Walk around any college and you’ll hear the same conversations. You’ll even hear identical phrases – ‘And then she…’, ‘Who does she think…?’, ‘So he says…’
You’ll then hear unfold a deep analysis of some interaction, usually filled with plenty of side-taking, side-swiping, and general sniping.
It’s often the sort of analysis I struggle to get students to do. But they can do it here in the corridors with ease. I’d estimate such chat accounts for 80 per cent of students’ conversations and consumes 90 per cent of their energy.
When all this is going on it can be a real distraction from academic learning.
Expecting a student to analyse a poem when they’ve just been excluded from their friendship group is a big ask. They’re engaging in learning that seems far more urgent, visceral and essential than anything I can present them with.
But they are learning. This shouldn’t be mistaken for mere distraction. A teacher’s job is simply to direct that learning spotlight onto a particular subject.
Young people need to know how to navigate their social worlds, filled with complexities us older souls have long since left behind. They are still knee-deep in the swirling social milieux of in-groups and out-groups and urgent deep relationships. Underlying this, their survival instincts are engaged.
Social complexities once occupied us all; they had to because social survival and personal survival have always been interlinked.
In fact, social status has often been a lot more important than academic learning. Imagine yourself as the inhabitant of a Neolithic village, where you must fit in to be fed; where exclusion means exile and almost certain death.
The Neolithic human still resides deep inside, our modern manners serving only to hide the self-same creature within.
Survival used to centre on being accepted or excluded from the group, and we’ve not come too far from our ancient ancestors’ villages, where decoding social cues was an essential skill to develop. Our students are experts at this.
I’ve lost count how many times a student has sought me out to confide about some social crisis crucifying them. Social insults and slights can fill their horizons.
One student recently sadly said she was being excluded from her social group, and then added they were the group who didn’t even fit in anywhere else. Where else could she go?
You could hear her despair as she saw her social road running out before her eyes. How could I brush that aside? In that moment, my work was taking a solid back seat to her survival needs. I had to help her process this before she could study.
We’ve taken our Neolithically-minded kids and thrust them into a cyber world. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box of social media and left them at the mercy not just of their limited circle of peers in the Neolithic village but of a worldwide morass of confusing and conflicting social signals and stimulation populated by millions, where acceptance is ever unattainable and the pressure always on.
Put that together with a young adult’s unformed frontal lobe, which should help them regulate their emotional responses and assess risk and consequence but can’t yet, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
No wonder anxiety is at record levels amongst our youth, and there’s the constant cry of mental health preventing academic learning. No wonder so many feel they have run out of road before they’ve even begun their journeys.
Meanwhile homework still has to be done. So what do we teachers do?
The old Neolithic village might have been built with a stockade around it, providing a safe space to slowly develop social skills. In the 1990s, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested most of us could only really manage social relationships, of differing degrees, with 150 people.
In 2013, a Pew Research project found that people have, on average, around 425 ‘friends’ on social media. Maybe our young people simply need smaller social circles.
Australia is currently trying to erect a legal stockade around their young people. Do our youth here not deserve similar protection? Tech-savvy teens might find ways around any ban, but some might still be saved.
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