Should schools teach practical habits for managing social media’s effects on identity and well-being?

The people writing this curriculum do not live where the students do. Pew's teen surveys keep finding YouTube and TikTok at the top of what teenagers actually use, while the adults designing the lessons and the school boards approving them inhabit a different internet entirely. A unit built by people who learned about TikTok from a news segment will be outdated before it is printed and mocked the week it is taught. Teenagers can smell condescension about their platforms the way they smell a substitute teacher's fear. The habits worth building, like noticing when an app is engineered to keep you scrolling, are learned from peers and from experience, not from a worksheet. If schools want credibility here, they should hire the students to teach it. Pew