I can understand an Olde Phartte someone from my generation banging on about how the Yoof Of Today are hopeless wankers when it comes to education and being taught in the classroom. (And yes, I use the word “wanker” in its most appropriate sense, as you will see later.)
But when a 26-year-old teacher gets all ranty on the above topic… well.
“These kids don’t know how to read,” she says flatly. “Because they’ve had things read to them, or they can just click a button and have something read out loud. Their attention spans are waning. Everything is high stimulation. They can scroll in less than a minute.”
And:
Teenagers who refuse to write even a paragraph, who throw tantrums when asked to handwrite an assignment, who beg to ‘just type it’ – not to save time or effort but to copy and paste answers from the internet or use AI to do the thinking for them.
She believes the behavior of her high schoolers is only part of the problem. What worries her is the sense that this generation, raised on screens, simply doesn’t care about anything whether it be learning, literacy or even the basics of society.
“They don’t care about making a difference in the world. They don’t care how to write a resume or a cover letter. They just have these devices in their hands that they think will get them through the rest of their life.
“They want to use [technology] for entertainment. They don’t want to use it for education.”
Hence my use of the term “wankers”: self-pleasuring little wastrels.
Her solution?
“I think we need to cut off technology from these kids probably until they go to college,” she says. “Call me old-fashioned, but I just want you to look at the test scores. Look at the literacy rates. Look at the statistics. From when students didn’t use technology… to now.
“If you can’t read and you don’t care to read… you’re never going to have real opinions. You’ll never understand why laws and government matter. You’ll never know why you have the right to vote.”
By George… I think she’s got it. And I repeat: this isn’t some Olde Phartte like me; she’s Gen Z, FFS. And if someone in that group is starting to despair about the future generation…
She’s quitting teaching. At age 26.
Somebody somewhere needs to give her a job — in a proper school, run as she describes it — because this is a lovely seed just waiting to grow. She shouldn’t be wasted, because gawd knows there aren’t that many like her.