From Aaron Mesh’s interview with Gregory McKelvey:
“We must put ourselves in the minds of someone who probably rightfully believes the world is ending or, at a minimum, is on the brink of being unrecognizable with incredible amounts of death, pain and climate chaos. If the world is ending, some people are going to act like it.”
Why do so many young people believe that? Consider their education, both their formal schooling and journalistic doom-saying:
“For generations like mine and the one after, we have been told our entire lives that the world is about to end if nothing is done immediately, and that all of the evils of our world—climate chaos, racism, the ills of capitalism, and more—are all inexplicably linked. In my mind, and the minds of protesters, these things are objectively true. So if a young person is told the world is ending, and then told to sign up to testify or to go vote, that does not seem to meet the urgency of the moment.”
In my 1991 (!) article in The Wall Street Journal, “Global Problems Are Too Big for Little Kids,” I worried about the doomsters’ sabotaging children’s capacity for handling difficult problems, given the widespread reports of children coming home from school scared that the world is ending soon. My conclusion:
“Frightened or apathetic children are not going to grow into the adults who will be able to solve the world’s problems. Problem-solving requires confidence that solutions can be discovered and a healthy self-esteem about one’s ability to find them. These attitudes require nurturing over a long period of time, on countless small, day-to-day issues. Too much too fast can only destroy them.”
Education is about helping children grow into knowledgeable, creative thinkers with emotional resilience and a can-do spirit. The opposite of that is indoctrination that results in young adults oscillating between angry dogmatism and stunted apathy. Yet thirty years later, a generation of young teachers and journalists are passing the burn-it-down torch along to the next generation.
The WSJ piece is online in text [pdf] and audio [mp3].
Related: Postmodern philosophy’s contribution: “Why Postmoderns Train—Not Educate—Activists.” Also at The Atlas Society and in Spanish and Portuguese translations.
I experience this every day with the education system. My son, his head nearly exploded, was taught in English classes about equity. His disdain was immediate and evoked in his character a hatred towards the subject. The question, then comes to mind, are they teaching English, or are they teaching hatred?
That is the result of the imposition of ethical judgments that robs each individual of their moral center. There can be no solution unless the situations are able to be woven into one that evokes the character of a moral person, the hero.