If our existing schooling system is unnecessarily exacerbating mental health issues, then parents, teens, educators, and policy-makers should re-evaluate the premises of our existing schooling system. If schooling-as-we-know-it is excessively different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then how should we rethink schooling in order to create healthier adolescent populations in the future?
It is a long essay, which covers a lot of research on the problems of contemporary adolescents. As I read it, I applied my rule of thumb, which is to focus on technology as a cause. Also, I came across the essay concurrently with my reading of Panic Attack by Robby Soave.
For example, Strong lists five characteristics of adolescent tribal life that are not shared by today’s youth. I will put them in a table.
| tribal life | modern life |
|---|---|
| (1) small tribal community of a few dozen to a few hundred with few interactions with other tribal groups. | exposed to hundreds or thousands of age peers directly in addition to thousands of adults and thousands of electronic representations of diverse human beings (both social media and entertainment media). |
| (2) shared one language, one belief system, one set of norms, one morality, and more generally a social and cultural homogeneity that is unimaginable for us today. | exposed to many languages, belief systems, norms, moralities, and social and cultural diversity. |
| (3) immersed in a community with a full range of ages present, from child to elder. | largely isolated with a very narrow range of age peers through schooling. |
| (4) engaged in the work of the community, typically hunting and gathering, with full adult responsibilities typically being associated with puberty. | Have little or no opportunities for meaningful work in their community and no adult responsibilities until 18 or even into their 20s. |
| (5) mating and status competitions would have mostly been within their tribe or occasionally with nearby groups, most of which would have been highly similar to themselves. | are competing for mates and status with hundreds or thousands directly and with many thousands via electronic representations (both social media and entertainment media). |
Of these five contrasts, (3) and (4) are linked to our schooling process. (1), (2), and (5) are much exacerbated in the world of smart phones and the Internet. I speak of it as the world of our new species, Homo Appiens.
The mental health problems of Homo Appiens have been emphasized by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.
I’m highly skeptical of this line of reasoning. To me, it comes across as pseudo-scientific story telling. It is easy to generate an opposite set of stories based on evolutionary psychology that are just as plausible. It is the “rethink schooling” part that gives me pause, especially when the metric is based on second order effects like mental well-being and suicide rates. We don’t need to “rethink transportation” since vehicle accidents/deaths are prevalent. By all means retool and tweak to improve the accident/death rate but don’t design an alternative to roads/highways/cars based on evolutionary psychology.
I agree. This sounds like the people who say we need to eat like cavemen.
But some people do need to eat like cavemen. At least, more like cavemen than subsistence grain farmers. While others, perhaps in the same family, can thrive on a daily diet of nothing but potatoes.
That’s the trouble. Extreme variance and inherently high causal density makes a taste or and arguments for one-size-fits-all advice or policy an instance of conceited hubris that is not just foolish in its arrogant futility, but often downright harmful and dangerous. The psychological drive – apparently very common – to passionately fixate and adamantly and stubbornly insist that there is one right and true strategy which would work best for everyone, despite our awareness of our high variance, is incredibly unfortunate. It is probably no coincidence that these attitudes are most conspicuous in the sectors closest to ones in which our core instinct to “signal that we care” is strongest: e.g., health and child-rearing.
And so it is with the “correct” approach to schooling and “the” impact of social conditions and technologies (which reminds me of Kling’s argument that there is no single interest rate for a whole economy, and his annoyance that everyone nevertheless reasons as though there is). Some people probably thrive now who would struggle in those past conditions.
This insight is the basis for arguments about freedom of choice in a free and lightly regulated marketplace, so that diverse needs can be more efficiently matched with diverse products, most of which can suit some subset of customers better than any one-size-fits-all model, and that furthermore, when such markets exist, the political and personal stakes of stupid One Right Strategy arguments fall so far that people lose the motivation to fight and are more likely to tolerate alternative preferences and mind their own business.
To be fair, I should acknowledge two major benefits of the One Right Strategy mentality. Most common impulses have an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, whether we understand it or not, and one should be cautious and hesitant about lamenting or condemning common tendencies.
One benefit is the generation of high levels of personal motivation, commitment, self-control, and discipline. With weight-loss diets and/or exercise regimes, it seems that almost any strategy obeying the laws of thermodynamics, no matter how odd or crazy, can still work well for at least some people, but only so long as the Tinkerbell effect is operating, and the dieter truly believes they are following the One Right Strategy – true for everyone, everywhere, always. (CF: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus). It’s no coincidence that most people operating under this belief, and who then get real positive-feedback results, tend to become strident evangelists for their practical faith.
A second benefit related to that evangelistic motivation is that without this passionate and unreasonable attitude, many important and beneficial contrarian or heterodox ideas would never come to anyone’s attention, especially to generate the extremely useful competitive and adversarial intellectual processes that are the essential ingredients of real progress and escape from conformity and stagnation. Only a psychological state that gives people the monomaniacal and obsessive need to let as many people know that they the conventional wisdom is actually poison and they have discovered the One Right Strategy can keep one going 24/7 on the same message. A reasonable attitude that one has an alternative approach which is probably better for some people just isn’t going to cut it.
I know in my own case I have greatly benefited from being exposed to the output of such unreasonable people making inaccurately exaggerated claims for their positions. But without them being fanatically driven to do it, I wouldn’t have seen even the reasonable and accurate version of those claims, or had the opportunity to apply independent judgment to a debate or trial which otherwise wouldn’t exist.
roads/highways/cars based on evolutionary psychology.
—————-
We have no car gene, we can be assured of that. So, yes indeed, redesigning our cars to become auto driven personal caves make a whole lot of evolutionary sense. And packing unrelated kids into a classroom is also not evolutionary, we do not have a ‘packed into classroom’ gene.
RAD,
It seems these can be considered hypotheses at least some of which can then be tested.
I know an administrator of schools in rural Alaska and they teach kids in the old fashioned way of one teacher for 12 grades with mixed ages working together. No grades. No set curriculum based on age, but instead based upon proficiency tied to the individual.
I thought this was an exceptionally thought provoking article.
My background is in Anthropology, among other things. Number 5 is the only point which I think lacks real study and is probably the most interesting on this list. Males were never exposed to competition of this magnitude until very very recently.
Now younger guys are having to compete not only with their peers they interact with physically on a day to day basis, but also on a virtual basis with millions of other males.
But isn’t there a mitigating (and if not true, why not) flip side to this: The set of opportunities should also have increased by a similar factor driven by the same forces.
I think this is where empirical study could inform us better. My sense is that social media provides somewhat equal exposure and access to competition as well as potential mates, but that young males don’t perceive this equity. Instead, they assume that simply more women are holding out for higher status males. There was a good study about potential mate rankings and choosiness done by cupid.com or other site. I’ll see if I can find it.
Right. This problem emerges in a wide variety of contexts in which key factors don’t have scale symmetry and do won’t stay in balance the same way even if one applies the same magnifying transformation equally. A classic example is that the surface area-to-volume ratio of an object shrinks when absolute size grows, which creates problems for radiating excess heat.
If any such psychological asymmetry exists between men and women in the factors of the tournament of the sexual marketplace, then one can’t assume that competition will always be balanced by opportunities, that prices will adjust and markets will always clear, and instead one is reasonable in worrying about whether important elements of equilibrium will be irreparably thrown out of balance.
I still don’t understand this conservative love of community and a competitive economy. They are not nature allies in the world. And maybe we should accept the Post WW2 boom as the historical outlier of this idea as opposed a long term society. Creative destruction of 1970s and 1980s broke this model. (The more I think about the 1970s economy the more accept there was a lot more creative destruction happening that decade.)
We live a global competitive economy and young people need to be exposed that reality in all education. The tribal model sets up a number of young people to fail in the modern economy than the ‘new’ model. (The opiod epidemic is hitting the WWC Rust Belt the hardest.)
And I do think the real issue in the modern world is the bridge from HS graduation to full career adulthood (18 – 25) have a lot holes in them today.
The more I think about the 1970s
—-
The 70s were pure chaos, about as close to chaos as we get without civil war.
I did not say the 1970s was a stable time…I said there was lots of creative destruction of the decade. (The economy would move from manufacturing to digital information but it took 2 decades for the productivity to hit.) We can state creative destruction is good thing overall but that does not mean increased social stability. This is why I don’t see how a stable community life can long term survive in the global economy.
In fact, the Post WW2 economy hit the Oil Embargo and Inflation wall in 1974 and led to a lot changes to American life which did impacted communities very harshly and led to a 8 year Recessionary period of 1974 – 1982.
We live a global competitive economy and young people need to be exposed that reality in all education.
If young people are indeed “snowflakes” and the educational system is protecting them from feeling hurt, then the opposite is happening.
There possibly will be some interesting ideas in the current Cato Unbound:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/
Note the reference to “structured” learning which is one of the things for which Kahn Academy “methods” offer modifications.
“exposed to many languages, belief systems, norms, moralities, and social and cultural diversity”
Uhh, they are steeped in abject conformity to prevailing ideological pieties.
Bryan Caplan recently wrote (https://www.econlib.org/historically-hollow-the-cries-of-populism/):
Arnold Kling is identifying negative outcomes of technology and social media. He is what Caplan describes as a techno-populist that is impossible to please 🙂
Who is this guy railing against?
I get it that leftist are angry that their Uncle likes Trump tweets and thinks a lack of censorship on Facebook caused Trump…but I don’t detect any hate beyond that.
I don’t like these companies because they are leftists and use their power to increase leftism, but that is something outside their business model.
Is anyone railing about 2-day Amazon delivery? Or being able to schedule a birthday party on Facebook?
This guy tilts at Windmills 24/7.
asdf: I think you completely misunderstood BC’s post. He’s not railing against Amazon or any other tech company.
@asdf, email me at nikodavor@gmail.com.
On an entirely separate plane:
A critical development for complex “social orders” has come with the displacement of *personal” relationships (dominant in tribal cultures) by increasingly *im*personal relationships (many through intermediaries, intervenors, and devices [including aps]). This reduced “personal” could be leading (absent affirmative efforts) to less and less “comprehension” of others; without which “comprehension” there arise the uncertainties (fears and loathing?) of the unknown or not understood – of which more and more become the unknown and not understood.
Let me clarify the last phrase:
_of which more and more come to feel or recognize that THEY are becoming the unknown and not understood.
There have been the ages of Troyan;
gone are the years of Yaroslav;
there have been the campaigns of Oleg,
Oleg son of Svyatoslav.
-Vladimir Nabokov
For something like 8,000 years the bulk of humanity has lived in agrarian society rather than hunter-gatherer tribes. That is a a lot of time for adaptive evolution. I’m having a hard time buying that tribal life in 1, 2, and 5 are the best or most relevant contrasts with the modern world.
What if we go back just 70 years though?
Unlike most young people today, most then would have had immediate family members who had gone to war. Young men would have lived with the knowledge that they could be drafted and might need to fight and kill to survive.
Unlike most young people today, most then would have had experience of hard, physical labor. There was no denigration of people working in trades.
Unlike most young people today, most then would have well defined sex roles. Most children would have been raised by stay at home mothers and have come home from school and been expected to perfom chores rather than either be carted about to endless extra-curricular activities or left to roam the streets. Most teenagers had jobs then.
Unlike most young people today, young people then had exposure to both masculine and feminine environments. There just aren’t as many masculine haunts or retreats around anymore where men were free to be men.
Could not many of the maladies of the new Homo Appiens be traced to these more recent changes?
The good news is that people are still interested in mastering trades and working with their hands. The popularity of television shows like Forged in Fire, Cake Boss, Deadliest Catch, etc suggest that people are looking for a worklife that involves something other than sitting behind a screen. The blossoming of local breweries and distilleries, farmer’s markets, etc. etc. suggest that people are following through with these ambitions. There is much to life beyond the apps and more and more people are rediscovering it.
And nobody needs to go deep into debt to achieve a meaningful existence learning a trade.
In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa found that 36 percent of studenets did not demonstrate an signficant improvement in learning over years of college. How many of the ills of Homo Appiens can be attributed to the death throes of our Prussian- modeled schooling system?
One suspects as people continue to leave the central cities, abandon public schools in droves, and find alternatives to student-loan peonage, a lot of the Homo Appiens problems will go away on their own.
For something like 8,000 years the bulk of humanity has lived in agrarian society rather than hunter-gatherer tribes.
Not at all true The first peasant societies are more like 5,000 years old but they comprised a very small chunk of humanity until about 2,000 years ago. How much “adaptive evolution” there has been is unclear.
Adaptation to the lifestyles of farming civilizations is even less well distributed than that. Consider that European settlement of Australia really didn’t get up to speed until less than 200 years ago, and many Aborigenes hadn’t been incorporated into a non-foraging based civilization until fairly recently. Before settlement, type 2 diabetes was unknown among the indigenous. Afterwards, while white Australians have high levels, Aborigenes get it 4 times more often. Alcohol, which was also unknown, causes intoxication-related deaths at 8 times the non-indigenous rate. Similar problems exist for American Indians, especially those who were foragers prior to contact with Europeans. Reservations are pretty dismal and gloomy places. Appalachian Opiod Wasteland avant la lettre, and a kind of canary in the coal mine for both medical and social pathologies.
Indeed, alcohol – especially in distilled form – didn’t make it to Northern Europe until relatively recently, and, it seems, not soon enough to eliminate alcoholism-prone alleles from the local gene pool (which likely occured in ugly fashion in the Mediterranean long before).
The issue is more pronounced when adaptations to farmer lifestlyes – which had a few thousand or even just a few hundred years to develope – require the opposite impulses to adaptations to forager lifestyles which were established over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years – especially core instincts related to reproductive strategies.
Yes, evolution can happen quite quickly when the power of the selection effect is extreme, but one can’t assume like T. Greer that a few thousand years is all it would take to consider all that maladaptive forager-era stuff as negligible water under the bridge. The shortcut is for newcomers to acquire an adaptive innovation from some group which has been adapting to local or “new to you” conditions for eons.