Kids “Can’t Read” and Everyone is Freaking Out About It: What Can This Tell Us About Our Current Society?
Kristy Smith, PhD Candidate
Faculty of Education, York University
If your YouTube algorithm looks anything like mine, you may have come across one of the many content creators speaking to emerging issues in education post-COVID; namely, that children’s behaviour is unmanageable, school absenteeism is at an all time high, and that kids can’t read. Perhaps none of these concerns are surprising given the massive disruption that the pandemic caused in students’ learning and their lives in general, but what I find interesting is that such panics have brought influencers of various identities and political commitments together in their concern for children. Parents and teachers, as well as childfree millennials and Gen Z influencers, are all weighing in on the conversation. These kinds of discussions, among others, somewhat resemble Hannah Arendt’s (1952) thinking about what constitutes public space. While the fact that all social media platforms are ultimately owned by private companies is not lost on me, platforms hospitable to longform commentary seem to operate as the symbolic table in Arendt’s definition of public space:
The term ‘public’ signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our private place within it . . . to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men [sic] at the same time. (p. 52)
In my exploration of teacher-influencers and commentators on social media responding to concerns in our education system, I noticed that while they all agree that such concerns are important issues to reckon with, they often differed in their understanding of why today’s students are facing so many problems, as well as who or what is to blame. Commentators who illustrate more left-wing ideologies, like Tiffany Ferguson, are more likely to identify myriad causes that necessitate a more systemic response, such as learning loss during the pandemic or undiagnosed learning disabilities and processing disorders, and believe that greater investment in caring for young people’s mental health and individual learning needs is the answer. Commentators who seem to align more with right-wing politics, such as Amir Odom, are more likely to blame the pitfalls of gentle parenting and the erosion of teachers as authority figures in the classroom, believing that more rigid structure and discipline is the answer to getting kids “back on track.” I am inclined to believe that the truth includes each of their arguments in some way, but that more is at play in defining why students’ literacy levels are lower when measured by government-mandated standards and why their behaviour seems worse.
To me, children’s academic achievement and social-emotional skills signify the tip of the iceberg in examining larger societal issues — specifically, that each of us are struggling to secure a good quality of life within our current neoliberal structure. Practicing teachers are familiar with the increasing demands placed on them, and they are expected to operate as pseudo parents (in loco parentis) to a degree that we haven’t seen before. Teacher-influencers often — perhaps rightfully — complain that parents aren’t parenting their children or sharing the responsibility of educating them. But is this because millennial parents are lazy, uninvested in their children’s lives, or leaning too much into the tenets of gentle parenting? I would argue that many millennial parents are more hands-off in raising their children because they have no other choice. It is much harder for millennials to survive financially when entry level jobs in myriad sectors require more qualifications but pay less, and when inflation, housing crises, and financial precarity overall characterize life in recent years. It just isn’t feasible for most families to rely on a single income, take extended parental leave, or work part-time to be home with children more often. Parents don’t have as much time to establish consistent structure and discipline at home, read with their children before bedtime, or help them with their homework. These challenges may also explain why the “tradwife” movement has gained traction on social media and has amassed a following of young women (Nilsson-Julien, 2024).
“Tradwife” influencers such as Estee Williams encourage women to take on more traditional gender roles as housewives and mothers and live frugally rather than pursuing higher education or careers. Given the stress that many working mothers feel and the current concerns about how children are faring, it is easy to see how this lifestyle could be appealing to young women. Gen Z, in particular, watched as millennials pursued degrees and careers, yet struggled to achieve a middle class quality of life — and as a consequence, could not afford to have children at all, or could not afford to be fully present in their children’s lives. Tradwives online often blame feminism for the hardships that women and children are facing, which I strongly disagree with. The demands of trying to survive within the current landscape of neoliberalism certainly has more to do with such hardships than the progression of women’s rights — which still has much to be desired considering that maternity leave isn’t financially sufficient for many working mothers, and childcare costs in Canada are expensive and inaccessible to a lot of families.
Kids allegedly being unable to read is a mere symptom of larger economic and social issues that we have not been able to reckon with as a society. While my initial intention in this piece was to examine the phenomena of lower literacy skills and higher behavioural challenges in the classroom, the more I explored these topics on social media as a pseudo public space for discourse, the more I saw distinct connections between seemingly unrelated social concerns. While the landscape of children’s wellbeing and academic capacities may seem bleak, the fact that questions about education have entered influencer spaces so profoundly is a source of hope. Perhaps these conversations can move concern for children and their education from the private sphere — as an individual problem for families and teachers — into the public sphere, as a societal responsibility that we all share. In a neoliberal context, families often operate in isolation without a sense of community. I often wonder about the implications of fewer families accessing community through religion since we have not yet found a secular alternative for the communities that faith-based spaces once provided on a larger scale. The saying that it “takes a village to raise a child” comes to mind here, and while YouTube and TikTok don’t necessarily operate as “villages” or communities, it is meaningful that people who aren’t parents or teachers themselves are entering the conversation. Perhaps such conversations and the hope that they offer can lead us towards creating new communities of care for children and adults alike, and help us learn how to share the load of teaching and nurturing younger generations.
References
Amir Odom. (2024, January 16). Why gen Z and Alpha are making teachers quit [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na4V7RjbW48
Arendt, H. (1952). The human condition. The University of Chicago Press.
Estee Williams. (2023, March 20). How to become a traditional wife: Part 1 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA1U8eI4jhQ
Nilsson-Julien, E. (2024, February 28). Meet the tradwives: The anti-feminist influencers calling for traditional values. Euronews: Culture. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2024/02/28/meet-the-trad-wives-the-anti-feminist-influencers-calling-for-traditional-values#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20the%20movement,social%20media%20platforms%20like%20Instagram.&text=%22Searches%20exploded%20during%20the%20pandemic.
tiffanyferg. (2024, February 16). “Learned helplessness” and the tech literacy crisis: Internet analysis [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPWeAe4_tkY&t=122s
