Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (2025)

For several years now, I have been wracking my brains to understand why more of my students don't seem to be very engaged - why are there so few who evince genuine curiosity, passion to learn and debate about the world? I talk about this with my colleagues; this year I started asking some of the curious students at my school what their explanations are. It's an issue that's often on my mind. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I found this book sitting on my coffee table - Stacy had come across it and ordered it for herself. The book turned out to be very interesting, and I plan to recommend it widely. My own explanation of student disengagement had revolved around two things: the pressure to achieve academically, which has only grown over the last 30 or 40 years and which I thought might be crowding out genuine interest; and - of course - the phones. This book isn't mainly concerned with the causes of the crisis (they do provide quantitative evidence of a disengagement crisis), but when they do they focus on the increased pressure to achieve. They see phones and tech, not as a cause, but as a response to previously existing disengagement. The book is engagingly written, fluently combining often-moving stories of individual teens, quantitative data, and relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies, which they explain quite well. Anderson and Winthrop helpfully distinguish between three kinds of disengagement: passenger mode (in which half of all students may be!); resister mode; and - surprisingly - achiever mode (in which praise and grades are the only motivators). Their ideal, by contrast, is explorer mode, in which students are driven by intrinsic motivation, are agents in their own learning, and are resilient, i.e. can handle setbacks. I appreciated many of the pieces of advice the authors give and hope to incorporate it in my teaching (and perhaps parenting, as well). There are some small bones I want to pick, though. The authors regularly emphasize the importance of teachers trying to engage students and make the material relevant to their lives and interests. But how can one do this with a class of 25 or 30 different students? And I wonder (frankly) how many students really have passionate interests? (In the book, almost all disengaged students had some deep passion, which seemed to me to be unrealistic.) Maybe I just don't know my students well enough....More fundamentally, isn't it possible to make things interesting without appealing to what students already care about? Obviously, some bridge has to be built to what they know, but.... Relatedly, Anderson and Winthrop repeatedly downplay the importance of knowledge transmission and elevate the importance of skills, learning how to learn, and what they call "transcendent thinking" - i.e. more abstract or reflective thinking, stepping away from the given to ask about causes and alternatives. They cite the progressive guru Paulo Freire admiringly. But somehow transcendent thinking only requires the time and space to daydream. (I'm being a little unfair.) Here's where E.D. Hirsch's emphasis on mastering knowledge can come in. Transcendent thinking requires more than just the chance to daydream (the brain's default or mindwandering mode), but the material to daydream with - i.e. knowledge, schemas, etc. The combination of new material and the option to pause and daydream/ruminate/reflect is precisely what Maryann Wolf (Reader Come Home) identifies as the secret to reading's transformative power. It's a mark of the quality of The Disengaged Teen that it so often won me over, even when some of its progressive tendencies rankled.