that's a large aspect of it, certainly. they have vague notions that they need to have some amount of educational attainment to make enough money to live comfortably, but this is not really connected to a lived motivation to actually build the skill of learning. and i think there's also a less discussed aspect where the broad bulk of the social current have their attentions and desires being moved between different very totalizing media. they do not engage with the world in such a way that learning is a skill worth honing. in fact, i think they've become rather divorced from being able to think about developing skills in general. in other words, if kids never really see anything put in front of them that suggests reading is useful and seeking knowledge is good, they won't have any motivation to that effect. our entire educational designs in the modern era are fundamentally structured entirely around the notion that this motivation already exists within the student, and that they simply require a guiding hand to keep them focused on the task.

A promise of a secure future does seem to be a reasonable prerequisite before asking someone to make a long term investment

In educating the masses you will only teach them how bad a deal they have gotten and what steps may be taken to rectify it. They are more malleable and pacifiable stewing in their own ignorance. Decreasing education grows the lumpenproletariat.

couldn't put it better myself.

These kids have no future.

that said, i agree with the general truth of this paragraph, and the literal truth of "nobody cares about anything," but it is also very much the case that the kids are wholly unaware of this future. their nihilism is actively caught up in the conscious consumption of food and media, somewhere around 1/3 of them simply refuse to stop listening to music in at least one ear during classes. they are very much living in a "dead flag blues" reality without realizing the lumpenproletarianization they are undergoing precisely by their having no drives or interests beyond what they can see and hear and smell that are in any sense animating.

I think the problem is much more fundamental, schools are essentially abusive and hostile to (many) students. One of their core missions is to sort students, selecting some of them for higher education and others for precarity. This necessitates institutional bullying, which I have witnessed plenty of while at school. Naturally many students will react with being unmotivated and hostile, it's an abusive situation. I swear if some aunt or uncle treated the children like some of the shit I've seen in my schools days, most parents would forbid them from having any contact.

i'm very sympathetic to this analysis because it correctly describes the basic structures of the system as a whole. it's institutionalization, students understand that they're performing for grades and exam scores, etc. etc. and it was bound to arrive at proceeding generations that simply start not to even care about that. the discipline and punish analysis as applied to the school is correct; i just think that it is incomplete. i think it lacks the ability to explain the success of, for example, chinese education when it is to a fault predicated on producing an objective meritocratic sort of students to determine who gets the best higher education. the model of education exists in an entirely different cultural context, within which what outwardly appears to be a similar educational medium is quite different. i think it's unlikely the case that the differences just in the scheduling structure of chinese education, teacher temperament, and curricula could explain their system being fundamentally compatible with and similar to the western european educational model that terminates at western-style university education and yet achieving different results. surely if it were so completely different as to achieve such better results it wouldn't be able to do so in a manner that is still compatible with the western academic structure. and yet, the educational outcomes are much stronger. in other words, i think the chinese education system is structurally quite similar to that in the united states, should therefore be just as abusive, and yet has not produced an increasingly ill-educated, propagandized, lumpenproletarianized society as the u.s. has. therefore, i don't think that institutionalization is as fundamental as the society that encompasses the education system. and ours let's corporations eat the children in any way they can get away with. last week i worked with a student that was using kalshi to bet on tennis during class, and that was an AP calculus student, so not one of the ones in this group of failing math students. even the more education-curious ones are often already investing themselves in attempting to become oppressors.

Have you found any approach that helps improve this?

well i think if we all really committed to a "don't shoot the dog" inspired behavioral approach we could successfully train them to perform the process of learning with sufficient diligence for long enough that it becomes self-reinforcing, but that's an awful lot to tackle twice a week or to get curmudgeonly educators to even understand the concept of.