There are many reasons students experience stress and anxiety, not the least of which is because they often are not TAUGHT to be competent readers and writers, yet are expected to be. Competency lowers stress. Educators need to look into a mirror, not a gong, if they truly want to address our adolescents' and young adults' mental health crisis.
Though I haven't volunteered in too many years, I used to be involved in adult literacy tutoring. I did many hours of training in order to serve as a volunteer for adults who wished/needed to learn how to read, and the training always began with an emphasis upon phonics. Kids from culturally-enriched UMC backgrounds can do whole language, because they've already learned phonics through a process of cultural osmosis. But those who are starting more or less from scratch? They need phonics.
Oh, and I used to bring in some real-life, real-world materials: the weekly flyer from the local grocery store, an application for US citizenship... So, you know, a bit of whole language theory, I guess. But always we began with phonics.
This is a trap that I attribute to the spirit of neoliberalism, which I know in this sense sounds to most people like "neoliberalism is a generic word for everything unlikeable in our times". There's other words to use--managerialism, etc.--but I don't want to say this is about bad guys doing dumb things to good people.
What it's about is that many of our important institutions have hit some pretty hard limits on what they can accomplish with the resources we provide to them and the constraints they operate under, while at the same time our expectations of what those institutions should accomplish are almost limitless. Some of those expectations are fair, some aren't--it's right to expect that schools should educate their students, but we collectively tend to skirt over the fact that as a whole, we have fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes education. It's wrong to expect that education should solve persistent mismatches between the aspirations of all individuals in a democratic society for a materially, emotionally and spiritually good life and the realities of contemporary American capitalism and the labor market it provisions. It's wrong to expect that education can provide wellness and happiness to students that families and the wider society seem helpless to provide. But we expect that nevertheless.
Which is where we get to the neoliberal part of things. When we charge professionals inside of institutions (including many corporations) with closing the gap between the limits of what they can do and the unlimited expectations placed upon them, they tend to jump between faddish solutions that are often packaged for them by an agglomeration of experts, policy makers, consultants and service providers, where each successive fad is marketed as having the potential to close the gap between the upper bounds of reality and the vast void of expectation. They tend to jump between the packaged fads because of a characteristic neoliberal practice, which is a web of annualized or periodic metrics that measure microscopic movements at the upper bounds of possibility. In all our institutions, we hold professionals responsible for making at least microscopic, asymptotic movements into the gap towards those distant expectations. And then we get angry because those movements are only microscopic (which they were always going to be)--but we get angry at the people measured, not at the people who've sold the latest fad product. Usually that's because those people have already rebranded like those shanzai sellers on Amazon who have random names for imitation products. They're on to selling the next miracle cure already by the time managers and publics get mad that money was spent and still we're not anywhere near our expectations. Principals get fired, teachers get shuffled, political appointees get replaced, and we never have to collectively rethink what we believe we're entitled to receive from public institutions, or what we believe an organization can actually accomplish.
There are many reasons students experience stress and anxiety, not the least of which is because they often are not TAUGHT to be competent readers and writers, yet are expected to be. Competency lowers stress. Educators need to look into a mirror, not a gong, if they truly want to address our adolescents' and young adults' mental health crisis.
Though I haven't volunteered in too many years, I used to be involved in adult literacy tutoring. I did many hours of training in order to serve as a volunteer for adults who wished/needed to learn how to read, and the training always began with an emphasis upon phonics. Kids from culturally-enriched UMC backgrounds can do whole language, because they've already learned phonics through a process of cultural osmosis. But those who are starting more or less from scratch? They need phonics.
Oh, and I used to bring in some real-life, real-world materials: the weekly flyer from the local grocery store, an application for US citizenship... So, you know, a bit of whole language theory, I guess. But always we began with phonics.
This is a trap that I attribute to the spirit of neoliberalism, which I know in this sense sounds to most people like "neoliberalism is a generic word for everything unlikeable in our times". There's other words to use--managerialism, etc.--but I don't want to say this is about bad guys doing dumb things to good people.
What it's about is that many of our important institutions have hit some pretty hard limits on what they can accomplish with the resources we provide to them and the constraints they operate under, while at the same time our expectations of what those institutions should accomplish are almost limitless. Some of those expectations are fair, some aren't--it's right to expect that schools should educate their students, but we collectively tend to skirt over the fact that as a whole, we have fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes education. It's wrong to expect that education should solve persistent mismatches between the aspirations of all individuals in a democratic society for a materially, emotionally and spiritually good life and the realities of contemporary American capitalism and the labor market it provisions. It's wrong to expect that education can provide wellness and happiness to students that families and the wider society seem helpless to provide. But we expect that nevertheless.
Which is where we get to the neoliberal part of things. When we charge professionals inside of institutions (including many corporations) with closing the gap between the limits of what they can do and the unlimited expectations placed upon them, they tend to jump between faddish solutions that are often packaged for them by an agglomeration of experts, policy makers, consultants and service providers, where each successive fad is marketed as having the potential to close the gap between the upper bounds of reality and the vast void of expectation. They tend to jump between the packaged fads because of a characteristic neoliberal practice, which is a web of annualized or periodic metrics that measure microscopic movements at the upper bounds of possibility. In all our institutions, we hold professionals responsible for making at least microscopic, asymptotic movements into the gap towards those distant expectations. And then we get angry because those movements are only microscopic (which they were always going to be)--but we get angry at the people measured, not at the people who've sold the latest fad product. Usually that's because those people have already rebranded like those shanzai sellers on Amazon who have random names for imitation products. They're on to selling the next miracle cure already by the time managers and publics get mad that money was spent and still we're not anywhere near our expectations. Principals get fired, teachers get shuffled, political appointees get replaced, and we never have to collectively rethink what we believe we're entitled to receive from public institutions, or what we believe an organization can actually accomplish.
Thanks for bringing to the attention of your readers the nature of the clothing the king is wearing while walking in the parade.