(2019-02-24) Warner One Small Step To Address The Student Mental Health Crisis

John Warner: One Small Step to Address the Student Mental Health Crisis. Here’s two things that are not causing the incidence of anxiety and depression to increase among young people 1. Smartphones. 2. Helicopter parenting.

one dataset that showed, “the negative effect of wearing glasses on adolescent well-being is significantly higher than that of social media use.”

the Pew data shows that concerns about anxiety and depression span all income demographics

What is the proximate cause of all this anxiety and depression? School, money, their futures. Students live inside a culture of scarcity and precarity.

These teens almost universally express a desire for a future in which they have “a job or career they enjoy,” with 95% of them say this is “extremely or very important”to them.

In Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, I lay out how and why I believe privileging student choice and agency can help mitigate some of the toxic effects of schooling culture that privileges compliance, and subjects students to high stakes assessments and near constant surveillance

Here’s something that might help: a national minimum wage of $15.

When I matriculated to the University of Illinois in 1988, it took about five weeks of full-time minimum wage work in the state to pay a year’s tuition.

Even when the Illinois minimum wage rises by a dollar next January 1 to $9.25 per hour, it will take over 48 weeks of full-time minimum wage work in the state to pay a year’s tuition. Raising the minimum wage to $15 reduces that number to 30 weeks.