Learned Helplessness

Image by vodkaholic from Pixabay

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Everybody’s moaning about how kids today have terrible Mental-elf problems and they’re clearly soft and wet and of course Woke.

[By the way, can I just point out that Woke is the past tense of Awake and I have no idea why it’s a bad thing to be awake. The opposite of Woke is Slept, the past tense of Asleep. Slept is what all the anti-woke people clearly are, which is a problem because they’re supposed to be in charge of the country. But alas, they’re Slept.

There will be no Sleptery here.]

So what’s wrong with the youngsters?

I suspect that the 40% of young people who feel numb are actually in the grip of learned helplessness.

This is what happens when dogs are kept tied up and given an electric shock whenever they try to eat. After a bit, most of them stop trying and just lie there and take it. They give up.

Or when a baby elephant is put in heavy chains so he can’t move, and he tries and tries and then he gives up.

We do it to our children when we take all the joy out of learning and make them do tests in school that are hard and boring over and over again, until they give up.