Episode 31: Our Kids are not OK
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Welcome back to the Reach Every
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Student Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Bergman. Before we start talking about today's topic that our kids are not okay, I want to encourage you to think about your summer PD goals. I've created three courses that really help teachers prepare themselves in this world of A.I. I'm convinced that flipped learning particularly is going to help you navigate the world of AI significantly. To that end, I have created three courses, flipped learning K-12 in the age of AI, flipped learning higher ed in the age of AI, and mastery learning in the age of AI. You can find that at jonbergman.com slash courses. And now for today's topic.
00:00:38 Jon Bergmann: Today, I want to talk about the state of our kids and our kids are not okay. None other than the late Pope Francis, who, as you know, recently passed away. He said on a trip to Bethlehem, he said this, children are a diagnostic sign, a marker indicating the health of families, society, and the entire world. He said this, whenever children are accepted, loved, cared for, and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy, and the world is more human. He continued and said, children need to be welcomed and defended from the moment of their conception. All too many children. Still quoting Pope Francis, continue to be exploited, mistreated, enslaved, and prey to violence and illicit trafficking. And though I'm not living in the world of deep poverty in a world where I see trafficking happening to my students, I see that we have a huge issue going on in our kids. See, I started teaching in 1986, In 1986, students were different. And then in 2011, as some of you may know, I, I had published a book actually about 2012, I think is when I Stepped away from the classroom teaching and I then basically went on a world tour after my first book was published and I traveled the world working with schools. And so I was away from direct contact with students. Until I returned to the classroom in 2019. And when I returned to the classroom, I remember remarking to some of my friends, I said, I've never seen such a high incidence Of student mental health issues going on. And I said, what's going on with this? What, what happened in those intervening years when I left teaching and then came back to teaching And that has been voiced and clarified to me in the last couple of weeks is I have picked up the copy of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt's book has been... Terrifying for me to read and yet also it, it speaks to what I saw. He, he has put his finger on what has happened To our kids and he cites so much. if you've not picked up a copy of this book, I would highly encourage you to pick up this book. He cites a couple of things, the rise of teen mental illness, which I saw when I returned back to the classroom, just alarming rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide, That has happened in the last decade or so, and it's not just in the U S it's across multiple countries, mostly in the developed countries. And he then finds causality in what he calls the rewiring of our childhood. He argues that there was a shift that occurred at how children are growing up today than say when I grew up back in the 1960s and 70s. Yeah, I'm old. and we moved from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. And I'm seeing that there's this, and that rewiring has changed how students interact with the world. And. You know, as a child, I, you know, me and my friends would just like disappear and then go play outside, whatever. And we'd play games and we would kickball and, um, we would have fights, but then we'd have to work it out. one thing Haidt really says, I think it's almost one of his best quotes is we are overprotective in the physical world for our students, our kids, and we are under protective in the virtual world. And, If you know anything, the virtual world is much more dangerous than the physical world, pretty much. And yeah, so there's a lot of things going on in this book that really he talks more about native impacts and he attributes a lot of this to smartphones, social media, particularly he goes and he talks about how social media and the smartphones have really hurt students. He, he talks about how it's, it's, it's actually social deprivation. The students have limited interactions with their peers. they are getting less sleep and that's, that's terrible. There's even a, thing about. This was just terrible, is that because people are blinking less, so physiologically blinking less because they're staring at screens, then there are eye problems they're developing. And it's, you know, attention fragmentation students are, have more, they have shorter attention spans. And, many students get addicted to these things. there's a huge increase in loneliness. and also social comparison, particularly among young women. And he sees this also as a social contagion. Again, sees this. It's not like it's just his ideas. He backs it up with data, et cetera, et cetera. And then he spent a bit of time talking about how it is different for young men and young women, and they have different, issues that we're seeing, I won't go into that right now, but it's, it's, it's just, it's terribly alarming. This has been mirrored in my own career as I've gone back, as I've seen this huge anxiousness among students and depression, anxiety, and you know, even where I sit now, a lot of the students have gone Have been taken to treatment facilities and some of that has really helped. I've seen it be very powerful in helping students as well when they've gotten the treatment that they need. And so our kids aren't good. They're not okay. And, you know, Haight wrote this book and this was really pre when the AI world takes off. So he doesn't really address AI in amount, how might it might change and impact our children. And I am continually being concerned about where this is headed for us as a society. We need to be very careful. Again, go back to Pope Francis's idea. You know, we need to protect our children, right? Wherever children are accepted, loved, and cared for, and protected, the family is healthy, the society is more healthy, the world is more human. And if there is a charge that we as adults have in this world, it is to protect our kids. But what does that mean and what does that look like? And so we need to be thoughtful as we look at things such as artificial intelligence and we need to protect them. I was listening to another podcast this morning about AI and education and And, students are offloading cognition to AI. I mean, I am doing that, right? I, I, even in this podcast, I asked AI to generate some thoughts for me and But you and I are dealing with students who have a developing brain. They are, they are young. They, their brain is still more plastic than yours or mine. And we need to be very careful. About what we do. I mean, we need to really address a couple of questions. Like number one is what's the point of education? Is it just information transfer? I would argue part of it is there are certain things that we as a society and different societies may have different ideas on this, but there's certain things our society says that students should. Know and be able to do, right? We want them to become a positive citizens, citizens in our democracy. So we should teach citizenship. But we also need to think, teach them how to think number two, like we need to teach them how to think the process of thinking, the process of becoming critical thinkers. And if they let AI do the critical thinking for them, then. I believe we're going to have stupefaction of our students. We don't want to diminish. We don't want to do harm. Like, you know, Google's saying do no harm. Google by the way has done harm. we, what harm are we doing to our kids? And we want to predict it. if Haight's right, and I believe he is, is that particularly social media has been detrimental to our students and we didn't see that Before we did this mass experimentation on them and gave them access to social media. now that AI is about to take over the world and maybe it already has. We need to do some work and not allow that to happen with AI. Now, AI is here to stay. The cat's out of the bag. I've said this before. We need to think how to ethically, thoughtfully teach this to our students. We also need to know when to not use AI because we don't want students To be stupid, to lose cognitive thinking skills. You know, one of the reasons we teach students to write is because it helps them understand the thinking process. It helps them to become critical thinkers. But now it's too easy for a student if you assign them a paper to write for them to just offload that and let ChatGPT, whatever, write the paper for you. And then they have done no critical thinking. And so we need to be very thoughtful in not just how we deliver content and how we structure our classes, but we need to be very thoughtful in how we We need to be thoughtful not only in how we structure our classes and what we're teaching them, but kind of in what context that is. We're probably going to have to rethink what is the most important aspects of an education. Because they are going to get out there. They're going to get in the world. You know, we get a job someday. And as they get that job, they're going to use AI in some way to enhance their work. And, we've got to really be thoughtful about this. And as some of you may know, it just, I saw this morning in the, on my new newsfeed that president Trump has just issued an executive order. Um, and I want to talk some more about this in a future episode. But his executive order essentially is saying that we want to start almost like a space race on AI, right? Um, it's transforming. I'm reading from, the report here, artificial intelligence is rapidly I'm reading from the report right now. AI is rapidly transforming the modern world, driving innovation across all industries. And the big idea is that we need to create a society That's going to help students become, as he says, or whoever wrote this, um, have AI literacy. We need to promote AI literacy among Americans, and we need to start that with our kids. Um, I believe this is probably a response to a similar measure that happened in China recently and We, this is the world that we're going to live in and we need to teach students how to thoughtfully use AI, but we want, don't want it to happen at the expense of other students. And I guess my, my thinking at this stage, I, I hope I'm wrong. I think we're going to get a bifurcation of our society in that we're going to have those who are using AI to accelerate their work and to just do amazing things. AI can do some great things. It's already done some great things and with medicine and I mean, it is, it's got such great positive potential. But again, I'm an educator and I work with developing minds of young people. And if that's the case, I want to make sure that they are prepared to use the AI thoughtfully in the world to come. And we've got to really be careful about when we use AI. I mean, one thing I'm concerned about, I mean, I'm jumping into the topic here. maybe, you know, I have not done a deep read of this, but it, he talks, or the, the executive order talks a little bit about, AI use at early ages. It's not defined. It looks like, and I may be wrong, but. I'm not sure it's a good idea at all for, young students, three, four, five, six, seven year old students to be using AI. There's so much going on in our world with our students. Our students are not okay and to some degree we are It's our fault. And so what we need to do is as we approach the AI world, I encourage us. I want to encourage you, my listeners to deeply think, get into a dialogue, reach out to me. And maybe we can have a conversation about what are some of the solutions. And I did promise last week that I would dive into a solution that we are developing here at my school. And I didn't. I'm going to postpone that because the jury's out. We're doing like a trial test with some students to see if this will help. And I think it is an innovative idea, not mine, that somebody came up with. That I think is going to make a big difference. thanks for listening to this podcast. This is Jon Bergman. I encourage you to hit the subscribe button and please share it with your friends. It's super easy with any podcast app you use.
00:13:28 Jon Bergmann: And if you want to do me a solid, I think that's the kid's terminology. Give me a podcast review to get this in front of more eyes or is that ears? So now I encourage you to go out and reach every student. you can find out more at reacheverystudent.com. Jon Bergman out.
