Recent national surveys of young people have shown alarming increases in the prevalence of mental health challenges— in 2019, one in three high school students and half of female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009. The question that we need to ask is why is this phenomenon getting worse year after year and what is it that we may be missing when trying to resolve the situation.
When thinking of long term solutions I like to go back all the way to very young children. I look at my granddaughter who does not miss any opportunity to emulate what her parents or other adults are doing. She has a toy kitchen and prepares breakfast for her family. She takes care of her dolls just like her mother takes care of her. It is amazing to see how these young kids are born with a natural drive to learn from parents, older siblings or adults in general. This is not work, it is part of their play and as long as they are left alone to explore and observe they keep doing it. Their intrinsic motivation is to step into adult shoes with confidence as soon as they can.
In school, the real-life learning they practiced as young kids changes to a series of subjects divorced from any real-life context. As they continue this type of learning, they get completely detached from the goal of their learning. A question that students frequently ask is ‘Why do I need to learn this?,’ ‘How does this help me?.’ To make the case that humans were destined to learn in order to manage their own life with confidence, I like to turn to prehistoric and primitive cultures as they were transmitting daily survival skills to the younger generation. The entire goal of their education was to ensure that the younger generation could confidently perform the chores necessary for daily survival. Daily repetition of those chores led the children to an adult-level proficiency necessary to become equal contributors to their family’s survival and a stepping stone for later establishing their own families.
Of course, we are much more advanced than those ancient societies and I am not recommending that we lower our children’s education to those basic survival skills. But I think that we can learn a lot from the confidence with which young kids were assuming adult roles in those societies. John Dewey, 20th-century American educational theorist and philosopher, who believed in learning that’s grounded in experience and driven by student interest, understood this. By stating that “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself,” John Dewey not only ties education back to its prehistoric and primitive roots, but also clearly states the goal of education should be to train students to become capable active participants in daily life.
Learning should always measure whether students are learning the skills they will need to confidently step into their roles in life. Teachers need to make sure that students can connect with the problems they’re trying to solve and make them feel that their learning can help them in life. There’s also an important psychological aspect of giving students the feeling that they are a team of employees solving a real problem in their workplace. The more realistic the scenarios seem to students, the more wholeheartedly they will engage and commit to solving the problem. These projects may eventually turn into a direction students will take in life and give them the feeling that the work they do contributes to their own life and to society.
In contrast, in the traditional classroom, learning in general is divorced from instilling students with skills they will need to confidently step into their roles in life. In fact, the majority of students have no clue what they want to do in life when they finish high school. This lack of direction and goal is detrimental to students’ mental health. This not knowing of what is one’s goal in life or one’s role in society, can very fast develop into a feeling of inadequacy and low self-esteem. The road from here to a full fledged depression is not long. Of course, there are other factors that contribute to depression, but a feeling of confidence in one’s skill and direction can assuage the deterioration towards depression.