Driving the news: English professors across the country say college students are struggling to finish books, The Atlantic reports. That’s in part because middle and high school teachers have noted kids’ attention problem and started assigning poems, short stories or excerpts of books instead of full works.
Kids shows are getting shorter. Episodes of Bluey, one of the most popular kids shows, are about seven minutes long on average, Vulture notes. Pop songs are simpler, shorter and more repetitive to give them a better chance of going viral on TikTok and Instagram in snippet form, Forbes reports.
Zoom out: Studies have linked excessive screen time to problems focusing in kids.
All of us — including kids and teens — have a world of entertainment at our fingertips, and we can just keep scrolling if something doesn’t grab us.
I’d probably have counter-points if the article didn’t end with this.
And some people pretty much know the way to deal with this problem… but even if they do, I think it all comes down to choice in the end. And a lot of people are simply not going to look into the possibility for learning or even verification.
In any case, maybe the counter points do have a place in this comment after all.
Firstly, not all people have access to these things. Even if it is made in a completely non-malicious way, this comment, those at the lowest levels will always find this difficult to accept.
Secondly, this ‘problem’ is not uniform. Like this issue… as a person in my mid-20s now, in my childhood there were other problems adults were talking about. Frankly the ‘problem’ part is subjective, at least in the way the problems themselves are perceived to be brought about (for example, the causes). But back to the topic, in my childhood I was not a ‘normal’ one. I pretty much made more mature decisions than the average students now that I think back, but what I usually got for it was bullying because I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing. The teachers too saw this as a normal thing, but it is not surprising now when I later saw the hiring process of said teachers. As an adult now, I can say now that many of those middle aged teachers had rotten personalities. The good ones were fewer. Frankly if this bullying problem were to be looked into, a lot of students wouldn’t feel compelled to go along with these if they didn’t already want to be into it.
Lastly, the education method comes into play. Of course this ties in with the teacher problem. Many teachers do not know how to aid actual learning and encourage it… some don’t even see it as essential… and in my time the ones that did were usually given less essential roles in teaching. A rotten system to the core, I’d say. But that was my situation. The art of learning is not something anyone can possess just because they need a job. Furthermore, just because you can handle the pressure of dealing with students does not mean you are fit to aur learning. You’re meant to be there for their sake, and not the other way around (but this wouldn’t really be practiced in many parts of the world where education is just seen as an institution to control, and do an ‘adequate’ job to get done with a person’s phase of life before they move on to the next step…).
Overall, I’m guessing students who really would like to learn are being actively hindered from doing so due to these things. Coupled with stressful factors at home (it is unfortunate that not every person who has children is a model human who cares about their children—even in many cases where they are provided for in necessities) and away, a desire to ‘escape’ is not uncommon. I mean… I think I’ve seen more adults than children who have these tendencies to escape from their problems. If many pressuring factors so decide that younger students in these particular situations are pushed along these particular things… I say it takes a resilience more than what many adults are incapable of, expected in a child, to do something as fundamental to building your focus and concentration as learning to do things better, and learning about how things really function right from the basic elements.
Instead, the focus here seems to be in part put on what the nature of the escape should be. As a student, I chose the popular escape at the time—free mobile games. But that was only after I was past more than half of my schooling, after which the quality of actual learning dipped heavily in favour of just going along with what you’re told about how the world works and getting grades for it. Thankfully a few were not like this. In any case, by the time my learning autonomy was snatched back… I also started exploring works which required more concentration of my own accord. Not everyone will choose this but those who will have the mindset to choose their own way will come across eventually life-helping decisions in the end.