DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

I'm just going to throw this out there from personal observation and if anybody agrees we can get into the "why"... but has anybody else who is of that age group or spends a lot of time around that age group (teachers, coaches, parents), noticed that this lazy problem, this lack of motivation problem, this lack of problem solving ability problem... seems to be far worse among boys than it is girls?

I will try to find the TED talk, I've heard of those but never checked them out....

So why do you think that is happening? I have my own opinions.

Some criticisms of the TED talk:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/men-20/201205/the-demise-particular-type-guy

http://www.amazon.com/Inclusive-Masculin...0257&sr=8-1

http://www.downloadtheuniverse.com/dtu/2...d-books-ki.html

2) A largely unrealistic view of finances, often passed down from the few previous generations. We have become a "microwave" society, where people want everything immediately, but sacrifice is unacceptable.

One of the biggest problems we have, as a country, is that the whole economy is built on people being in debt,and accumulating more and more debt. If people waited till they could afford things, the economy would completely collapse.

Look at our monetary policy. It is designed to keep debt building. We have extraordinarily low interest rates ..... which discourages saving and encouraging investing and spending. It is one giant Ponzi scheme.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

July 2010

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]

No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]

As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.

Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests.

As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.

It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.

In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]

Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.

Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Now we move onto a test and punish movement aimed at educators.

Let's ignore poverty, and blame all low achieving scores on the teachers! What a brilliant idea!!

But, poverty correlations with the American education system rests as a GIANT elephant no one wants to acknowledge.

When we moved from New Mexico [a very poor state that has sub-standard public education imho] to Portland, Or we went into where we wanted our kids to go. I put my kids in private school for their first few years to ensure they had good foundations of learning the basics ... weirdly enough, they learned cursive which is apparently not taught anymore.

One correlation I found when looking for good schools was that the overall test scores directly related to free lunch program...meaning the higher the % of free lunches the lower performing the test scores were. that was true for NM and Oregon so it was not ethnicity issue.

I have seen several documentaries on this subject as well in the US where hungry kids just don't do come well in school..this is a travesty IMHO in the US at this day and age...

Nice post, gopher.

Regarding brain development, please see my new thread.

Can't educate your kids because they are poor? Maybe someone new can teach them.

Pulling the weeds makes for a healthier garden.

When we moved from New Mexico [a very poor state that has sub-standard public education imho] to Portland, Or we went into where we wanted our kids to go. I put my kids in private school for their first few years to ensure they had good foundations of learning the basics ... weirdly enough, they learned cursive which is apparently not taught anymore.

One correlation I found when looking for good schools was that the overall test scores directly related to free lunch program...meaning the higher the % of free lunches the lower performing the test scores were. that was true for NM and Oregon so it was not ethnicity issue.

I have seen several documentaries on this subject as well in the US where hungry kids just don't do come well in school..this is a travesty IMHO in the US at this day and age...

Hungry and abused children are actually a product of the enabling that we support in this country and a lack of accountability.

That's an interesting correlation although I'm not sure I understand your tie point. By enabling are you meaning programs like welfare / food stamps? If so, I have read some interesting articles on this as well.

The Education Department took some of the blame for the sometimes stressful, excessive and time-consuming testing at many schools and said Saturday that it hasn't done enough to help states tackle the problem.

By enabling, I mean giving, not earning, creating folks who are entitled. Highlight any program you choose. Most of these programs were developed to allow those folks falling upon difficult times to temporarily use them to create a better life for themselves.

The Big 3 automakers, Boeing, Archer Daniels Midland, Wall Street; some of the most entitled citizens in the country.

then why do they receive tax payer dollars?

Because the Obama administration says they do.

so it started with obama?

where did i say anything about party?

you getting defensive shows your party is the main culprit of this.