Gen Z has a case of long Covid — and society is enabling it.
It’s been five years since the pandemic, but schools are continuing to let sub-par performance fly, as test-optional policies drag on, grade inflation soars and student skills slump. Meanwhile, learning disability and mental health diagnoses are soaring.
When will we stop coddling teens and victimizing them in the name of pandemic woes?
Lockdown was an undeniably difficult time for kids. But too many have been given potentially lifelong diagnoses of anxiety and depression, or have been told their learning losses are due to disabilities rather than circumstances. It’s all disempowering.
In the UK, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is launching an independent review into the rising demand for mental-health services — as Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday that young people have been written off as “too ill to work.”
In the wake of the pandemic, kids in the West keep being told that there’s something wrong with their minds when their issues might have been temporary and best left behind with N-95 masks.
Instead, we’ve lowered academic and societal expectations, creating a persistent arrested development.
A recent report from The University of California San Diego found that, over the past five years, there’s been a 30-fold increase in enrolled students who can’t do fundamental high-school math. It’s no surprise, considering high schools are handing out good grades right and left and colleges are still refusing to require SAT or ACT scores.
The report, published by UCSD’s Workgroup on Admissions, found a staggering 900 students — 1 out of every 8 first-years — couldn’t meet high-school benchmarks for math. Worse yet, 1 in 12 couldn’t do middle school math.
“The picture is truly troubling,” the group wrote. “The problem is serious and demands an immediate institutional response.”
It’s going all the way up to the top. Harvard, our nation’s most selective university, unveiled a remedial math class for freshmen arriving on campus without “foundational skills” in 2024.
It was the predictable result of an ongoing refusal to reinstate SAT and ACT scores — which Harvard only reversed for the class of 2029, after the evidence that the tests were a good predictor of success on campus became totally irrefutable.
And yet, there are still 2,000-plus schools that are test-optional or test free in 2025 — including heavy hitters like Duke University, Columbia University, and Vanderbilt University.
Why are we still treating teens like we’re in the middle of an international emergency, and like they can’t take the tests that generations of adults before them did? The message is “yes, you can’t.”
Stop coddling kids by telling them they have a problem.
Stop sending the message that they actually can’t overcome the hangover of lockdown.
Stop saddling them with lifelong mental health diagnoses that imply that the sadness of Covid will never cease.
Prior generations overcame war and disease and financial depressions. Gen Z can do it, too.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
