Strange that it doesn’t though, right? And although the shootings get far more attention, students aged 15 and older are far more likely to take their own lives than be killed by another classmate. Psychologist Peter Gray writes in a recent FEE article that these suicides also correlate with the school calendar as well. Gray writes:
“Collin Lueck and his colleagues (2015) examined the rate of psychiatric visits for danger to self or others at a large pediatric emergency mental health department in Los Angeles on a week-by-week basis for the years 2009-2012. They found that the rate of such visits in weeks when school was in session was 118% greater than in weeks when school wasn’t in session. In other words, the rate of emergency psychiatric visits was more than twice as high during school weeks as it was during non-school weeks. It’s interesting to note that the sharp decline in such emergencies occurred not just during summer vacation, but also during school vacation weeks over the rest of the year.
The researchers also found a continuous increase in the rate of psychiatric emergencies during school weeks, but not during vacation weeks, over the 4-year period of the study. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that the increase in suicidal ideation and attempts over time is the result of the increased stressfulness of school over this time period and not to some factor that is also present during the summer. In another, more recent study, Gregory Plemmons and his colleagues (2018), found that the rate of hospitalization of school-aged children for suicidal ideation and attempts increased dramatically—by nearly 300%—over the seven years of their study, from 2008 to 2015, and each year the rate of such hospitalizations was significantly higher in the school months than in the summer.”
Gray later goes on to state that, according to an extension study conducted by the American Psychological Association, American teenagers are the most stressed, anxious age group in the country. This is not how education should be approached. Why good is it bringing, not only the students, but the nation as a whole? It seems to me that there is a collective anxiety on the part of the older generations about the future of this country, and that anxiety is manifesting in intense pressure being put on the young to somehow fix the problems that those older generations created. Debt, war, regulation, and economic distortion through central bank money creation, all this exploded during the past 40 years. But times were relatively good, so no one cared enough to attempt to stop it. Now that Uncle Sam’s checks are bouncing, reality is settling in. And that anxiety is now being exploited by the architects of the punishing regime of public schooling that is driving kids to suicide. The irony is that this type of ‘mental anguish’ being inflicted on the nation’s children will make it far less likely that they will grow up to be the miracle-workers the Boomers hope and pray they will be.
The solution to the problem of schooling appears to be cutting most students loose by age 13 and allowing them to work actual jobs, where they’ll learn actual skills rather than forcing them through another five years of mental and emotional torture that might drive some of them to commit atrocities, or kill themselves. Another solution would be to get rid of the unnecessary “social studies” fluff that does nothing more than push a certain political ideology onto young minds.
