Why a Billion-View Anthem Became a Cry for Help

 The Kids Are Not Alright

How We Broke Education, Why a Billion-View Anthem Became a Cry for Help, and What We Must Do About It

Something unusual happened in 2025. A song from an animated Netflix film about K-pop demon hunters — featuring fictional girl group HUNTR/X performing a track called "Golden" — became a generational anthem. Not just popular. Not just viral. Something closer to a lifeline. Children, tweens, teenagers, and adults played it hundreds of times on a loop. They sang it at Halloween. They cried to it. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It surpassed one billion YouTube views in less than seven months.

Why? What does it mean when the most-streamed movie of any year in Netflix history — watched the equivalent of 207 million times in 2025 alone — is a story about young women who are dismissed, underestimated, and burdened with a secret purpose the world refuses to acknowledge? What does it tell us that our kids are clinging to an empowerment anthem with an almost desperate fervor?

It tells us the kids are not alright. And if we are honest — really honest — it tells us that we, the adults who built and administer their educational world, are a significant part of why.

The Phenomenon Is Real — Let's Start with the Facts

Before examining what is broken, it is worth establishing the scale of what we are discussing. KPop Demon Hunters, a Sony Pictures Animation production released on Netflix on June 20, 2025, became the most popular Netflix film of all time by August 26, 2025 — surpassing both Red Notice and Squid Game Season 1 — with more than 500 million views recorded by late December 2025. According to Nielsen Media Research, it accumulated 20.5 billion viewing minutes in the U.S. alone, making it the most-streamed movie of the entire year. Nearly half of those viewers — 48%, per Nielsen — were children between the ages of 2 and 11.

The film's soundtrack, led by "Golden," set records that had never been set before in the history of the Billboard charts: it was the first soundtrack to place four songs simultaneously in the Billboard Hot 100's top ten. "Golden" topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight nonconsecutive weeks — the first time a song by an all-female group reached No. 1 on the Billboard Streaming Songs chart. The song's official lyric video crossed one billion YouTube views in January 2026 — a milestone that typically takes a decade or more, reached in under seven months. At the 2026 Academy Awards, "Golden" became the first K-pop track to ever win an Oscar for Best Original Song.

One of the songwriters, EJAE, offered perhaps the most telling words of the entire awards season when she accepted the Golden Globe: "It's a dream come true to be part of a song that's helping other girls, other boys, and everyone of all ages to get through their hardships and accept themselves. This award goes to people who had doors closed on them."

Doors closed on them. When a billion-plus plays of one song can be traced back to that sentiment — the feeling of exclusion, the hunger for acceptance, the desire to be seen as something more than what you are told you are — we need to ask why so many of our children feel that those doors are closed.

The Youth Mental Health Crisis Is Documented, Not Debated

In October 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children's Hospital Association issued a joint declaration calling youth mental health "a national emergency." Two months later, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy followed with a rare public health advisory, documenting a "devastating" decline in the mental health of young Americans — noting critically that the decline began a full decade before COVID-19.

The data since then has not improved enough to reassure. According to the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, one in five high school students seriously considered suicide in the last year. From 2009 to 2023, the percentage who actually attempted suicide rose by 43%. In 2024, 45% of youth ages 10 to 24 reported struggling with their mental health within the previous two years, per the Youth Mental Health Tracker from Surgo Health. In the 2024-2025 school year, more than half of public schools (53%) reported a rise in students seeking mental health services — yet only 52% of those schools said they were effective at actually providing those services.

These are not footnotes to a policy document. These are children. And the question we must face squarely is this: how much of their crisis is manufactured — or at least worsened — by the educational environment we have built for them?

The Purpose Has Been Engineered Out of Education

Over the last three decades, American education underwent a transformation driven not by what children need but by what is easy to measure. The standards-and-accountability movement — turbocharged by No Child Left Behind in 2001 and extended through Race to the Top — turned schools into testing factories. Textbook publishers and assessment corporations built multi-billion-dollar industries around standardized curriculum. Politicians found the language of "accountability" and "metrics" irresistible.

The result? An educational culture of compulsory busywork. Students are assigned tasks not because they lead anywhere meaningful, but because they occupy time in ways that are legible to administrators and defensible to policymakers. Teachers know this. Research confirms it. And most importantly, children feel it.

According to a longitudinal study cited in a 2025 Education Week report, the percentage of K-12 teachers who described themselves as enthusiastic about their jobs plummeted from over 60% in 2010 to a mere 20% by 2020. When your teachers are not inspired, you will not be inspired. Engagement is contagious — and so is its absence.

This is the dead horse theory in action. Educators and researchers have pointed out for decades that doubling down on testing-based accountability has not improved outcomes for the students who most need support. Yet the system continues to mount the same horse, spur it harder, and wonder why it will not run. Albert Einstein's widely attributed observation applies: doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is a definition of insanity. In education, it also happens to be policy.

The Deep Roots: How Education Was Built to Control, Not Inspire

The present crisis in education is not an accident, and it is not new. Understanding why requires an honest look at how the teaching profession was constructed — and for whose benefit.

From the colonial period through the early 1800s, teaching was dominated by men — a transient activity performed between farming seasons or as a stepping stone to law or medicine. But as the industrial revolution accelerated and men found more lucrative options in factories and business, educational reformers led by figures like Horace Mann expanded the Common Schools movement and faced an urgent question: who would staff this suddenly massive public education system?

The answer was women — and the economics were explicit. Historical scholarship from researcher John Rury and others documents that female teachers were paid approximately one-third to one-half the wages of their male counterparts in the standardized school systems of the mid-to-late 19th century. By 1850, feminization of the teaching profession had taken hold in urban areas. School committees, as historian Rury notes, often searched in vain for male applicants before hiring women, and one of the explicit advantages was cost.

The ideology that rationalized this arrangement is particularly telling. Women were framed as "naturally suited" to teaching children — gentle, morally pure, innately nurturing. The argument, which can be read in reformer Henry Barnard's 1857 Journal of Education, held that women's "more gentle and refined manners" made them superior teachers. But as scholars at Facing History & Ourselves have documented, this discourse of supposed superiority coexisted with a system that denied women professional status, fired them upon marriage, and placed them under the supervisory authority of a male administrative hierarchy. The message was clear: women could do the work, but men would define, evaluate, and control it.

This two-tiered system — women teaching, men managing — is not merely historical. Its structural legacy persists in the way the teaching profession is still regarded: underpaid relative to comparable professions, subject to bureaucratic micromanagement, and perpetually vulnerable to the argument that demanding better conditions is somehow at odds with caring about children. As one academic from Dalhousie University has written, popular discourse about "good teachers" today still echoes the 19th-century notion that teaching comes "naturally" to a predominantly female workforce — and that it is somehow bad taste when teachers demand fair treatment.

That history of exclusion extended further. The education of Black students, indigenous students, students with disabilities, students from poor families, and female students was either formally denied or systematically degraded for most of American history. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was not the end of educational exclusion — it was a pivot point in an ongoing struggle. Today, new culture war battles are being fought over which histories can be taught, which identities can be acknowledged, and whose children's experiences are considered legitimate. The 2025 RAND State of the American Teacher survey found that Black teachers and Hispanic teachers experience significantly higher rates of burnout, depression, and intent to leave — in part because the political climate has made their professional environments actively hostile.

The Teachers Are Not Alright Either

You cannot have children who feel seen, inspired, and purposeful if their teachers feel none of those things. And right now, by virtually every available measure, American teachers are in crisis.

According to the June 2025 analysis from the Learning Policy Institute, approximately 411,549 teaching positions were either unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified for their assignments — representing roughly one in eight of all teaching positions nationally. A 2025 University of Missouri study of about 500 public school teachers found that 78% had considered quitting since the pandemic, citing lack of administrative support, excessive workload, inadequate compensation, and challenging student behaviors.

The 2025 RAND State of the American Teacher survey reports that 62% of teachers experienced frequent job-related stress — compared to 33% of similar working adults. Teachers work an average of 49 hours per week while contracted for roughly 39, earning an average base salary of $73,000 — approximately $30,000 less than comparable working adults. Female teachers, who constitute the large majority of the profession, report higher rates of burnout and stress than male teachers — a disparity that RAND has flagged for further study.

A 2024 Brown University working paper described the teaching profession as being in its worst state in 50 years. Less than one-fifth of teachers leaving the profession are retiring; the rest are fleeing — toward other careers, toward higher pay, toward work environments that do not require them to absorb the consequences of every unaddressed social failure while being told they are the problem.

One NEA-quoted teacher put it plainly: "School isn't fun. By that, I mean engaging for students and rewarding for educators. It's the opposite. It's like boot camp for a lot of students."

Teachers who do push back — who insist on purpose-driven pedagogy, who resist the busywork industrial complex, who ask why their students are being prepared for a world that automation is already rewriting — are often pushed out or marginalized. The system does not reward courage. It rewards compliance.

AI and the Coming Displacement: Nobody Is Talking About the Real Problem

Layered on top of all of this is a technological disruption that is arriving faster than any educational institution is prepared to handle. Artificial intelligence is already restructuring the labor market — displacing routine cognitive work at a scale and pace that previous automation waves could not approach. Corporations are openly implementing AI not because it serves workers better, but because it dramatically reduces labor costs.

The honest question our schools should be grappling with is: what are we preparing children to do in a world where a significant portion of the work they have historically been trained for will not exist? That question requires radical rethinking of purpose, of curriculum, of what school is fundamentally for.

Instead, the dominant educational response to AI has been to generate more busywork — sometimes with AI's own help — and to double down on the assessment apparatus. Rather than asking whether this horse is still alive, we are discussing how to use AI to ride it faster. The students can feel the absurdity. Children are perceptive. They know when what they are being asked to do does not connect to any meaningful future.

Why "Golden" Matters: What the Children Are Telling Us

Return, then, to the song. "Golden" is the centerpiece of KPop Demon Hunters, an empowerment anthem in which three young women who have been given a hidden, crushing responsibility — protecting the world through the power of their voices — finally step into the full acknowledgment of what they are. The film's central character, Rumi, is half-demon. She has been taught that her nature is something to be ashamed of, hidden, and eventually erased. "Golden" is the moment she and her bandmates refuse that narrative.

Billboard's Jason Lipshutz described the song as having been "designed as a smash in the fictional world of the movie, but was strong enough to become one in the real world too" — a track that works both as pop craftsmanship and as "a highly positive, musically undeniable piece of pop songwriting" that children and adults alike reach for when they need to feel something real.

The song's songwriter and performer EJAE described watching children of all races and backgrounds dress as Korean women for Halloween, singing Korean lyrics in the streets of New York, and finding in these characters something they needed: strong women who are not princesses waiting to be saved, but fighters who use their gifts to protect the people they love — even when the world has told them their gifts are shameful.

This is what a billion plays sounds like. It sounds like children who have been told, in a hundred thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they are not enough — who recognize in this song a counter-narrative they desperately want to be true.

A CDC youth mental health report notes that "school connectedness" — the belief that others at school care about you and your well-being — is one of the most powerful protective factors for adolescent mental health. Students who feel connected to their school are measurably less likely to experience depression and anxiety. What our schools are manufacturing right now is the opposite of connectedness. They are manufacturing alienation, irrelevance, and the quiet conviction that no one at school is actually invested in the person you are becoming.

The Clarion Call: What Must Actually Change

A problem this deep does not have a simple fix. But it does have identifiable starting points, and they require the willingness of educators, administrators, school boards, and policymakers to stop confusing institutional self-preservation with service to children.

Acknowledge that the testing-accountability industrial complex has failed.

Not partially failed. Systemically failed. The student who can pass a standardized test in reading but has never been asked why a story matters, what a character's choice reveals about human nature, or how literature connects to their own life, has not been educated. They have been processed. Dismounting the dead horse means accepting this loss publicly and redirecting resources toward relational, purpose-driven learning.

Treat teachers as the professionals the entire system depends on.

A profession in which workers earn $30,000 less than comparable adults, work ten hours beyond their contracted week, and report burnout at twice the rate of the general population is a profession that is being dismantled in real time. If school boards want teachers who inspire children, they must create environments where teachers are themselves inspired. That means competitive pay, genuine professional autonomy, protection from political harassment, and administrative cultures that treat teachers as partners rather than managed labor.

Confront the culture war at the institutional level.

Every school board and administrator who fails to defend the historical record, inclusive curricula, and the professional autonomy of teachers against bad-faith political pressure is not neutral. They are complicit. The children who feel erased — whose families and histories and identities are treated as controversial — are not abstract policy debates. They are people in your classrooms. Their mental health data is in the statistics cited above.

Reckon honestly with the AI transition.

Rather than using AI to generate more of the same busywork, educators need to be asking what skills, capacities, and forms of wisdom are uniquely human and worth cultivating for the world that is coming. Critical thinking, creativity, empathy, the ability to work in relationship with other people, the capacity to find and make meaning — these are not soft skills. They are the skills that will matter when much of the routine cognitive work children are currently trained for has been automated.

Listen to what the children are telling you.

When a billion people reach for an anthem about being seen, about refusing shame, about the power of your own voice — they are not making a cultural preference. They are broadcasting a need. If our schools cannot meet that need, then charter schools, homeschooling, and alternative models will continue to draw families away — not because those models are uniformly superior, but because they are sometimes the only places offering children the experience of actually mattering.

A Final Word: The Mirror We Must Look Into

There is a habit in education — as in many institutions — of looking outward for someone to blame when things go wrong. Parents. Politicians. Technology. Social media. The culture. Those forces are real, and their impacts are real. But the institution of public education in America also has a mirror it consistently refuses to look into.

What would it see if it did? A profession built partly on the logic of paying women less than men. A system expanded through exclusion — of Black students, poor students, female students — that still carries those structural inequities forward in test score gaps, funding disparities, and the unequal distribution of experienced teachers. An accountability apparatus that has produced thirty years of data showing it does not work, and has responded by asking for more of itself. A workforce in profound distress, leaving in droves, warning us that something is fundamentally wrong.

And one billion children — because that is, in effect, what the data represents — listening to a song about being seen, about refusing to let shame define them, about using their voices to fight something dark that the adults around them will not name.

The kids are not alright. "Golden" is not the problem. "Golden" is the diagnosis.

The question is whether the adults responsible for this system are ready to hear it.

Research Notes & Sources

The following sources were consulted and verified in the preparation of this essay:

On KPop Demon Hunters and "Golden":

Wikipedia: KPop Demon Hunters / Golden (Huntr/x song) • Netflix Tudum • Billboard.com • Variety • Nielsen Media Research • uDiscover Music • Collider • Music Ally • Rotten Tomatoes

On the feminization of teaching:

MIT/Wellesley: The Feminization of Teaching in America • Encyclopedia.com • Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education • Facing History & Ourselves • Cal Poly SLO thesis (Digital Commons) • Dalhousie/Atlantic Universities Teaching Showcase

On teacher burnout and shortages:

Learning Policy Institute (2025) • RAND Corporation: State of the American Teacher 2025 • NEA • Education Week • Devlin Peck Teacher Burnout Statistics • We Are Teachers

On youth mental health:

CDC Adolescent Health • U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory (2021) • Annie E. Casey Foundation • Mental Health America • The Jed Foundation • Frontiers in Psychiatry (McGorry et al., 2025) • Wikipedia: Youth Mental Health Crisis