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Are Factory-Like Schools the Child Labor Crisis of Today?

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Most American children and teenagers wake early, maybe gulp down a quick breakfast, and get transported quickly to the building where they will spend the majority of their day being told what to do, what to think, how to act. An increasing number of these young people will spend their entire day in this building, making a seamless transition from the school day to afterschool programming, emerging into the darkness of dinnertime. For others, there are structured afterschool activities, followed by hours of tedious homework. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll get to play a video game before bed—a rare moment when they are in control.

There is mounting evidence that increasingly restrictive schooling, quickly consuming the majority of childhood, is damaging children. Rates of childhood anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and other mental illness are surging. Teenage suicide rates have doubled for girls since 2007, and have increased 30 percent for teenage boys. Eleven percent of children are now diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and three-quarters of them are placed on potent psychotropic medications for what Boston College psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray describes as a “failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.”

Dr. Gray goes on to explain:

It is not natural for children (or anyone else, for that matter) to spend so much time sitting, so much time ignoring their own real questions and interests, so much time doing precisely what they are told to do. We humans are highly adaptable, but we are not infinitely adaptable. It is possible to push an environment so far out of the bounds of normality that many of our members just can’t abide by it, and that is what we have done with schools.

In the early twentieth century, concern about children’s welfare in oppressive factories was a primary catalyst for enacting child labor laws and simultaneously tightening compulsory schooling laws. Yet, for many of today’s children, the time they spend in forced schooling environments is both cruel and hazardous to their health. Gone are the oppressive factories, but in their place are oppressive schools. Where is the outrage?

In a New York Times Op-Ed article this week, author Malcolm Harris posits that young people are placed into these high-pressure, increasingly competitive schooling environments by corporate interests aiming to push job training to younger ages without having to pay for it.  He writes:

There are some winners, but the real champions are the corporate owners: They get their pick from all the qualified applicants, and the oversupply of human capital keeps labor costs down. Competition between workers means lower wages for them and higher profits for their bosses: The more teenagers who learn to code, the cheaper one is.

Harris’s solution is to encourage students to unite collectively, following a labor union paradigm, to demand better schooling conditions.  He asserts:

Unions aren’t just good for wage workers. Students can use collective bargaining, too. The idea of organizing student labor when even auto factory workers are having trouble holding onto their unions may sound outlandish, but young people have been at the forefront of conflicts over police brutality, immigrant rights and sexual violence. In terms of politics, they are as tightly clustered as just about any demographic in America. They are an important social force in this country, one we need right now.

While Harris and I agree that the conditions of forced schooling are untenable and rapidly worsening, we disagree on the solution. To suggest that students unionize to demand better compulsory schooling conditions is similar to suggesting that prisoners unionize to demand better prisons: It’s a fine idea but it’s completely futile. Children are mandated under a legal threat of force to attend compulsory schools.

The first step to addressing the oppressiveness of forced schooling and its harmful effects on children is to fight the compulsion. Rather than trying to improve the conditions of an inherently unjust, state-controlled system, the system itself must be overturned. After all, humans cannot be truly free when they are methodically, and legally, stripped of their freedom under the pretense that it’s good for all.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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Is School Causing Teen Depression and Anxiety To Skyrocket?

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Dovetailing with World Mental Health Day earlier this week, The New York Times published an article about the skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide. It highlights recent data revealing that hospital admissions for suicidal teens have doubled in the last decade, with the highest spike in admissions occurring in early fall as students return to school.

Profiling a young man named Jake, the Times describes his incapacitating school-related anxiety that began in his junior year of high school and reached a breaking point when, at 17, “he refused to go to school and curled up in the fetal position on the floor.”

After a suicide attempt, various antidepressant medications, several hospitalizations, and time spent at a residential treatment facility in New Hampshire, Jake finally managed to get through his senior year of high school and into college, where his anxiety has largely disappeared.

While the article describes various tactics schools and therapists use to address mounting teenage anxiety and depression, one question not asked is this: If schooling is causing these serious problems for teenagers, then why are they going?

In his compelling book Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From the Torment of Adolescence, researcher and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today Dr. Robert Epstein explains that adolescence is largely a western societal construct.

“In more than a hundred cultures around the world, teens have no such difficulties—no depression, no suicide, no crime, no drug use, no conflict with parents, Epstein writes. “Many cultures don’t even have a word for the period of life we call adolescence. Why are American teens in such turmoil?”

Epstein goes on to suggest that much of this teenage angst results from the “infantilization of teens” as they are confined and enclosed for much of their adolescence, and their actions and thoughts are controlled by others.

“Driven by evolutionary imperatives established thousands of years ago, the main need a teenager has is to become productive and independent,” Epstein writes. “After puberty, if we pretend our teens are still children, we will be unable to meet their most fundamental needs, and we will cause some teens great distress.”

The word adolescence was coined in a mammoth 1904 book by G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association.  Hall’s book, the 1400-page Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, struck a chord with policymakers and educators hoping to expand mass schooling.

An American Heritage article on the history of adolescence claims: “Among the book’s supporters were secondary school educators who found in Hall’s writing a justification for their new enthusiasm about moving beyond academic training to shape the whole person. They also found in it a justification for raising the age for ending compulsory school attendance.”

Enclosing young people in compulsory schooling environments for most of their teenage years severely restricts their freedom and challenges their evolutionary adaptability.

It is perhaps no wonder that Jake’s anxiety lessened as he left high school and went on to college, where he gained more freedom and more personal control over his schedule, his classes, and his social life.

In an article for The Huffington Post, author Blake Boles writes about how high school should be more like college, with teenagers given the freedom, independence, respect, and real-world immersion they so desperately need.  He writes: “Real learning thrives when students have real choices. Give high school students the same freedom as college students, and we’ll take education a step in the right direction.”

Boles should know. His company, Unschool Adventures, works with unschooled and homeschooled teenagers through immersive travel programs and self-directed learning initiatives.

While it is critically important to help teenagers struggling with school-related anxiety and depression, it is worth considering the evolutionary mismatch between forced schooling and adolescence. Designed to be fully immersed in real-world experiences and productive work, dictating their own thoughts and actions, and surrounded by adult mentors, teenagers are instead cut-off and controlled. Freedom may be their best medicine.

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This post A Theory on Why Teen Depression and Anxiety Are Skyrocketing was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.