Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

It came in one of those daily emails from The New York Times. The subject line read, “The Morning: Are schools a problem?” Oh no, they didn’t . . . I had to open it and read.

I have a real chip on my shoulder about stuff like this. After being a public school teacher for nearly twenty years and working through No Child Left Behind’s testing frenzy, the recession’s funding cuts, the accountability movement’s pressures, and the COVID pandemic’s restrictions, I’m kind of touchy about hearing, “It’s the teachers’ fault” or “Schools need to do better.” I can share, from a lot of experience, that the struggles that occur in schools are almost always caused by factors outside of the schools themselves. The average American teacher is drinking from a firehose daily, and some people want to point to the fact that they’re soaking wet as a sign that they’re guilty of something. 

The article itself didn’t amount to much. It was a teaser for a longer article that sprinkled out some polling results like bread crumbs and asked us to follow the trail to a vague inference that, if most kids have anxiety and most kids attend school, then the two must be linked. Uh, sure . . . 

One of the factoids that interested me most was the assertion that 80% of teenage boys said they are stressed. Of course they are! They’re large children who are trying to become men. Today, the societal pressures on boys and young men and the consequences of those pressures are well-documented. (Lookin’ at you, social media.) Boys are encouraged by society to be masculine and strong while also being dissuaded at school from aggressive or even assertive behaviors. One result is that lots of young men are turning to hypermasculine programming for affirmation that they aren’t bad or wrong. Boys are also looking straight at the difference between what school offers and what the media shows them (athletes, entertainers), and school can’t measure up— why study and do schoolwork when I could cover myself in tattoos, behave badly on YouTube, and get rich? That’s what the videos on his phone tell him he can do, and his phone is what he’s usually paying attention to, not his teacher. And where did he get the phone? From his parents.

Out of disdain for insinuations like the ones embedded in this Times article, I looked to Pew Research for a counterpoint. In a 2024 study, we find these factoids in a poll of teachers:

• 77% say their job is frequently stressful.
  68% say it’s overwhelming.
  70% say their school is understaffed.

Those numbers seem comparable to the ones coming from the teenagers. The first two sentiments have a lot to do with how Americans treat teachers, and the third factor has a lot to do with how Americans don’t like to pay taxes. The accountability movement planted the seed that teachers don’t need good salaries, feasible workloads, or adequate resources; they need to stop being lazy and plaintive. Even though that movement has faded since a peak in the 2010s, lots of Americans have provided their tacit assent, because it’s convenient. 

I’ll give a little credence to the headline, though. Schools can sometimes be a problem. Depending on where you are, there can be bad policies, bad practices, bad teachers, bad principals, bad facilities . . . but I think that something different is stressing our kids. What is less often discussed is that our culture, through advertising and other messaging, emphasizes the desire for ease and convenience as not just a marketing ploy, but as the basis for a belief system— if it isn’t easy and convenient, then it should be! Wrong. Ease and convenience are pleasant and preferable, but they aren’t foundational principles for living a good life.

Since this notion has taken root, we have younger generations swimming in learned helplessness. This established idea within the psychology community amounts to a hopeless reticence that is based on negative experience— if something seems hard, then don’t try. Among the subtopics on the Psychology Today webpage that I linked here is: “Does overparenting lead to helplessness in children?” Their answer is yes. Children who are coddled become averse to challenges, which is what any true educational experience is. Another subtopic on that webpage is: “Are self-absorbed people more helpless?” Their answer: “They can be. [because] They expect everyone to do things for them.” Reading on, we find some context for that Times article: “The concept may also manifest in educational settings when children feel they cannot perform well and therefore stop trying to improve.” 

Psychology Today didn’t say this, but I will: hardship and failure can be an excellent teachers. Viewed in a constructive way, hardship shows us that work can pay off, and failure shows us that we can get back up. Bad experiences do not define us, if our resilience does. However, many parents don’t want their children to face hardship and failure. Then when administrators don’t want to face parents, that combination puts teachers and students in a circumstance where the path of least resistance is very, very appealing. However, when kids do truly fail, the shit rolls downhill, and it becomes the teachers’ fault. This causality comes from a genuine dismay that learning is hard work.

My compassionate answer to addressing widespread teenage angst would be to support failure as a learning experience. (Notice that I am not endorsing failure as a viable option— I said, we should support failure as a learning experience.) Schools can start by not putting lower-performing students in advanced classes, being honest that they’ve failed to meet benchmarks for enrollment. At home, instead of punishing a kid who makes bad grades, parents can ask why the grades are bad, listen to the answer, and seek tutorials and other solutions. On the teaching side, in addition to high-stakes testing, formative assessments can identify deficiencies early. If a student does poorly on homework and quizzes, those small failures can alert a teacher of the need for extra help before a big failure comes. This would require reducing class sizes so teachers can give timely feedback on daily work, instead of just doing a spot-check. It would also require that parents make sure kids do their homework. Put those things together, and we’d have an “accountability movement” that lives up to its name by addressing everyone’s role in education. 

Asked generally, are schools a problem? Sometimes. That question takes on new meaning, though, if we believe that schoolwork has no connection to real life, that schools are only a means to an end, and that learning isn’t good in and of itself. When teenagers believe those things, school does stress them out. As competent adults, we can’t yield, though. Using blame to ignore schoolwork so they can scroll TikTok, watch YouTube, and play games might cure their stress . . . for a while. Until, one by one, we all realize that a life of pure ease and convenience is so empty, meaningless, and unfulfilling that many of us will seek social situations and challenges from something like . . . uh, I don’t know . . . school.