This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:
Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.
Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.
As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test. But here’s an interesting observation:
Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.” Everybody’s “phoning it in.”
But here’s the really salient point:
The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.
Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate? Just a thought.
Then:
The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.
Hmm. Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.
Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).
The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem: engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.
My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time. (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)
Here’s the thing. As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions: fear and love.
- Fear: if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
- Love: this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.
We don’t have to worry about the “love” part: as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.
What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.
