'No child has ever been inspired by despair'

Doom-and-gloom teaching is persuading students that the world is a terrible place best avoided, writes Robert Pondiscio.

In English class, students read young-adult books "obsessed with trauma, abuse, dystopia, self-harm, and catastrophe," he writes. (That's if they read books at all.) In social studies, “honest history” means understanding our country "only through its sins, rarely its virtues."

Science teachers rarely ask "how we innovate, adapt, and solve problems," but instead "bombard kids with projections of planetary disaster," he writes. "Action civics" claims to teach about real-world public problems, but often tells them "the most important civic posture they can adopt is outrage."

"Exposing children to more injustice, more trauma, more inequity, more doom and gloom" is supposed to "empowering," he writes. We hope to produce activists and "change agents." But that's not how it works.

No child has ever been inspired by despair. Not once, in nearly two centuries of public education, has a student thought, “Everything is collapsing! Institutions are corrupt! The planet is burning! I should probably do my homework.”

This generation is already prone to withdraw behind their screens, he writes. Saturating them with narratives of "danger, fragility, and decline" isn't helping.

He wants school to teach optimism (we can do better), attachment to family, community and country and a form of patriotism based on "gratitude and shared purpose." Schools should help children "see that the world is not something to withdraw from, but something to join, and a place in which they can flourish."

"Children must learn that their world includes hardship and injustice," Pondiscio writes. "But they also deserve to learn that it contains beauty, progress, and opportunity."

Infantilization is America's problem, writes Elizabeth Grace Matthew in Law & Liberty, responding to Helen Andrews' essay blaming feminization.

It's not that more women are in positions of power, Matthew argues. We have elevated too many women and men "who are chronological adults yet think and behave like toddlers: profoundly unreasonable, proudly irrational, and occasionally hysterical." 

"Political and cultural maturity" is not the exclusive province of men, she argues. What we're seeing is "an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own failures and successes," a willingness to see every problem as "systemic." As a result, "performative helplessness, the defining characteristic of toddlerhood, is arguably today’s most potent political and cultural currency, on left and right alike."

Nobody wants to be an adult any more.