Instagram is a Cigarette

"The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling" is wrong about what's wrong

In the March edition of Commentary, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a well-known education writer, has a long essay called “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” As you might guess from the title, it’s not exactly a pick-me-up. 

He paints a dire portrait of American childhood today, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Social and political upheaval, rapid technological change, a global pandemic — these alone do not make growing up in 2022 such a drag.

Au contraire, Pondiscio’s own childhood growing up on Long Island in the 1960s was “marked by levels of domestic unrest and political violence that in retrospect stagger the imagination” — assassinations, war, race riots, terrorism — and still, the adults “seemed in charge and mostly competent.”

Today? Not so much. Everything is better, but we’ve made it worse for kids. “As adults and educators, we are not merely failing in our responsibility to be a reassuring presence in [children’s] lives,” he writes, “we seem perversely determined to normalize and even valorize their despair.”

Pondiscio has a real ax to grind with American schools. It is no longer a given that the United States “is a force for good in the world or an engine of freedom and prosperity.” No, “school culture seem[s] nearly to revel in the bad and the broken, suggesting to children that they have suffered the great misfortune to have been born into a country that is racist to its core, whose founding documents were lies when written, and where democracy is hanging by a thread.” This, he labels as the “pedagogy of the depressed” and it is “creating a generation of overwhelmed young people paralyzed into learned helplessness.”  

Pondiscio supports his thesis with the usual targets of conservative contempt (critical race theory, youth activism), along with a few unexpected ones (YA literature, the Parkland students), some impressive deep cuts (Paulo Freire, the National Council for Teachers of English), and a few bipartisan targets, just for good measure (excessive testing, the pandemic).

And he’s such an effective prose stylist, and writes with such persuasion and authority, that I suspect, like me, you might nearly miss it when he sneaks his solution to all of this past you, and which, it turns out, seems to be the entire raison d'être of his piece: “We see intriguing hints that parents are more willing than they have been historically to question their long-standing ties to public schools, and they may be searching for more edifying and enriching options for their children’s education.”

In other words, school choice. More charter schools, more Catholic schools, more homeschooling. Don’t make public schools better, give parents more choices.

You know, like a supermarket.

Pondiscio concedes that the recent decline in enrollments in district schools “may mostly be a reflection of new patterns of mobility driven by Covid.” But in the same breath he makes it clear that what he actually hopes is that they are more in “response to [a] long-festering dissatisfaction with the status quo in education and an inchoate sense that something is off about it.”

“A large and growing number of Americans,” he writes in the conclusion, “are either seeking or at least open to alternatives to the cultural habit of traditional public education as we have long known it. They want something different for their children.”

Perhaps. 

First, I will admit that I happen to agree with a bit of what Pondiscio writes in his essay, namely, that American schools need a hard “reset.” I just happen to disagree with this solution. As a fix for school quality or narrowing achievement gaps, school choice belongs in the graveyard with those other Reform-era ideas we were oversold on: smaller schools, stricter teacher evaluations, aggressive testing, obsessive accountability.

However, that’s not the most disappointing aspect of this essay. What’s most disappointing is that Pondiscio misidentifies what is most responsible for warping American childhood. It is not a philosophy of schooling dominated by leftist ideas. It’s not a generalized failure on adults’ part to play a “reassuring role” in children’s lives.  

It’s social media¹. 

And yet, Pondiscio grants only two sentences to the possibility that social media might play an important role here.

Why?

I have no doubt that, like most people, he understands social media is a net bad for most kids. I have less doubt, however, since he does not work in a school and does not witness day after day (and year after year) the compounding negative effects of excessive social media use across hundreds of kids, that he truly understands the extent and reach of its harm — how swiftly and ruthlessly it undoes almost every single thing schools are designed to do (and often do very well.)

I don’t think it’s wild to surmise that most teachers, administrators, deans and guidance counselors would agree that Instagram et al. are at the origin of most beefs, meltdowns, and the generalized malaise pervading so many classrooms (to say nothing of how utterly impossible it is to get students to do homework anymore.)

And the panic and nausea most educators felt starting this school year was not only due to the uncertainty we were certain the pandemic would bring— it was also due to the knowledge that teens’ screen time had doubled to almost 8 hours a day.

To be sure, the “Kids Are Not Alright” genre of essay is nothing new, and Pondiscio’s entry makes the same mistake as most of the others, which is that it identifies a social problem, and then presents school (or a reformed version of it) as the cure.

This is called the Education Gospel, which is the belief that America’s social, economic, civic and moral problems can be solved through more or better schooling. Whenever there’s a crisis or moral panic, American schools are called upon to provide the remedy. It’s the rationale behind financial literacy classes, digital literacy classes, news literacy classes, sex ed, health and nutrition, and social and emotional learning. The belief is so pervasive — and on its face, intuitive — that we don’t even question it. 

But there are a few logical and practical problems with the belief — students spend the majority of their waking hours outside of school; schools have limited resources and expertise — and chief among them is the failure to admit that the forces outside the schoolhouse doors exert a greater pressure than the forces within those doors, as mighty as those internal forces often are. (Great teachers change lives. Curriculum matters. Etc.)

The paradox of the pandemic was that while it physically shuttered classrooms, it also brought them straight into our living rooms. Zoom, Pondiscio writes, “pried open the black box of the classroom” for parents, and they didn’t like what they saw.

But I might suggest that what parents were actually looking through wasn’t a window— it was a mirror. And that the feeling they had that something wasn’t right wasn’t only because they suddenly realized their local schools weren’t doing enough.

It was a pang that schools can only do so much. 

Those of us who work in schools have always known this, but we have long been trained not to say this out loud. To do so would, depending on the audience, expose you as a loafer counting down the days until summer vacation, a fatalist with low expectations, or a bigot with no understanding of history.

Even more broadly — and I’m not sure when exactly this happened — open discussions about parenting last only until kids turn five. After that, if you talk at all about parenting or values or working hard you may as well be Phyllis Schlafly. And the suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the welfare of children is the responsibility of society as a whole and can’t be shouldered by schools (or families) alone makes you sound hopelessly naive.

But why, exactly, are there more podcasts and books and YouTube videos and websites dedicated to raising babies and toddlers than one could ever possibly consume in one lifetime? New parents find those things pressed so fervently into their hands that they could be forgiven for wondering exactly how any human on this earth survived past the age of two without their parents having read those two sacred texts, Bringing up Bebe and Cribsheet.

Once kids enter kindergarten, all talk of parenting turns into talk about schools, and we expect all intellectual, emotional and social development of our children to happen between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., from September to June, Monday through Friday.

And if something’s not right with the kids, or if the kids aren’t learning enough, then there’s something wrong with the schools, and we have to change something about the schools.

Except that hasn’t worked. Not for a long time, and not by a long shot. Even Pondiscio notes we have little to show from the past two decades of reform. Jennifer Berkshire, writing in The Nation in an almost perfect negative image of Pondiscio’s essay, notes that the pandemic has only made the situation worse, exacerbating “the gap between what our schools can do and what they are tasked with doing.”

No wonder almost everyone involved — parents, teachers, students — are so unsatisfied.

Whether you prefer Commentary or The Nation, it’s high time we reject any discussion about improving schools that do not include in their solution, diagnosis (or condemnation) those external forces — social, economic, historical, technological, familial — that exert such inordinate pressure on what exactly happens within those schools. Any that don’t should be regarded as naive, and not to be taken seriously.

And so let’s begin by acknowledging that over the past decade social media has transformed much of American childhood and adolescence into an arid, darkened plain that we should be ashamed we have allowed our children to walk across unaccompanied. Let’s be radically honest about the cause of the sharp rise in depression, anxiety, suicide, and asocial behaviors. And if we won’t — or can’t — ask the companies responsible for creating this to take easy steps to make their products less harmful to children, then let’s take a drastic step.

An excellent essay in the New Yorker wonders if “the best way forward is to treat teen-age social media like teen-age smoking, and reorient our culture to discourage it altogether.” 

Sounds good to me.

We banned cigarettes for children.

Let’s ban social media, too.

Above image: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Children smoking. New York, NY" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1940 - 1979.

1. Specifically, any app or website with design features and algorithms built to capture children and teen’s attention for as long as possible, amplify an endless stream of negative, sensational, and/or debased content, and encourage social comparison.