Why Students Fear the Real World?

Building off of the ideas talked about in my article about how narrow student worlds have become and why their bedroom has essentially become their all room—where they eat, where they socialize, their entire world reduced to a few feet—I have continued to think on this over the last several weeks and began to realize that this might be partly responsible for something else I have noticed in my students over the last few years: a fear of the real. That might seem strange to some people reading this—why would somebody be afraid of real things? But when everything you have ever known, your entire world, has been school, shopping with parents, or your bedroom—and everything important in your world has been digital, simulated, texted, or TikToked—then the concept of interacting with the real world can actually be frightening. Partly for its novelty, and partly for the standard human fear of the unknown.

The all room is not just a bedroom anymore. It has quietly become the place where students eat, sleep, socialize, relax, and escape. It is their entertainment center, their social hub, their classroom extension, and in many ways their emotional refuge. It is where friendships are maintained through screens, where experiences are consumed rather than lived, and where the outside world is filtered down into something safe, curated, and controllable. When a student’s entire life can be accessed within a few feet—within a single room—the need to step outside of it begins to diminish, and with that, so does their familiarity with anything beyond it. And as we saw in the earlier “home is where the heart is” writing assignment, when asked where they feel most at home, most students did not name a place in the world—they named that room. That alone should give us pause.

Nowhere was this better exemplified than when our school has taken our students on their yearly field trip to the aircraft carrier. Whenever we announce to our students what the field trip is and where we are going, there is always a mixture in the class. Some students are very excited. Some students will openly state that they intend to be absent that day so they do not have to go, and every year I literally have to call parents to convince them to make sure that their child shows up, turns in the permission slip, and attend the field trip.  And even those who say they are excited will often also say how nervous they are—but that they are not going to let that nervousness stop them from doing something they know will be fun. 

For years, I assumed this was just normal excitement and pre-trip jitters that everyone gets. But now, on reflection, I am wondering if this is part of a wider problem—students becoming anxious when they are going to be taken someplace outside of their all room.

Someplace not of their videos, not in their video games, requiring in-person social interaction, strict following of safety rules and protocols—in short, something real. Something fun, but something that also comes with a level of personal responsibility, both for their own safety and for the experience of others around them. 

And of course, the announcement and safety briefing is always followed by the most popular question I get every single year—often multiple times in the same class:

Q: “Is the ship going to sink?”

A: No, the ship will not sink. The Japanese tried to sink this ship in combat and failed—it is not going to sink docked in Charleston Harbor, where it has sat for decades.

Q: “Are we going to fall off the ship?”

A: Falling off the ship is like falling into the lion’s den at the zoo—it is possible, but only if you are actively trying to make it happen. It does not happen by accident.

And many other such questions that I have fielded for the better part of half an hour. The first time this happened, I thought the students were just being silly. But over the years, after hearing the same questions repeatedly from different students in different schools, I have come to understand that this is not silliness—it reflects something deeper. A genuine anxiety about interacting with something real, something unfamiliar, something outside of the controlled environment of their all room. They will be on a real ship—often for the first time. They will be on a piece of history. For many of them, it is the first time they have ever been to a museum or participated in an extracurricular educational experience of that kind. It requires them to drive over bridges—which, living near Charleston, I once assumed every student had experienced. That was a very incorrect assumption, The fact is that most my students despite living less than a dozen miles away from Charleston have never actually been to Charleston, their worlds are shrunken and tiny. The field trips of the last few years have made it abundantly clear that when students have not experienced real things, there are many new things to be afraid of. Over the years, I have seen students experience a wide range of fears, including but not limited to: fear of crossing bridges, fear of being over open water, fear of heights, fear of walking down gangways, fear of climbing and descending ladders, claustrophobia, fear of machinery, fear of water, fear of crowded spaces, and so on. It may sound extreme, but the reality is that many of these students have never had a truly authentic experience outside of their family unit or school setting. So when they are finally placed into one, it is both exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. And yet, by the end of the trip, nearly every single one of them cannot stop talking about how amazing it was.

That, more than anything, gives me hope. While students may live in their all rooms and spend much of their time on their phones, experiences like this briefly open a window into a wider world. Something beyond the all room. And while that first encounter with reality may be intimidating, it is also deeply impactful. Years later, students still talk about that one trip—to an aircraft carrier in Charleston Harbor. Because for many of them, it was the first time they experienced something real. The yearly trip has now become, for me, an important learning experience—not just for what we learn about social studies or marine environments, but for something far more foundational. It is an opportunity for students to see, many of them for the very first time, that there is a world beyond their all room—and that reality is not nearly as frightening as they imagined it to be.