Worse, this lassitude is masked by data that can make it appear things are actually improving. Teen pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births might be down, for example, but that’s because marriage and birth rates are declining overall. Fewer teenagers die in car accidents because fewer of them are getting drivers licenses. “There is less social disorder,” Levin concluded, “because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together.” The thing young people “do together” is go to school. At least they used to. The phrase Levin coined, “disordered passivity,” or simply a “failure to launch,” fits more comprehensively the rise in chronic absenteeism, which was a problem even before Covid; the pandemic merely legitimized it.
Nearly one in six U.S students missed
Fifteen or more days in 2018–19 the El-Salvador Phone Number List last full school year before the pandemic. Seen through this lens, school is just one more activity from which young people are becoming estranged, one more opportunity to stay on the sidelines, but the easiest to quantify: we take attendance. In the past, even bored or indifferent students might have dragged themselves to school to escape their parents, to avoid the drudgery of being housebound, or to socialize. But as David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York State education commissioner, points out, smartphones and social media have made leaving the house unnecessary. Worse, they feed this poisonous passivity.
You think you are
Enjoying the experience, but it’s cementing Iran Phone Number List you into a cognitive and emotional coma,” he told me. “Others are living ‘for you’ in ways you know you never will, so why try to take any baby steps? Just keep scrolling.” Schools seem increasingly inclined to yield to the forces of enervation rather than resist them. A survey conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences found that 72 percent of public schools have higher teacher absenteeism rates since the pandemic. At least 900 school districts have now adopted four-day weeks, as if to normalize declining attendance of students and staff alike. “We gave a lot of grace” during the pandemic, one middle school teacher and administrator told me. Students didn’t just get passing marks, they got good grades for minimal effort.
