Before blaming doomscrolling, ask what school makes meaningful

Before blaming doomscrolling on what children are like, ask what their education has given them a reason to do. There is a philosophical choice underneath the familiar argument about screens: do we regard disengagement as an inevitable expression of human nature, or as something the educational arrangement itself may help produce? The answer changes what we think can be repaired. If the child is the whole problem, the institution gets to preserve its purposes while we search for better methods of controlling the child.

I think we accept that explanation too easily. A person whose day is filled with externally chosen work can have little opportunity to experience attention as something that advances their own purposes. The screen then offers escape from an arrangement in which interest makes almost no consequential decision. We should be willing to consider whether the desire to leave says something about the arrangement, rather than treat it only as evidence that the person cannot be trusted with freedom.

The competing explanations need to be distinguished because the first can make school look like a necessary restraint on an otherwise aimless child. Disorder, distraction and the desire to rebel become the qualities education must contain. The second asks whether a system organized around removing meaningful decisions has helped create the behavior it now claims to manage. More control might suppress the symptom while strengthening the relation that produced it.

Digital distractions can be powerful, and attention needs protection even when the work matters. A meaningful curriculum still leaves a child with an attractive screen and reasons to avoid a difficult moment. But removing the distraction does not create a purpose for what remains. A child can be physically present and still have no reason to care, which is why a successful rule about screens cannot establish that the educational problem has been solved.

Meaning concerns what the learner thinks the effort is for. An ambition, an unanswered question or the desire to become capable can give work a direction the child recognizes. There will still be difficult and repetitive parts, but they belong to an undertaking rather than an unexplained demand. We should ask whether the education supplies that relationship before assuming that sustained interest is an unrealistic expectation about human beings.

Agency makes the purpose actionable. The learner needs some opportunity to affect what they pursue, how they approach it and what happens when the first attempt fails. Being asked what you enjoy after every important decision has been made is not the same thing. The child's attention can become an investment in their own work only when their role in the work is more substantial than enduring it politely.

Homeschooling allows a family to bring meaning and agency into the ordinary structure of education. The interest can affect the curriculum rather than become a treat after it, and an explanation can change when it fails to reach the learner. That freedom does not eliminate the work of teaching. It makes the work answer to a different account of the person, one capable of developing purposes instead of merely needing containment.

A child whose attention has somewhere worthwhile to go has an alternative to escape, even when escape remains tempting. That is the possibility I want us to take seriously. We should not explain every disappointing result of education as proof of the limits of human nature while leaving education itself outside the inquiry. The institution is shaping part of the life from which the child is scrolling away, and it owes an account of what that life offers.