Wow did people have a lot to say about that post. Over 400,000 people read it and over 1400 restacked it, thus making it more widely read than probably all of my professional writings combined. I am surprised and grateful for the engagement. It’s been very interesting to me to see what resonated and what others have experienced. I can say that of the professors and K-12 teachers who commented or contacted me privately, 99% agreed with me that they are seeing the exact same things that I am, and that they too are frustrated and dismayed. The remaining 1% seem to work at Ivy+ places and think I’m an obnoxious moron for moaning about my sports car students when they just need a tune-up. I invite them to walk a mile in my tweed jacket, teaching four courses a semester with no TAs to students who scored a 960 on the SAT. I’m not complaining, mind you, just stating the facts.1
I wish those percentages were reversed. I wish 99% of people had said, “what? This is nuts. All my students are awesome, driven, hard working, intellectually curious, and keep asking me for book recommendations” and only 1% were in agreement with me. I’d much rather be in the minority. It leaves me in the weird position of being simultaneously gratified and disappointed.
Many of the comments can be classed into groups.
nnn:
Do you end up giving a lot of failing grades
Amelia Anderson in response to nnn:
Doubtful, they want to keep their cushy job after all so they'll play along with this self-destructive 'education' system while lamenting how terrible kids are at learning in said system.
You already admitted that you know what to do. Keep up high standards and fail students. Everyone in this system is about the money not the education including you.
Sounds like self awareness is almost hitting you. Western University is a big scam as you are too scared to fail students who don't meet muster.
Instead of babying them, flunk them. If they get up and walk out of class, flunk them. If they disappear in the middle of the semester, flunk them.
Flunk ‘em all and let the Dean sort them out!
I looked at my grade distribution from last semester. I taught two sections of Critical Thinking. I started with 70 students. 13 dropped/withdrew before they failed and the final grades for the remaining 57 were a D+ mean and a C- median. I also taught two sections of Intro to Philosophy. Again, started with 70 students. 11 dropped/withdrew before they failed and the final grades for the remaining 59 were a C mean and an B- median. These are the two easiest courses in philosophy. Exactly how much more harshly should I grade? Grades are simply not the motivator for students that they used to be.
Also, not all universities are created equal. We have different missions. My university serves a high percentage of first-time college-goers from lower SES families. At least part of our mission is offering the opportunity of higher education to students that maybe were not all that great in high school, but want to better themselves and turn over a new leaf. That’s not the same population who goes to MIT. But I strongly believe in making college available to those who want it, not only to overachievers with straight As and a 1600 on the SAT. No, not everyone should go to college. But they should get the chance. Flunking every student who can’t meet MIT physics major standards is not the right approach.
Some people proposed solutions like this: to prevent AI-written papers, what I need to do is have all students compose their work on GoogleDocs, where I can track changes in real time and offer feedback on multiple drafts. Then instead of written tests, sit down with each one for an oral exam that really probes the extent of their knowledge. Then after that I can… Yeah. I’m not doing any of that. Let’s be honest, any proposal that begins with “how about you triple your workload to compensate for students’ cheating and lack of interest” is not a viable solution. Nobody but a few heroes heading for early burnout are going to do that. I’m not working myself to death in the hopes of dragging a couple more students away from their opium phones and it is not a reasonable ask.
Another common suggestion was to just ban phones and electronics from class. For example:
DH:
All essays are to be written in class, on paper, by hand. Electronic devices must be turned in beforehand and can be retrieved afterward.
This is one of those things that looks a lot better in theory than in practice. As in, literally how do I do it? Suppose I have a class of 35 students and tell them no phones. They sneak them in anyway. Then I’m playing whack-a-mole all class. Thank God I don’t teach mass lecture, but some of my colleagues over in psych and biology do. Policing phones in a class of 200 is impossible, so what’s the plan for them?
Suppose I tell my students all their phones go in a basket at the beginning of class. How do I enforce that precisely? Frisk them on the way in? Then six students come late. Do I interrupt my own lecture six times to go make sure their phones are in the basket? Then after class students complain someone took their phone by accident. Or they complain it took them so long to root through the basket for their phone they were late to their next class. Then first time there’s a school shooting somewhere the admin will come tell me that phones are essential safety tools and I must allow students to have them.
I’m not trying to be negative about it—I would love to get rid of all electronics from my classroom. Truly, chalk is starting to look good to me again. I just don’t see how it is practical. If I had a 12-student honors seminar, then yeah, maybe. But that’s far from a typical class.
The problems we as faculty are facing are, in my view, deep, systemic, and entrenched before we ever see a freshman. There’s not going to be either an easy solution or one that can be unilaterally implemented by the faculty. Not a solution that works, anyway.
A few people really wanted to tell me that I suck. Yeah, I might. On the other hand I heard from faculty from the four corners of the Earth2 saying that they are having the exact same experiences that I am, and they were the overwhelming majority of my correspondents. Plus I’ve won all the teaching awards my university has. So I’m inclined to think that I’m at least average.
One thing that was sort of funny to me is how many people insisted that student apathy is a rational response to the larger forces in their lives, but were oblivious to what the rational response of faculty might be to the forces in our lives.
Let me tell you. ALL pressure on us is to be lenient about grades. It’s what the students want, it’s what their parents want, it’s what our bosses want, it’s what gets us good student evaluations. Students refuse to put in the work, so why should we knock ourselves out trying to get them to do it? They won’t (or can’t) do the reading, so why should we assign any? If they use AI to write their papers, we might as well use AI to grade them and it can be a nice closed-loop system. Why give detailed feedback they will never read or care about? If the students are doing as little as possible to pass, then I might as well do as little as possible to get my paycheck. You see what I mean? It’s just rationally responding to incentives.
Of course that’s not what I do, or what most faculty I know do. I certainly didn’t get into philosophy for the money. I’m not that dumb! I’m here because I love my field and I want to share that excitement with others. When I went to college, I thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened. I wanted more books, more reading, more learning, more new smart friends talking to me about classical music, or fine art, or literature. I was a starving man at the banquet of heaven. When students tell me, “I don’t feel that way, I hate being made to learn,” I hear, “I tried ice cream once, meh, it wasn’t for me.” I feel dumbfounded, incredulous, mystified. I’m begging my students to dine with me at the banquet of heaven and instead they walk away malnourished, heads bowed in obedience to a rectangle.
It’s wild to me that you critique young people but take zero time to do any sort of self reflection upon yourself. Your perspective is skewed by your experiences and upbringing. Public schools in the US are incredibly inequitable. That inequity has dramatically increased since your time as a K-12 student. Most are underfunded, understaffed, and tear down educators over time. Not everyone has access to the same resources afforded to those in wealthier districts. Even passionate educators can only do so much without support.
It’s no wonder to me that students feel apathy towards college when they have been given a cheap, propagandistic education in the US. Then they show up to a college or university where educators would rather blame generational and environmental differences for the lack of engagement rather than their own inability to connect with their students. Maybe spending more time trying to engage with students and teaching them the skills they lack rather than complaining about them on substack would be a good first step.
this is really weird. you, as a professor, seem to be blaming *students* for not wanting to learn, for being somehow lazy and determined to take shortcuts through dense intellectual material that may or may not resonate with them (material that desperately needs to be updated for a 21st century audience, btw), without interrogating WHY that might be the case.
are there maybe societal factors that contribute to students thinking a traditional college curriculum and spending $$$ on books is an outdated and useless way to spend their time? are they feeling disengaged or overwhelmed by the state of the world right now?
in seeking the reasons for collective reading comprehension going down, or engagement decreasing in classrooms, i find it odd to point the finger at students, some of the most vulnerable members of society.
I feel like a physician with 400 lb. patients regularly coming in for treatment. I tell them that they have hypertension, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and incipient arthritis in their knees. I prescribe some medication for the hypertension, diabetes, and cholesterol. The patients refuse to comply. When I ask why, I’m told medications are expensive and didn’t they already pay to see me? They are not wrong, of course, but I have zero control over the price of medicines. I tried to be cost-conscious in what I prescribed, and recommended generics, but there’s just not much more I can do. If they want to keep living, they need to take the meds.
I also tell my patients that they are morbidly obese, and that’s causing most of their problems. I recommend a simple diet and exercise program to safely take the weight off.3 The patients angrily accuse me of being fat-phobic and that they refuse to be shamed for being body-positive. Then I’m told that they are not to blame for their weight anyway, because it’s all due to food deserts, poverty, big corporations forcing us to eat highly-processed low-nutrition food, their natural metabolisms, the price of eggs, microplastics, Democrats, and late-stage capitalism. It’s not their fault at all and how dare I insinuate otherwise?
Well, maybe all that is true. I don’t know. Again, I can’t do a single thing about any of that stuff and have little interest in dispensing blame. I’m just a humble country doctor. It is still the case that they need to drop the weight if they want to make it past 40. When I bring that point up as gently as I can, I’m told it’s my fault because I’m not sufficiently inspirational and I need to find just the right combination of cajoling and motivational rhetoric that solves all their problems.
At a certain point in this office visit, I want to say, “look, you came to see me. If you don’t want to follow any of my recommendations, save yourself the co-pay and stay home because I can’t help you.”
Mel:
I’m 18 years old and I started my undergraduate program at a University in Lisbon a few months ago… I just want to show how is the perspective of the currently situation by a University student’s eyes that really just want to study and enjoy the academic world.
The average students know what’s going on, and they don’t care about. They all know, someone of them, like 40% want to set free from this system of ‘zombieness’, they try, for… two days. They delete social medias, they try to read book, they are struggling, trying to keep strong, and then their friends, that are in the 60% and consciously know what is going on and just don’t care, they just like this cheap dopamine lifestyle, come and push the 40% back to the zombie state, mocking at them, saying that they are going to miss out things, and probably discrediting the university institution, reducing life to just easy pleasure and nothing more. And the 40% are in a so fragile state of their change, still in the early stages, that they just give up, because they are already used to only getting things in the easiest way possible, and of course they will regret it and complain about how they aren’t better students and bla bla bla, but they are so addicted to easy stuff and too much afraid of missing out, since they live their life’s through others in instagram story’s and tiktok videos, so they just… swallow it.
As someone who's currently still a student, and has struggled massively with smart phone addiction in the past, I think part of the reason is that school doesn't have fast feedback cycles. When you think about it, grades are just letters on a paper, and any real consequences only happen after you graduate. The fastest feedback you might get after getting a bad grade is your parent or teacher scolding you, but parents and teachers seem increasingly hesitant to scold children for getting bad grades nowadays.
Compare that with the instant gratification of short-form content. The feedback we get aren't really tethered to our actions anymore, and thus, we have a decreased understanding of what consequences really are. This is just my theory, but I think teenagers are struggling more with the credit assignment problem on a neurological level. Personally, I feel like I have a hard time caring about the consequences of my actions even if I cognitively know I should care. Things that are not impacting me in this very moment do not feel like they're real.
Last year, as a college sophomore, ChatGPT and its counterparts gained traction, and I, just like 80% of students on my campus, began using them. Over the course of the next two years, I noticed that my brain was legitimately turning to mush, and so I've gradually been weaning myself off since... I hate to say it so brusquely, we are no less than drug addicts. And you know what they say, kicking a drug addiction is one of the most challenging things to accomplish. So yeah, this is how things will be. And I hope you see that students and faculty are on the same side of the issue.
What are we supposed to do to improve ourselves? I think I resent this post a bit because it brings a lot of shame and it’s harsh. But we came into this world with phones in our hands. It’s hard to get off the news now when it seems like we’ve got to be paying attention. Nothing about my academic life felt normal - I lived through COVID and learned from a screen while people died and the world stopped. I feel like it was here, where we experienced significant shifts in our reliance on technology and it was here where I feel my intrinsic motivation died. I also go to Columbia university (enough said if you’ve seen any news about Columbia in the past two years). I think it’s more than that, the phone is so ruining. But it’s also such a coping mechanism and a way to understand an increasingly scary, disordered and unprecedented world. you can know exactly what’s happening right now. You can watch it live. How do I get better? I want to improve my life…
her:
im a highschool student myself and I can confirm that its the phone addiction that has rotten our brains. despite my constant efforts to get back on track i simply can not. everytime i sit down to study, i end up doom scrolling instead. i feel like the constant dopamine has made the teenagers lazy and purposeless as we simply dont care about anything anymore. i recently came across the terms "apathy" qnd "avolition" and i think these terms perfectly describe how a vast majority of teenagers feel now as we are simply not interested in anything and even if we are, we find ourselves unable to get things done. i desperately hope that somehow we can reverse this brainrot.
I have deep sympathy and compassion for these students, and my heart aches for them. I’m no kind of expert about addiction, but I did recently read a piece by someone who is, and maybe he has some actionable ideas. Owen Flanagan is a recently retired philosopher of mind and neuroscience from Duke University. He’s published a ton and is very highly regarded. He is also a recovering alcoholic and pill addict.
Flanagan recently published an excerpt from his new book on addiction in Psyche. He argues that a sense of shame, feeling ashamed, is valuable in helping people overcome addiction. Cultures develop shame in order to protect their values, and if we abjure all forms of it as harmful and think we should feel good about whatever we do, then those values disappear. It’s not my fault I’m an addict and I shouldn’t feel shame about it! Then why change? Sex work is real work and I shouldn’t feel badly about it! Are we building the best society for our young people? Class is so boooooring; I don’t need to feel guilty about blowing it off! Are you becoming your ideal self?
Flanagan writes, “The shame of addiction, properly focused, invites the addict to recognise that they were a person before they were an addict – and that they can be that person again, or some new and improved version of that person, if they can find a way to undo their addiction… Shame is a perfectly sensible emotional response to failing to abide by norms for a good life.”
Nobody likes feeling ashamed, I know, but maybe a bit of that would help. When I call on a student and they shrug their shoulders at me in silence, they should feel ashamed. When they bomb an assignment because they didn’t do the reading or come to class, being ashamed is the proper response. Addicts can’t be helped if they are filled with excuses and don’t want to change, but maybe their own sense of directed shame can lead them to a better life. At least, it might be worth a try.