Why students no longer learn
It looks like a recent problem, but it should not be assumed it was caused recently. Some social symptoms we notice today took years to cultivate.
Education is a rigid institution, regulated by states around the world, bureaucratic in nature. It was born centuries ago to serve a function and that form stayed. Students, meanwhile, changed.
People today absorb information quickly. They also lose attention easily. They prefer to watch TikTok instead of a two-hour film; not because they are incapable of concentration, but because they live in an environment where there is too much information. Modern societies have mechanisms to communicate efficiently across distances, to process gigantic quantities of information. But that has a cost: we lose attention capacity gradually, not overnight.
The gap is simple: rigid education, fluid students. Modern psychological traits are not the ones from fifty years ago. A child's beliefs and values change constantly. Identities are flexible. Tastes and behaviors are too. What once was a predictable trajectory is now a menu assembled every day.
But classrooms still expect someone to sit for four hours straight listening to someone fire content at them, hoping something sticks. That worked when the only source of information was the person talking. Now it is ridiculous.
Pedagogy is the tool left to the teacher. It is not a minor tool: it is the opportunity to reach the attention of students, to arm itself against the gap. But it requires someone to see the abyss and decide to cross it, instead of calling students lazy and keep talking from this side of it.
The risk is that this disconnection gradually diminishes our intellectual capacities as a society.
In that sense, education is not an infrastructure of transmission. It is a space of resistance.
What should change is not the student. It is the relationship between education and culture. Inside classrooms, small and large social changes are potentiated — what looks specialized is where the capacity of the next decade is formed. If education surrenders to the gap, the next decade surrenders too.
- There are no valid fixed formulas when identities are flexible.
- Speed is not the enemy of depth — well directed, they can be the same thing.
- A classroom does not compete with TikTok. It competes with the attention that exists, which is finite.
- Pedagogy is not a branch of education — it is everything education can be.
The question that remains is whether we are ready to cross the abyss, or if we would rather stay on this side calling lazy those who already crossed.
También disponible en español: ¿Por qué los alumnos ya no aprenden?.