As you watch the video below please keep in mind that these protesters may reflect another lost generation, or, more accurately, a lost portion of another generation. We are breeding highly confidant, overly opinionated know-nothings. They are coming out of our comfortable homes and families and out of our resplendent public and private schools. Why? Below is my attempt to wrestle with an answer.
Fads infect nearly everything. Trendy grand theories takeover many fields. Academia and its professional appendage – teaching – are especially prone to it. I remember a conversation with a principal many years ago over the voguish pedagogy of HOTS, or “higher order thinking skills”. He believed that the idea held great promise. I was more skeptical. He saw it as a way to constrain the leftward bias in the schools. I viewed it as ongoing cover for more bias, just another rendering of the usual indoctrination with a new twist.
The notion of honing good “thinking” skills in the young, on first blush, has some appeal. But strip away the glossy veneer and you’ll find the same cognitive emptiness and ideological spin. For one, educators never established a good factual and conceptual basis for the students’ logic. A biased rendition of human experience and complete ignorance of history’s contrasting frames of reference makes the entire enterprise nonsensical.
The K-16 academic core – Science, Language Arts, Math, History – remain primers for the making of good little Progressives (maybe less so with Math, but the “experts” are making inroads). Reason or revelation; objective or relative truth; spontaneous human organization or central planning; the positive notion of human nature or a negative one; nature or nurture; humankind as animal or “in God’s image”; collectivism or ordered liberty; and the “scientific” or organic forms of human social development are some of the dichotomies that’ll be absent from their understanding. Chances are, the kids won’t be acquainted with them because the staff never was. The rot is preordained from college on down.
I maintained that the kids already “think” and have been doing it since they first mouthed “I want” to mom. If you doubt it, establish a dress code and watch them devise ways to subvert it. Kids are quite ingenious at playing hooky and avoiding homework. Ask any parent. It’s not that kids don’t “think”. We just don’t give them much to properly think about. And we aren’t about to accomplish that end when we smear “thinking skills” over a deep layer of half-witted indoctrination.
Add a dollop of narcissism in the form of a frenzy of self-esteem instruction and you’ll have all the makings for an opinionated ignoramus. They have opinions but are manifestly ignorant of much of everything outside the dogmas of the Left. They speak in empty rhetoric, so dialogue never happens. It deteriorates into a flinging of accusatory epithets. Insults that they mistake for deep thought are their stock-and-trade.
We brought this on ourselves. If the home is responsible, it’s child abuse. If the schools are liable, it’s child abuse. Either way, this is no way to rear a child. People don’t get this bad by accident.
RogerG