Half of young people have so many 'emotional problems'

I'm gonna push back on that just a bit. The entire population is not homogeneous, of course. However, the idea that most of us don't all learn the same way is fallacious and is a false narrative that really needs to stop being peddled. Our brains, in most cases, are all designed roughly the same and operate in roughly the same ways. Hell, the entire fields of medicine and behavioral sciences are based on the fact that humans tend to function and behave in roughly similar fashion. So, yeah, phenomena don't apply to 100% of the population - every man, woman, and child on earth - but they apply to most of us (a supermajority, in many cases).

With the exception of the small minority of people who experience learning disabilities or related cognitive dysfunction, the cognitive mechanisms and processes by which our brains learn information are the same for everyone. Person A's brain does not perceive, encode, store, and retrieve information differently than Person B or Person C. The false idea that "everyone learns differently" is strongly rooted (if not completely based on) the bullshit myth of "Learning Styles Theory," has been completely debunked in the strongest of terms. In fact, the last study I read about it (from July issue of the journal of Teaching of Psychology), suggested that researchers time would be better served (i.e., not completely wasted) by focusing on studying pretty much anything else.

The idea that it is advantageous for kids to be "encouraged to learn for themselves" has little evidentiary support. Montessori schools use this approach and there is little evidence to suggest that they are more effective than traditional classroom instruction. One reason may be because young children lack the physical brain development to have even a fundamental sense of impulse control and serious goal-directed behavior. At that age, structured instruction is actually better for them than letting them run free to "explore, discover, and learn" on their own.

Also, there are already avenues for people to learn for themselves; they can take online classes. Unfortunately, students taking online classes tend to retain less information than in-class students, report that they feel the didn't learn much, and surveys show that they actually prefer in-class instruction to online instruction. So much for learning for themselves.

On a related note, I have to roll my eyes every time I see someone like Bernie Sanders or some random Facebook vid claims that school systems in places like Sweden are so much better than the US because "reasons." It seems to be the hip new thing for ultra liberals to shit all over the US as if this country is some sort of backwoods garbage dump of Reconstruction-era stupidity and inequity. It's not a position that is rooted in rationality or reality and the claims that traditional, in-class education is "bad" are not rooted in evidence.

So, while there are definitely issues with our sad state of public education, I think they're mostly due to political and ideological bullshit, and not because traditional instruction is innately ineffective or because kids are being brainwashed by some totalitarian regime.


I'll partly agree that, while ADHD is a very real condition, it is often over-diagnosed by grossly underqualified people (like pediatricians) and used as an excuse to avoid actually having to find effective ways to engage students who might be more high strung than other students or simply bored. However, to insinuate that the school system is full of virtuous, plucky upstarts who are standing up to authority figures to fight back against moral and intellectual oppression, and the totalitarian schools are simply slapping labels on large numbers of students and pumping them full of drugs just to silence these little freedom fighters and make them more compliant is a ludicrous, fact-free assertion.

Most of the time that a student is being disruptive, it's not because he/she possesses a keen mind and razor-sharp intellect that allows him/her to see right through the communist bullshit. As many classrooms as I've been in, both as a teacher and a researcher, I can tell you with confidence that it's actually because the kid is an asshole or actually does have dysfunctional issues which require treatment.

I've also never encountered a time where groupthink was encouraged and masked as critical thinking. On the contrary, critical thinking isn't focused on nearly enough and, when positive initiatives like Common Core try to correct that, the political and ideological bullshit rears its ugly head to prevent critical thinking at all costs.

The problem isn't that the government tries to ensure that students all think the same way. The problem is that, in many cases, the government acts in ways that prevent students from thinking at all.