrogation, and insurgence. This particular yet representative vision of radical woke education isn’t hailing from Berkeley or Colombia or any of the other currently poison Ivy League echo chambers along our deep blue coasts. No, this came straight out of Texas&M of all places. Even the classically conservative Aggies have been conquered by critical social justice and education. That’s how pervasive this ideology is. If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we’ve got at Dad Saves America. 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Facing a mental health crisis, Illinois is ramping up its authoritarian policies with mandatory mental health screenings in schools. While the problem is real, this approach ignores the elephant in the room—the public school environment is a major driving factor of our kids’ mental health issues. In this excerpt from “The Poisoning of the American Mind,” I break down how the authoritarian Prussian model of schooling, combined with modern political bias, has left us with a generation of uncurious, unmotivated, and immature kids—especially for boys.

Check out the full “Poisoning of the American Mind” episode: https://youtu.be/UA8rBFmrtV8?si=YgnZCeSxKT0g5Bo0

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