My previous post seemed to ignite a small controversy over whether smart phones were the principal cause of the growing problem of students who seem unable/unwilling to learn and/or think/work hard.

That controversy illustrates a longstanding problem with human beings, what I’d call the reliance on single-factor analysis – the attribution of the cause of something to a single factor. Over the years, I’ve observed that most outcomes – good or bad – are based on more than one factor.

In the case of students, there are more factors in play than smart phones, including the parental background, the genetic background, the educational system, the local environment, and social media, just for starters.

Admittedly, smart phones enable social media and create isolation while amplifying the impact of negative social pressures (bullying) and increasing distractibility.

Then there’s the impact of an educational system which increasingly focuses on teaching to the test (usually multiple choice) rather than on analytical thought. Also, the use of computers has lessened reliance on memory-based mathematical skills, which has weakened the ability of many students to accurately estimate quantities, make change, or mentally project future trends with any degree of overall accuracy.

There’s also ever-increasing parental pressure on teachers not to criticize students for bad behavior or poor educational performance.

The increasing reliance of some parents on technology as a babysitter also reinforces the idea that everything, including education, should be entertaining and easy.

This tendency to limit causal factors goes beyond education. As a naval aviator, I came to realize that aircraft disasters almost always involved multiple factors, and that was the reason behind standardizing procedures based on experience, i.e., to limit contributing factors and thus reduce multiple-cause incidents or accidents.

The ATR 72 crash in Brazil last week is a good example. The ATR has a good overall safety record, but the aircraft has some weaknesses, as do many aircraft. Its de-icing equipment can be overloaded in extreme icing conditions, and this has led to at least several fatal crashes. The aircraft was also close to its load limit, according to early reports, because a number of passengers were denied boarding, even though the aircraft was certified to carry more passengers than were aboard.

The Brazilian pilots knowingly flew into extreme icing conditions with a fully-loaded aircraft, then went into a flat spin, and crashed. While the exact causes haven’t been firmly established, what we do know suggests that the pilot(s) were either unaware of the danger of icing with that aircraft or chose to proceed anyway and could not recover from what appeared from the video to be a stall/flat spin. Prior to the crash, there was no evidence that the pilots attempted to descend or otherwise avoid the icing conditions.

Obviously, multiple factors led to the crash, and that’s usually the case with most disasters, including students who cannot or will not learn.

In another week or so, my wife the professor will return to work full-time, and she’ll be faced with the often blank faces of students who are or who think they want to be voice majors, either as teachers or performers. Of course, what few of them comprehend is that all successful voice major graduates will end up both performing and teaching. The only question is what percentage of their careers is spent performing and what percentage is spent teaching.

Unfortunately, despite “good grades” and standardized test scores, far too many of the students she teaches:

Cannot or will not read, especially textbooks, unless forced, and often not then.
Have great difficulty concentrating enough to be able to listen.
Have great difficulty actually thinking.
Expect to be spoon-fed knowledge rather than actually learning it.
Want everything in education to be interesting and entertaining.
Don’t have the faintest idea of how to work intellectually or vocally.

The students with these difficulties also generally are wed to their cellphones.

Students like these used to be a small minority, but every year for roughly the last fifteen years, the percentage of students with these difficulties has increased. These are not stupid young people. They just haven’t developed the skills of reading, writing, listening, concentrating, problem-solving, and working hard, and by the time they reach college it’s too late for most of them to do so.

And they wonder why they’re struggling, and often blame their difficulties on their professors, the school, and/or their classmates. Some go into deep depressions. Some drop out, and some muddle through, and the university categorizes them as successful graduates.

The other day I got to thinking about family… as I suppose many people do when they get to my age. So far as I know, we don’t have any famous or greatly distinguished forebears. Slightly distinguished perhaps, by my paternal grandfather, a mining engineer who essentially founded the U.S. potash industry (twice) and sold it for a comparative pittance…and my uncle, a largely commercial artist who died young but whose work adorned such products as Coca Cola and Uncle Ben’s rice, or my father, an attorney, whose unseen legal efforts partly shaped U.S. antitrust law.

Needless to say, my father hoped I’d become an attorney, while my paternal grandfather, a doctor and noted surgeon, married to a nurse, urged me toward medicine.

After my tours as a Naval aviator, I got accepted to law school and then decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer – but after failing as an industrial economist and real estate agent, I ended up spending almost twenty years in politics – all of it in positions usually held by attorneys, writing on the side, at least partly to keep my sanity.

Among my immediate family, and aunts, uncles, and cousins, there are doctors, lawyers (of course), engineers, and business types, but the profession most represented is that of teachers, thirteen of them, ranging from primary school teachers through graduate school university professors. And, among them are two of my three wives, one a secondary school teacher/counselor, and one still a university professor. Also, in transitioning from politics to writing full-time, I spent three years as a college lecturer in English and writing, where the university actually let me teach a course in science fiction and fantasy.

And you wonder why I have to curb my desire to lecture?

As I’m certain, many of my readers already know about J.D. Vance’s comments about the Democratic Party’s leadership consisting of “childless cat ladies” and his insistence that people who aren’t parents have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

Vance, of course, is free to state his opinions, but like too many on the extremes of the left and right, particularly the far right, he seems to have difficulty in understanding that his opinions aren’t facts.

How many thousands of young men and women in the armed services died for their country before they could have children, an example typified by Nathan Hale, executed by the British, and memorialized by the line, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Hale and all the other thousands of childless members of the armed services who died in the line of duty sacrificed their lives for their country despite having no children.

As for being great Americans without biological children, how about starting with George Washington, who was “only” a stepfather to Martha’s son and daughter?

Or how about Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, the Wright brothers, Dr. Suess (Theodor Geisel), Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Helen Keller, Tennessee Williams, Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin, Sally Ride, Julia Child, Dolly Parton, Henry David Thoreau… and this is just a sampling of “childless” Americans who have made physical and intellectual commitments to the country.

And, by the way, three other U.S. Presidents had no biological children — James Polk, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan… and certainly Jackson and Polk acted in ways very much committed to the future of the United States.

But then, like Trump, Vance too often believes that what he says are facts, rather than looking to see if what he believes actually has a factual basis.

Decades ago, in school, I had to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book about middle-school-age boys marooned on an island, and how all the social norms quickly disintegrate into unvarnished cruelty in the absence of adult supervision.

I found the book all-too-true-to-life then, and recent revelations in social media suggest that the nature of “pre-adults” hasn’t changed much from what Golding perceived, if in a different context, that context being social media, where “adult” supervision is sadly lacking.

A recent New York Times story revealed how “seventh and eighth graders in a Pennsylvania town set up fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers and shared disparaging, lewd, racist and homophobic videos.” Investigations revealed that roughly a quarter of the school’s faculty discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. In addition, students created 22 fictitious TikTok accounts impersonating teachers at the middle school. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed, or commented on the fraudulent accounts.

The only disciplinary action was the brief suspension of several students and a lecture to an eighth grade class. Most interestingly, few of the perpetrators exhibited any remorse for their actions.

Not only has social media helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some children and teenagers to weaponize them against adults, but it’s also fostered an attitude that destroying reputations, bullying other users, and attacking others with falsehoods is acceptable. Teen suicides have increased by more than 60% since 2007 and continue to rise with the growth in social media use.

Currently, social media linked suicides are primarily in the 10-25 age group, but what will happen when older individuals are increasingly targeted and their reputations savaged anonymously? And with the increase and technical sophistication of “deepfakes,” how long before no one will be able to verify the difference between real and fake – and what happens in an increasingly “online” world, when no one can trust anything or anyone?