“kids are so stupid these days, the ipad babies are ruining the world, ten year olds skip school and goes to sephora—“ do you have any idea what it’s been like to go to american public school within the last 15 years? can you blame a child for not wanting to spend 8 hours a day in a place where their safety and autonomy aren’t just not considered, but are blatantly denied?

mass shootings every day. funding being cut. school lunches— which were already the bare minimum in terms of nutrition— being removed. those alone would give anyone trauma, but even without those things the power structures inside of the average public school are designed to wring the individuality out of a child. (and that’s not even mentioning the way that neurodivergent kids are left out to dry by the school system, or how any marginalized kid can be tortured by their peers with no repercussions!) it’s designed to be miserable, and yet somehow people are surprised that kids don’t want to be there.

sandy hook happened in 2012, and nothing changed. uvalde ten years later, and still nothing. kids were forced back into overcrowded, unsanitary classrooms while covid was still killing thousands every day— most after having missed critical social development during lockdown, which there was no support for recovering from. children are being forced to see politicians debate the “ethics” of feeding them, letting them express their gender identity, allowing them to access accurate information about history as if their futures are just hypothetical. along with that is the social media boom, where marginalized people can create communities like never before, and those same kids are realizing that the systems they’ve been shoved into are broken. they’re being showed how awful the situation really is, and still completely powerless to change anything.

can you imagine having to go through all that and still pass your standardized fucking tests? my god, it’s a wonder that schools aren’t completely empty by now. we’re getting there though— i can’t count how many stories i’ve heard of kids dealing with truancy charges because of how many days of school they’ve “skipped” due to extreme anxiety or burnout. i’m one of them! i barely graduated in 2018, and the conditions were leagues better then!

people bitch about the “decline in intelligence” between generations, as if it’s the kids fault for the state of the world, as if this isn’t the inevitable conclusion for the public school system in this country. it feels deliberately ignorant— have you not watched the news recently? does it not evoke any empathy, does it not fill you with rage? how in the world could you pin the blame on kids here?

everyone says protect the children, and yet. fuckin sickening.