“We fail students by indulging their fragilities” - Libby Purves in the Times

[CruCru]

I read this thing by Libby Purves in the Times: [[We fail students by indulging their fragilities

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5dbf29f2-857e-41ce-8c78-028a513ab8f9?shareToken=c41320dec7bfb802e039b5c8bc3b513f

I found it very interesting. “Whatever the failings of postwar stiffness - it had plenty - at least that generation was more prepared than most modern children for the shocking fact that once education’s over, the wide world really doesn’t care about your feelings. Rules and systems should prevent bullying, but preserving your comfort zone is of interest only to parents and faithful friends. As far as everyone else is concerned, it’s up to you to be useful.”

I remember at work being taken aback at how much harder work some of the new graduates were than when I started. I wonder, though, if part of that was that they’d had to do so much more to get the job. My A levels were respectable but my old university wouldn’t give me a place these days. So much is expected of young people.

@Fairyliz I totally agree. Some of what is getting called neurodiversity is just normal difference between people.
Anxiety, sadness, feeling overwhelmed are normal emotions. Disability is when these are outside the normal range and not due to external events. For example if your child has just suddenly died in an accident, your level of all of those emotions is going to be enormous, but that is also a normal reaction. You need support and help, but it is not a disability.
Neurodiversity does exist, but is now being used in such a way to make the term meaningless.
Dyslexia has long been recognised as a meaningless term as it is an umbrella term for a range of very different literacy difficulties, some of which have a major impact on peoples ability to study and hold down a job and some which have little or no impact once the person has mastered literacy.

And misophonic in itself is very very common and is not automatically a disability. Loads of people can't stand certain sounds. It becomes a disability when people can't manage normal situations. Eastenders did a good illustration of its impact with Jean who has bipolar and in a manic phase was totally overwhelmed with normal sounds in a cafe and had to rush out. The programme showed an illustration of what she experienced.

Dyslexia has long been recognised as a meaningless term as it is an umbrella term for a range of very different literacy difficulties, some of which have a major impact on peoples ability to study and hold down a job and some which have little or no impact once the person has mastered literacy

That is such crap

It really sin't. Talk to anyone who is an expert on dyslexia, it encompasses a wide range of literacy issues which have a range of impacts. The experts I have spoken to have said that it really should be broken down into more specific literacy issues.

To be clear I am not saying dyslexia does not exist, it does as an umbrella term and the literacy issues are real. But in reality the literacy issues under the umbrella term are very different and should be broken down into more specific terms. This is why people with dyslexia difficulties can be widely different.

I don't agree with her.

Secondary school is nothing like the rest of your life thank god, and work is nowhere near as harsh as school.

Most secondary schools today prepare children for nothing but going to prison.

At work I have been taken aback by how very good, hard working and competent young people are. Gen Z in particular are fabulous.

It's right that appropriate adjustments are made for those who need it.

It's also right to question a growing culture of individualism and self-obsessed navel gazing where some people feel entitled to demand the world caters to their minor fragilities and preferences.

I did a course as a mature student and one recent graduate was very full of what they felt entitled to. It was all back to front in my opinion.

Instead of taking a reasonable approach such as "I've got a disability and with support from disability services we're going to discuss reasonable adjustments for specific assignments", their outlook was to look at the content and assessments, then decide what they wanted to do, what they didn't and then tell the academic tutors and module coordinators how THEY felt the module should be assessed for them because (to paraphrase) "you can't make me".

To this day I'm not sure if/how this person will manage in a workplace because very few workplace will allow random workers to decide if and when they're going to work, if they're going to come to meetings or not, dictate to the managers what work they'll consider doing and I what time frame.

It might be getting worse but it isn't new though. I knew someone when I first went to university who had a similar outlook. They were exhausting to be around and are still existing in a state of permanent victimhood.

It's also right to question a growing culture of individualism and self-obsessed navel gazing where some people feel entitled to demand the world caters to their minor fragilities and preferences.

You could be describing the generation who were teenagers in the 1960s.

What I find strange about this is that I know far more teenagers with part time jobs than I did when I was that age myself. To some extent this might not be typical but it’s surely the case that with the move away from student grants most graduates starting graduate jobs will already have worked at some point doing waitressing or bar or barista work or something else minimum wage while studying. So who are all these graduate starters who think the workplace should revolve around them? Are they the minority of well off students who haven’t already worked?

To me it reads a bit like:

• MY child has a genuine medical need.
• YOUR child needs some extra help.
• THEIR child is a feeble snowflake who needs a dose of reality.

plus I would disagree that employers don’t care about mental health - that is not my current experience at all, but recognise this might not be universal.

I think the stats are 25% of us in every year on average have a mental health problem - that’s 25% of employees every year as well, causing a lot of sick absence.

Yes, this!

I always thought this article on dyslexia was interesting wrt middle classes vs the rest and the battle for funding.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/17/battle-over-dyslexia-warwickshire-staffordshire

I think both can be true at once - there are more genuine mental health diagnoses being made, which is genuinely very helpful for many people who suffered in silence before, but we are ALSO failing to teach people to build resilience (as in, life will not always go our way and that's okay) which is an active skill that will help them day to day.

My sister has a whole slew of mental health diagnoses that mean she struggles with life, severe anxiety being one of them. Until recently she had very little emotional resilience too, because she never learned to keep her emotions in check. Her general world view was that everybody was out to get her, and whenever things weren't perfectly going her way it was incredibly unfair. (Which was very draining on the people around her).

Recently though, she's started to work on learning to build emotional resilience, and has found her day to day happiness significantly improved because of it. I wish we could have found a way to point this out to her earlier, without her taking offence, as her life is better for it.

I assume your son eats food? Do you think farmers work 4 days a week, at the hours of their choosing?

I assume your son requires electricity and broadband/wifi for his gaming? And he won't mind if it goes off for hours/days because the engineer who has to fix the cabling finds the job a bit stressful today?

It's all very well being flexible for vague admin office jobs, but society needs a number of reliable people in various core jobs in order to function. As we saw in lockdown, where middle class office workers remarked on how lovely and relaxing WFH was, all facilitied by supermarket shelf stackers, delivery drivers, tradies etc.

My first job was teaching English abroad, after a month's training. Standing in front of that class of expectant faces for my first lesson was genuinely terrifying. I'm glad I did something intense and challenging so young though, as office jobs since then have been easy.

People working in education and healthcare are not in need of more resilience. They need for there to be a radical overhaul of working conditions.

I think there are way more problems in the design of jobs in the UK than problems with the young people entering the workplace. Not to mention the low pay and lack of social mobility. And of course the lack of housing that no political party is ever motivated to address.

I don't think that shipping in people from poorer countries to work on low wages in undesirable jobs is the right answer.

You could be describing the generation who were teenagers in the 1960s
Every generation is viewed as having some annoying behaviour by the generation before it. What matters is how we respond to it as the adults at the time and it doesn't mean it's wrong to guard against excessive navel gazing and self-absorption though.

Every generation before us probably had children saying "but muuuuum, daaaad, EVERYONE ELSE is doing it / has the item / is going to the cool event" or "but we're not like the other kids, we're different and special" tribes. Most generations have some form of trend or way of making themselves different from the grownups, usually through music and subcultures.

I don't think in the early 00s teachers, parents and schools were appointing themselves in charge of validating the individual uniqueness of every emo teen and ensuring the emo teens all knew they were special and unique, and shall we redesign the GCSE/A Level/College course so you don't have to encounter things you don't like.

I also think that the "bring your whole self to school/college/university/work" is doing a disservice to young people though. It also seems to go hand in hand with a growing sense that some parents have where their job is to ensure their children are happy at all times and are fulfilled at all times, rather than it's a parents' job to love and care for a child and raise them to be functioning adults who are capable of creating their own happiness and fulfilment. I think this isn't a problem or trend from teens and young adults, I think it's a pattern of behaviour that's caused by adults.

There is no duty or loyalty between employers and employees any more. Employees will walk out the moment a better gig comes along, and employers will lay you off the moment the share price hiccups or a robot can do your job slightly cheaper (not better, just cheaper). At the moment the job market is very much in employees' favour, so employers need to bend over backwards to accommodate young people's demands if they want actual workers. And just paying more doesn't work these days - it needs to be a full benefits package, flexi working, leaves of absence, the works. In many industries you simply won't get any decent applicants otherwise.

@Rouleur Employers started that change first. In some industries if you got a job, you used to have a job for life unless you did something awful. Then it changed and it was all about having the most efficient employees, we should be glad we had jobs at all, and if your performance is not so good this year we will get rid of you.
Employees reacted by realising their loyalty meant nothing and they were disposable. So the logical thing to do is have zero loyalty back. I feel no sense of loyalty or duty to my employer at all. I know they would get rid of me quickly if it suited them.

Potentially controversial but I realised how much I matured when I became a parent. Stuff that used to worry me no longer did and I became more ambitious. People had children a lot younger in older generations, it forces you to grow up, take responsibility and get on with stuff. Could this be a contributing factor? I'm by no means saying that people without children aren't mature but I certainly think having children can make some people more resilient.

But he’s not in one of those roles.

He chose a job for him.

Most of what you talk about will be done by robots eventually anyway.

I run a company and hired someone straight out of uni for the first time last year. Within the first 2 months she went totally incognito for a whole 2 weeks (no reply to emails/calls etc) before finally coming back online saying "sorry I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and needed some time out". Totally casual about it like it was no big deal. I couldn't believe it! Suffice to say she didn't last the probation period.

I know I shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush but it's made me really wary of hiring anyone else of a similar age.

Most of what you talk about will be done by robots eventually anyway.

Electrical engineers, shelf stackers and tradies are less likely to get replaced by robots than knowledge workers. With the advancement in AI it'll be much easier and cheaper to write a program to do a desk job than to build, install and maintain complex machinery.

Libby talks a lot of sense. We are at risk of medicalising completely normal things like feeling unhappy, nervous, overwhelmed etc. Not everything needs a "diagnosis". The big question is how we can go about encouraging greater resilience in the young, because they've learned these behaviours from somewhere...

WTF am I reading...why is so acceptable on MN to suggest that neurodiversity is not a real disability?

Young people today are under more pressure to succeed academically than ever before - that's why so many students need to seek a diagnosis today - failure is no longer an option.

No one is suggesting that neuro diversity is not a real disability.