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

Before mandating a curriculum, read what the Surgeon General actually said. The 2023 advisory warned about risks but also acknowledged how much researchers still do not know, which is why it called for more study alongside its recommendations. Building a required course on an evidence base its own authors called incomplete means teaching certainties that do not exist yet, and teenagers are excellent at detecting when adults are bluffing. What happens in five years when the research overturns half the slides? The curriculum either calcifies into dogma or gets quietly rewritten, and either way the school has spent credibility it did not have to spend. Mandates should follow settled science, not precede it. Fund the research first, teach what it finds second. EdSource on the advisory