School has stopped being a safe space to learn how to socialize through failure and it probably explains a lot of young peoples’ peculiar social habits.
Observation is limited to the anglosphere in particular. I’ve met lots of foreigners in my life and their social skills even among our age group tend to be much better than those of Gen Z from NA and other english speaking countries.
I’m not really sure where the entry point is for tackling this but it has been on my mind for years. I think it is a variety of things. Schools are afraid to intervene in and adjudicate long-standing altercations between students for fear of being sued when they inevitably pick a winner and loser, so they just let kids torment and alienate each other in bizarre ways that teach bad social lessons and don’t carry over into the real world. Social media made it extra hard to forget awkward and cringey moments which are inevitable as a child; it actually made it easier to weaponize these things. I think both social media and the failure of schools to intervene in bullying have also created an environment where not only kids bully each other more easily but now bonding over this behavior is a default social behavior.
Once a group of kids picks a target and they establish that they can have fun with that target they’ll come back to do it over and over again and doing so will renew the bond among the kids doing it. The weird thing that I think prior generations fail to grasp is that the people who perform the bullying aren’t traditional “bullies” in the sense that they are standalone individuals who have an unusual proclivity for sadism; instead it’s normal students who know that the social hierarchy requires them to participate in alienating weaker kids because it could otherwise happen to them. In other words it is a normal social activity in schools. The consequence is that many kids learn socialization primarily as a process of identifying who belongs and who does not. They become adept at reading group consensus and enforcing it, but they never develop much practice interacting with people outside of it.
But once you take these kids out of school and place them in the real world and they don’t have their circlejerk to back them up when they see behavior that they think is cringe, they realize that they actually have no clue how to socialize with people that they would have alienated in school.
As a result you have an entire generation of young people entering the real world with a completely distorted model of social competence. The skill being rewarded is not connecting with different kinds of people; it’s identifying who the group has already decided is acceptable and who can safely be ostracized for fun or social gain. Then when the institutional environment disappears, that skill turns out to be much less useful than they thought.