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Students are struggling. From college campuses to elementary schools, there is a serious decline in the ability and engagement of students all across America. Even in schools renowned for high achievers and even higher grade point averages, just one look at the student body reveals a deep-set exhaustion. An angst toward education that most of us can’t quite explain past a shrug and chalking it up to our poor sleep schedules.

Many educators and parents alike worry for their students, and for good reason. Mental health was already a prominent issue before the pandemic but research has shown that rates of anxiety among high school students have been steadily increasing. A survey conducted by the National Library of Medicine shares that the prevalence of anxiety symptoms among adolescents has increased from 24.3% to 28.4% after the pandemic. An additional study conducted by the National Library of Medicine revealed that over 23% of high school students had moderate-to-severe depression and 35% experienced moderate-to-severe anxiety and stress.

These are scary statistics and with so much clouding the minds of students, it seems that most educators have tried to ease this dark cloud by easing the workload. The majority of teachers believe that to any teacher their classes are “easier” with much more lenient late work policies, less classwork and homework alike and even accommodations for extended time on tests and quizzes. But is this the right approach? Despite the increasingly lax expectations it seems as if students as a whole are becoming less and less interested in academics and more and more interested in retreating from it. 

The interesting part about this retraction from engagement is that it has nothing to do with a lack of interest. It has everything to do with the world we live in and how we cope with it. 

Speaking from my own experience, a “lack of interest” in what we are learning is not the true villain here, but rather it is our collective desire to retreat inward. As a self-proclaimed “high achiever,” I love learning, being stimulated academically, proving my worth and the fulfillment that comes with it . . . or should I say used to enjoy it. With college admissions getting harder and harder every day, the social pressure from our parents growing and the end of the world looming, a gnawing anxiety has plagued an overwhelming majority of students on campus like myself. For an ever-increasing myriad of reasons, school just isn’t what it used to be.

I believe that the dread surrounding the future, the consistently decomposing state of society and the weight of everyone’s expectations on our shoulders cause us to retreat inward. We crave the anxiety-muffling comfort of being isolated within our rooms, our devices and ourselves. We utilize how dopamine constantly flows into our brains through doom-scrolling to numb us from stress. But after a while, this isolationist behavior only exacerbates the issue. I find the overly electronic world tearing rifts in aspects of life, whether it’s between us and our parents, who complain of our reluctance to interact and beg us to be present, or between us and teachers, who have to put up phone pockets to create a physical barrier between us and our devices! The addiction to this strange brand of dissociation even takes hold when we are with our friends; all of us scrolling together side by side but further apart mentally than one could imagine. It is almost reminiscent of the pandemic’s era of Zoom classes, mentally together but physically scattered to the winds of our homes.

This electronic era has especially wreaked havoc on the next generation’s perception of the future. I believe that when we are adults, the world will be left doused in flaming kerosene, a colossal pillar of fire fueled by political instability, environmental collapse and social discontent that we are left to put out with little more than a bucket of water. Seeing as how issues of political instability, environmental collapse and social discontent flood our feeds, none of us are excited to enter this world. And for good reason. Why should we be when the worst of the worst is available to our impressionable minds with a tap and our parents, though trying to be encouraging, shirk all responsibility to us? The phrase “your generation is going to fix everything!” leaves my stomach in knots and my blood boiling, but that’s a topic for another day.

The irony of it all is that this electronic era has allowed phones to pollute our minds. The pressure of the world has been brought to us on a pixelated platter that we hungrily run back to. This dopamine addiction that the digital world has brought us is actively rotting out our minds and causing us to lose our attention spans, our interests and our desire to live life presently, especially in the classroom. Of course, more goes into it than Google’s chokehold. The pandemic caused this underlying rot to accelerate by forcing us to be on our devices 24/7. Taking into account how we already dealt with attempting to satiate our parents daily and compare ourselves to our peers (who somehow always seem to have it more together than they do), we are all dying to escape from the mountain of expectation we are buried under. So it’s not much of a surprise that student engagement is so dismal; the demands that come with school unfortunately just become another burden to numb. 

It also doesn’t help that school inherently does not prepare us to follow our dreams, it prepares carbon copies of obedient, efficient and sleep-deprived workers for the rich to abuse. Academics becomes less of a passion because there is no passion in the academics itself, only bringing the monotony of routine and more stress to manage. Rather than reduce, we need to entirely alter the way we present education and pioneer new ways to integrate passion into learning. If we can find a way to make school something that eases the pain of being present, it becomes inviting and a new way to escape the insanity we are all hiding from.