Why So Many Kids Dislike School Right Now

Key takeaways:

• Relationships are the strongest lever schools have. Feeling seen, respected and supported is foundational for engagement, especially for vulnerable students.

• Technology can amplify the problem. When AI and screens replace human interaction, challenge and meaning, engagement becomes easier to fake and harder to build.

• Engagement is not the same as compliance. A student can look attentive and still be disconnected from real learning.

• Relevance and challenge matter. Students engage when learning feels meaningful and pushes them to think deeply — not when it is easy or purely performative.

• Context shapes capacity. Stress, adversity and inequality affect attention and learning; when cognitive load is high enough, both engagement and motivation can falter.

My father was what we would now call a “high-risk kid.” His father died when he was a toddler, and his mother, left in poverty, sent him to be raised by his grandmother, who was struggling herself. Stability was not a given.

What he did have was one teacher who believed in him and his potential. She stayed in his life long after he left her classroom, writing letters through his military service, encouraging him through college on the GI Bill, and remaining a steady presence in his life well into adulthood. I remember reading a birthday letter she sent him when he was 65. She was elderly by then, but still present, still invested.

He always said the same thing: That teacher saw him and invested in him and it changed his trajectory. He went on to get a master’s degree and become a manager at a large company. (And a big education-enthusiast for his four kids).

My father’s experience illustrates what student engagement is, but it’s not the story many students would tell today.

What’s fueling students’ disinterest

Across classrooms, teachers and parents are confronting a harder truth: Students can go through the motions, do what they must to get by — even achieve — and still not be truly engaged. I hear the same thing from high achievers and struggling students alike: School is boring.

We’ve gotten better at producing work. It’s less clear we’re producing thinkers.

Researchers have been trying to define and measure student engagement for decades, and there is broad agreement on one point: it is essential to learning. A large meta-analysis found a consistent positive relationship between engagement and academic achievement across behavioral, emotional and cognitive domains.

Two decades and more than 158,000 students later, a sweeping 2024 review confirmed what educators have long suspected: Engaged students do better academically, and the type of engagement is a big deal. Students who show up and participate (behavioral engagement) tend to see the strongest academic gains, but how deeply they think about their work and how much they enjoy it also play meaningful roles.

Students can go through the motions, do what they must to get by — even achieve — and still not be truly engaged.

Engagement is a messy construct. It includes participation, interest, persistence, belonging and investment in learning. And different groups see it differently. Students, teachers and school leaders often disagree not only on how to measure engagement, but also on how to define it. Students are more likely to describe engagement as feeling interested and connected to what they are learning. Teachers tend to look for observable behaviors such as participation and attentiveness. School leaders often equate engagement with performance and outcomes.

Why it matters

This gap matters. When educators rely on visible behaviors alone, they can miss students who are invested but may be shy, anxious or not culturally inclined to speak up. And when systems equate engagement with performance, they risk reinforcing compliance over curiosity.

This creates a problem. Schools can end up measuring what is easiest to see — attention, participation, assignment completion — and miss what matters most: whether a student is intellectually and emotionally invested in learning.

In practice, engagement often gets conflated with compliance.

A student who is quiet, on-task and turning in work may look engaged. But that same student may be bored, disconnected or simply on autopilot. And now, with the rise of AI, the gap between appearance and reality is widening. Students can produce polished work with less cognitive effort, making it even harder to tell who is truly thinking and learning.

Research on engagement is clear

To understand engagement more clearly, it helps to look at what gets in the way.

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon has shown how strongly academic outcomes are tied to socioeconomic context. Zip code is not destiny, but it loads the dice. Students growing up with fewer resources and higher levels of stress are carrying a heavier cognitive and emotional burden into school.

When that stress includes big problems at home or violence in the neighborhood, the challenge is even more profound. The brain shifts toward vigilance and away from sustained attention, working memory and flexible thinking. Under those conditions, what looks like disengagement is often, essentially a capacity problem: Students are carrying such a heavy cognitive load that both focus and motivation are compromised.

Which makes this next finding especially important.

A large body of research shows that positive teacher-student relationships are associated with higher engagement, better achievement and stronger motivation, with the largest effects for students facing the greatest challenges.

In other words, the students who are hardest to reach are often the ones who benefit the most from a steady, respectful, attuned teacher.

In practice, engagement often gets conflated with compliance.

In my consulting role, I hear from teachers on a regular basis who contact families directly with concerns, problem-solve with parents and go out of their way to finesse student motivation. Often, they reach out to students in brief, personal moments. The teacher makes it clear: I see you; I care about your learning, and you belong here.

I confess, I am an inveterate cheerleader for the teachers out there who go the extra mile while constantly hearing repeatedly “that the system is broken.” Parts of it are, but teachers as a group are the most unsung heroes I know.

Online learning compounds the issue

There is another place where disengagement shows up starkly: online schooling. Disembodied schooling is like reading about swimming from the sidelines — plenty of information, no real immersion.

Online learning had its place during the pandemic, but the evidence suggests it came at a cost — drops in participation, weaker attention and uneven academic progress, especially for already vulnerable students. Yet, many districts have kept it as a permanent option. For students who are already struggling, it often delivers exactly what they asked for and little of what they need: less accountability, fewer relationships and minimal cognitive stretch.

In practice, the camera is often off, interaction is thin and effort is easy to dial down. The very experiences that build engagement — being known, being challenged and feeling part of a learning community — are harder to create through a screen. For some students, online schooling becomes not a bridge to learning, but an exit from it.

Learning is personal

The importance of the teacher-student relationship figured prominently in a lecture I attended years ago given by Bill Gates. He was reporting findings from his early investments in educational research. He was surprised by what the data showed, because he had expected structural levers like class size to drive outcomes. They didn’t, at least not in the way he anticipated.

According to Gates, the strongest predictors of school success were three things: rigor, relevance and relationships with teachers.

It’s a simple framework, but it shifts the focus from structures to experiences. Not just how school is organized, but how it feels to be known by a teacher, have your curiosity sparked and learn in a classroom setting.

What’s striking is how closely that aligns with what students themselves say about their school experience, whether in formal studies or even in informal forums. They engage when teachers treat them with respect, when the material feels meaningful and when they are actively involved in the learning process.

If we misunderstand engagement as what students produce, AI will amplify the problem.

An English professor and friend of mine at the University of Washington recently gave her students what she described as a “wild” in-class assignment. In groups, she asked them to connect the concept of a lighthouse to vulnerability using art, words, acting, singing, even math.

It required them to take intellectual risks, collaborate and think on their feet rather than passively absorb information. The room shifted. Students were animated — arguing, laughing, building on each other’s ideas.

No one was asking, “Is this on the test?”

That’s engagement: active participation, emotional investment and real cognitive effort. Students were using imagination and creativity, building something together through human connection, and even having fun. Positive emotion fuels learning.

Not all students experience school this way. One high school senior put it bluntly: “School is just brain rot. They don’t expect you to learn anything. They just want you to intake and regurgitate information. There’s nothing thought-provoking.”

That gap, between compliance and true engagement, is the problem.

And it is not one that AI can fix.

The adverse impact of AI

AI can support learning. It can explain concepts, generate practice problems and provide feedback. But it can also make disengagement easier to hide. When output becomes the focus, students can produce work without deep thinking.

And there is a broader concern. As educational researcher Jared Horvath and others have argued, the more we rely on technology as the primary delivery system for teaching, the more we risk weakening the very conditions that support deep learning. Add AI to that mix and the danger grows. If screens replace human interaction, challenge and meaning, we are not enhancing engagement; we are eroding it.

If we misunderstand engagement as what students produce, AI will amplify the problem.

If we understand engagement as something built in relationships, shaped by relevance and strengthened by intellectual challenge, AI can be a useful tool.

But it cannot replace the core ingredients.

Rigor matters because students want to be challenged. Relevance matters because students want to see themselves in what they are learning. Relationships matter because they make learning feel safe enough to try, fail and try again.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Engagement also grows when students are invited to use their imagination, to create, to wonder, and to connect ideas in ways that feel vivid and meaningful. It grows when classrooms reflect humanistic values, curiosity, respect, ethics and purpose. And it deepens when students feel a genuine sense of belonging, not as a program, but as a daily experience of being known and valued.

When those elements come together, the classroom comes alive. Students are not just compliant. They are invested. They are thinking. They are creating. They are becoming.

In a world that feels increasingly fast, filtered and uncertain, what students need most in school is something surprisingly simple: a place where they feel connected enough to engage, secure enough to take risks and inspired enough to grow into who they can be.