Victim. Privilege. Fragility. Lived experience. Systemic. This is just a sampling of the new woke lexicon, into which many Americans are rapidly being catechized. Underlying such supposedly empowering woke-speak is the premise that individuals are powerless in the face of forces beyond their control. Adolescents may claim to be woke to power dynamics, intersectional identities and systemic injustice, but they are asleep to the possibilities of personal agency and human flourishing in community.
As a history teacher at a large, diverse high school in the American South, I am struck by the connections between today’s woke adolescent and Richard Weaver’s “typical modern,” whom he claims in a 1948 book, “has the look of the hunted.” Can this phrase help explain my students’ passivity and anxiety—or their cynicism, anger and growing militancy? Perhaps this cocktail is a combination of what Weaver describes and the victimhood thinking that is now so prevalent.
The Look of the Hunted Then
Richard Weaver wrote at a time of intellectual and moral questioning in the aftermath of World War II, which had shaken people to their core. He writes that his book Ideas Have Consequences “was in a way a reaction to that war—to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions left in place of the peace and order that we professedly sought.” Weaver traced this back to the moment “when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged.” For Weaver, the best of our philosophical, scientific and religious traditions all point to an objective reality with accompanying universal principles that have informed and inspired humanity. Without such foundations, “modern man [suffers] from a severe fragmentation of his world picture.”
The widespread rejection of objective reality and universal principles in today’s constructivism, intersectionality, gender theory, standpoint epistemology and the like seems to corroborate Weaver’s basic argument. Situated at the nexus of postwar life and postmodern thinking, Weaver perceived this fragmenting trajectory sooner than most. He suggested that modern man’s “look of the hunted” had two main causes: meaninglessness and powerlessness.
Weaver attributed the look to the fact “that we have lost our grip on reality,” as postmodernism’s radical deconstruction of transcendentals and metanarratives robbed life of any deeper, meaningful reality beyond material existence, leaving only what Charles Taylor calls a “closed immanent frame.” Without a goal or an objectively true and purposive framework to situate being-in-the-world, the result is, according to Weaver, “disintegration.” As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain in Cynical Theories, postmodernity contributed to a sense of “aimlessness and loss of purpose,” even a “profound hopelessness.” Weaver argues that such meaninglessness produces “deep psychic anxiety, the extraordinary prevalence of neurosis.”
Weaver also attributed the hunted look to the fact that man’s “daily experience is one of powerlessness.” Despite vast technological advances and resulting increases in human control over the natural world, personal agency and independence have been eroded. Weaver noted that the modern workplace of his era contributed to this sense of powerlessness as “every other kind of independence” was sacrificed “for that dubious one known as financial.” Not only is the worker a cog in the machine, “he is cribbed, cabined, and confined in countless ways,” leading to “frustration, and hence the look, upon the faces of those whose souls [are withering from] hunger and unhappiness.”
The Look of the Hunted Now
In my classroom year after year, I often see the look Weaver described. Meaninglessness and powerlessness frequently merge in discussions about life goals. Many students have only the vague and nebulous goal of going to college, while others hope to make a lot of money. Very few have familial, religious or community aspirations, let alone a personal drive for moral and intellectual development. This is especially evident in the growing difficulty adolescents have in transitioning to adulthood. Teens are offered unending life choices, but have few objective or moral evaluation tools left, and thus struggle to devote themselves to any of these multiplying options. As Ben Sasse notes in The Vanishing American Adult, in our unique historical situation, “a large portion of our people in the prime of their lives are stuck in a sad sort of limbo.” A vibrant life of personal agency and action seems a rarity. Interpersonal initiative atrophies, as people are hidden behind buttons, screens and swipes. This is a perfect recipe for ending up “cribbed, cabined and confined.”
I find this unsurprising, since, for thirteen years of schooling, students are encouraged to nurture career aspirations above all else. But at least the postwar worker of Weaver’s day had the good fortune of rising wages and industrial growth. No such promises can be made today. As Jean Twenge explains in iGen, this leads students to “feel increasingly demoralized about whether they will be able to succeed,” since they are afraid that their lives are “controlled by outside forces.” All of which, she states, contributes to a “slow path to adulthood.”
I’ve seen further evidence of the meaninglessness Weaver references whenever students engage in debates about moral issues. Very few students ground their opinions in universal principles, rationality, natural law or objective truth—looking instead to popular opinion and personal feelings. Of course, this is nothing new. In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom quips, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Bloom’s claim has held true for decades. According to a 2002 Barna report, 83% of teenagers believe moral truth is dependent on circumstances, while only 6% describe it as absolute.
But we are also witnessing a shift from the tolerant my truth, your truth mindset to a my truth, or else militancy. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write in the 2019 The Coddling of the American Mind: “Something is going very wrong on college campuses, as we can see in the growth of call-out culture, in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers.” Bloom’s tolerant collegiate relativists are going extinct, to be replaced by ideological dogmatists. As R. J. Snell writes:
Perhaps [students] remain theoretically committed to relativism in the sense that they lack a justified account of moral sources, but a good many are fundamentally dogmatic in their prescriptions. While Bloom described his students as committed to relativism as a moral postulate … many have pivoted considerably: now dogmatic conclusions not open to debate are asserted as the conditions of a just society.
I’ve increasingly seen this inconsistency between theoretical relativism and practical militancy surface in the course of class discussions and student writing at the high school level. The first essay and roundtable my American history students participate in each year is an evaluation of Christopher Columbus, facilitated by selected primary and secondary sources that offer different viewpoints on Columbus’ legacy. There are always a few students who display a mature historical perspective, recognizing the complexities of the human experience. But the most frequent conclusion from students is that Columbus was a very bad person.
Many of these same students claim to be moral relativists, who do not believe in objective meaning or truth. By what standard are they measuring Columbus’ badness? Postmodernism’s deconstruction of transcendentals and metanarratives has left room for the paradoxical ascension of a new narrative taken as True—that of oppressor and oppressed. As Pluckrose and Lindsay explain, “What has happened is that applied postmodernism has come into its own, been reified—taken as real … The Truth according to Social Justice [has] … turned into a dominant metanarrative of its own. It has become an article of faith or an operational mythology for a wide swath of society.” Postmodernism’s offspring now assert “the objective truth of socially constructed knowledge and power hierarchies with absolute certainty.”
My students’ conclusion that Columbus was a very bad person displays a simplistic understanding of a complex topic. Trite responses like this bespeak an ignorance of human nature and of the insights available from the best of our religious and intellectual traditions. To be sure, none of this is the students’ fault per se. The problem is the nature of the world many students inhabit, where they are rarely exposed to alternative viewpoints that provide a richer, more transcendent view. Few students have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who discerned from behind the barbed wire of the gulag that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” I frequently see slight nods of approval or reflective gazes from students when they hear such profound truth. Its takes more, however, than a few periodic flickers of soul-satisfying truth to overpower the mainstream narrative that views the world as one gigantic, simplistic blame game, turning everyone—past and present—into ideological winners and losers.
Has the Hunted Become the Hunter?
The woke concept of the victim echoes Weaver’s the hunted, as both seem powerless to change their situations. Yet those with victim status are increasingly becoming the hunters, with unchecked potential to pronounce judgment on the privileged. This makes the privileged the hunted as well, for they too are powerless to remedy their inherent oppressor status. On both sides of the divide, individual human agency is out of fashion; systemic problems and power dynamics are in.
Both sides end up powerless, and, according to the underlying constructivist epistemology, with no meaningful, mutually shared experience, common language or transcendent truth to bridge the gap between them. This is all premised, Pluckrose and Lindsay explain,
on the idea that people with different marginalized identities have different knowledges, stemming from their shared, embodied, and lived experiences as members of those identity groups, especially of systemic oppression. Such people can both be disadvantaged as knowers, when they are forced to operate within a “dominant” system that is not their own, and also enjoy unique advantages, because of their familiarity with multiple epistemic systems.
These are perplexing juxtapositions. What Weaver observed has undergone an intensification: anxiety has turned to anger, powerlessness to cynicism and fear to hatred. With constructivism’s self-prescribed limits on transcendent meaning, and a feeling of powerlessness to boot, the disintegration Weaver predicted is on full display and his words seem prophetic: “And the fear accompanying it unlooses the great disorganizing force of hatred.” This progression from fear to hatred is especially evident in the growing militancy, iconoclastic impulses and the willingness to use violence that we’ve seen from extremes on the right and the left in recent years.
This semester, I have been teaching the American founding. One of the questions I set my students is “What actions are justified in protest against government?” I’ve used this writing prompt for years, but this semester I noticed a marked increase in students who responded that violence was justified to achieve desired outcomes. This seems to track with recent studies that found more Americans on both left and right willing to justify political violence if it helps attain their goals.
The meaninglessness and powerlessness of postmodernism that Weaver diagnosed years ago has now mixed with anger and militancy, making for a potent cocktail, imbibed by students via schooling, media and popular culture. Sozzled on such strong drink, their sight is too blurred to realize that ultimately the hunt will come for them too. There is no escape. In such a cynical world, meaning has been problematized into oblivion and individuals are powerless, trained to be victims. Agency has, ironically, been externalized and outsourced to the oppressor.
We need individual responsibility, agency and meaningful narratives, especially those that describe objective reality. This combination could allow people to live empowered lives and flourish within their communities and could offer a true, lasting and sustainable path towards a genuine awakening that has nothing to do with being woke.
11 comments
There was a popular song some time ago titled Love Is In the Air.
In the case of American culture the song that describes its dominant zeitgeist should be titled Fear Is In The Air.
Taking into account the fact that everything is interconnected it could quite rightly be said that hell-deep fear saturates the air and the entirety of American culture. Look at its “entertainment” industry which is saturated with the pornography of violence – especially that against women and children
Indeed American’s are not living in the “paradise of Western Democracy” but in a night of collective mortal fear.
In a very real sense American’s have not recovered from the shock of the September II Twin Towers atrocity.
The Shock of the New!
On that morning everyone in New York (in particular) and the USA altogether went about their normal every day business presuming that everything in America was more of less under control, and to one degree or another believing in the exceptional nature of US culture and its world wide political hegemony.
What was the lesson of the Twin Towers? You are not in any sense in control and just as subject to random acts of violence and terrorism as are all of the victims of your death-saturated imperial misadventures. And, perhaps too, you have now received a dramatic example of your inevitable karmic comeuppance, or what Chalmers Johnson described in his book Blowback The Costs & Consequences of American Empire
I’ll be honest – your comments are providing more insight than you may realize about the mindset of woke individuals and their total incapacity/unwillingness for reasoned discourse without invoking ad hominem attacks and strawmen designed to break down such discourse. As a bonus, the author’s thesis (“anxiety has turned to anger, powerlessness to cynicism and fear to hatred”), could not be writ larger than in the intensely combative but entirely insubstantial claims you’ve made. So thank you for your contribution; it is well-appreciated.
What kind of transcendental reality informs the rantings/ravings of any of the benighted characters that I named in my first comment?
And to claim that Christoper Columbus was motivated by any kind of transcendental reality and/or idealism is pernicious nonsense.
I much prefer the comprehensive assessment of Columbus and his pernicious legacy given by the distinguished Professor Jack Forbes in his truth-telling book Columbus and Other Cannibals The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism.
Further now-time elaborations of the Wetiko psychosis are given by the brilliant Buddhist inspired scholar Paul Levy in his book Dispelling Wetiko Breaking the Curse of Evil.
Briefly, I’ll just note that my actual essay didn’t reference any of the figures you commented about. The modern names you mention don’t represent what my essay is about. Also, I never claimed Christopher Columbus was an ideal figure. I simply suggested that things are much more complex than the simple good guy-bad guy ideological blame game we currently see. As a teacher I try to help students see beyond such simple ideology, and gain a more nuanced and complex view of the world, which is closer to reality–and closer to how we ourselves would want to be viewed by people 100 years from now. I think that’s all. Thanks for interacting with the ideas in the essay.
Cheers – JDP
Perhaps then we should replace the current relativist agendas that now dominate the minds and bodies of young people with the refined “wisdom” proposed by the two so called conservative culture war warriors such as Newt Gingrich and Senator Cruz. And throw in Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Dinesh D-Souza, and Russ Limbaugh (he who was awarded the “freedom” medal for being a life-long pathological liar). And why not Ginni Thomas too, because she openly praised the mob who invaded the White House
I also noticed that via his links to the Witherspoon Institute which is an Opus Dei front Joshua is to one degree or another associated with that charming outfit Opus Dei which now has a very strong influence in the “catholic” church and controls many levers of political and financial power all over the world. Both Ginni and her husband Clarence are closely associated with Opus Dei too.
And please explain why so many dreadfully sane normal Americans who have no sympathy for the dreaded “wokeness” voted for the cynical nihilist who has haunted the White House and the collective American psyche for the last four years. A cynical nihilist who has effectively trashed all of the norms upon which a functioning polis depends -with potentially devastating results.
Jonathan – I appreciate your spirited response and critiques of my article. I see you are passionate about this topic, as I am, especially after what we witnessed on January 6th at the US Capitol. Those events were shocking and despicable. They were a clear picture of the dangers of the meaningless, powerlessness, victimhood thinking, and nihilism I referenced in my essay, but this time from the extreme right. While my essay was written well before the recent events, I mentioned that this is a problem on the extreme right and the extreme left in multiple places, where I wrote, “This progression from fear to hatred is especially evident in the growing militancy, iconoclastic impulses and the willingness to use violence that we’ve seen from extremes on the right and the left in recent years.” and also when I stated, “This seems to track with recent studies that found more Americans on both left and right willing to justify political violence if it helps attain their goals.” What clearer proof of such things could there be than the mob that descended on DC.
You’ll note that my essay never referenced of any of the silly figures you mention. I’m as baffled as you are why so many folks fell prey to “Trumpism.” I have no sympathy for those folks. They are reaping what they sowed. Perhaps it’s the age-old lesson about the temptations of power. A bunch of folks sold themselves to Trump to keep their political power, seems like to me. I wish folks with any refined “wisdom” or commitment to truth would have rejected Trump from the outset and created a viable alternative. That would have been the honorable thing to do. There were some who did so, and they are saying I told you so right now. I think another factor, is that in a binary political system like America’s, you tend to have folks who don’t necessarily vote for someone; they vote against someone or something. Also I would suggest that this problem is much bigger than Trumpism. Norms and civil discourse have been breaking down in America for decades; in a sense Trump is an intensified reflection of that who has accelerated the process to unthinkable places.
As to possible solutions, I agree with you that the solution is certainly not Tucker Carlson or FOX News; nor is it Joe Biden or Wokeness. I would suggest the solution probably isn’t primarily political at all. It is much more foundational. Family. Community. Agency. At least these could be starting points that are direct, personal, and impactful. I offer my essay’s conclusion: “We need individual responsibility, agency and meaningful narratives, especially those that describe objective reality. This combination could allow people to live empowered lives and flourish within their communities and could offer a true, lasting and sustainable path towards a genuine awakening that has nothing to do with being woke.” I would hope these are ideas that both the left and the right could agree upon.
And regarding Opus Dei, I had to do an internet search to learn what that was. No, I’m not a member of Opus Dei. I’m not even a catholic. Though, I’m not afraid to say I am Christian in the historic sense of that term, and that my Christianity informs my understanding of the world, just like anyone’s core beliefs and worldview does. I try to read and write for a variety of outlets to avoid getting trapped in an echo chamber, or ideological bubble. I would hope that is the goal; to have a free exchange of ideas. Surely, we all have things to offer, and I appreciate what you offered here. Thank you again for engaging with the article.
Best – JDP
You come across as someone that would complain about the Red Coats abuses and those who served the Crown in the late 1700s and then would demonize and criticize the Patriots that founded the United States for actually doing something about it .
You insist on the Absolute Truth in certain morality then you contradict it with Relativism whilst criticizing it.
If Some things are evil and bad and other things aren’t then eventually people will have to rise up against it.
Are we supposed to just allow our election process and constitution “which includes the free exercise of religion and your right publish inconsistent hypocritical self righteous things like this” to be destroyed so we are ruled by a bunch of Organized Criminals “many whom are part of the Epstein trafficking ring”, and Oligarchs ?
Our we supposed to allow our Elections to literally be no different than in Putin’s Russia ?
oh but Orange Man “the least Corrupt President since George Washington” bad because the propagandist corporate media “who are doing the very thing to society you hypocritically criticize” told you so .
If Ashli Babbitt wasn’t Murdered and they didn’t start gassing people and shooting rubber bullets at people who were doing the same thing leftist did during the Supreme Court justice nomination hearings and in the past in state capital buildings the chaos wouldn’t have followed but the MSM won’t tell you that. The same MSM that continues to cover for those involved in Human Trafficking with Epstein and for the former Bush administration who deliberately mislead the nation with their Anthrax lies so they could gain access to Iraqi Oil Fields, make money off of weapons manufacturing, and from rebuilding via the Halliburton contracts .
Never mind the fact that The guy people like you are brainwashed to believe was SOooo bad called the generals, past and present politicians, and the media out for this
But he was crass perhaps vainglorious and not perfect so none of that matters with you Pious never Trumpers.
Now I don’t prefer violence let alone harming others but
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.
― Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith
Thank you for engaging with the article and for your feedback. I appreciate the interaction and the points your raise. In fact, yes I am someone who can see the complexities and naunces of both the loyalists and patriots during the American Revolution. Actually, there were many Christians (especially Lutherans) who were opposed to the American Revolution because they saw it as a violation of the principles laid out by Paul in Romans 13. Of course, there were also many Christians (especially Presbyterians) who supported and drove the American Revolution forward. But I would never “demonize” loyalists or patriots for their different decisions on this matter. These are complex and challenging things that can’t be simplified into our neat little categories of good people and bad people. I am proud to teach the principles of the American Founding–natural rights, limited government, checks and balances–and have done so for years.
It’s very interesting to note the passionate comments that this piece has generated from people on both the Left and the Right, and how quickly those comments descend into ad hominem, personal attacks. This is actually further evidence that confirms my thesis in the article. That we all too-easily place people into “demonized” categories and are “on the hunt” for people to be against. For you, I am one to be hunted, because I am attempting to show nuance and complexity and am not on the Trump train. For some of the other commenters, I am one to be hunted, because I am criticizing wokeness and am not on the woke train. That places me in a precarious position in our current world of ideological winners and losers. But I refuse to play that zero sum game that no one actually wins. We are not all evil or all good. I am actually attempting to be consistent in recognizing the complexities of these things, not being hypocritical. I am attempting to consistently apply objective truth and moral principles to all of my decisions, politically and socially, and also recognizing the limited and fallible nature of our individual understandings. We all have things to learn from each other. I’ve written in many places strong critiques of the Left and will continue to do so. But when the Right displays the same pathologies and problems, I will be the first to critique that as well. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. I would say it makes me consistent. We need to self-reflect, not just always point the finger. The “what-aboutism” and “other sideism” gets tiring.
If you want to see my take on the events of January 6th, that is a matter of public record. I wrote about it here: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/02/73937/ . On both the Left and the Right, we are falling prey to same problems. Demonizing others, believing our side is always right and has the whole truth, and going to further and further extremes to have “our side” win. The political has ascended to become eschatological—for the Left, as the only hope to usher in a better world, and for the Right as the last chance to prevent its destruction. That is part of the problem. We’ve invested too much in politics and made it into a good and evil game, where we place people into categories of friend or enemy, and that is not a healthy way to live life. The passionate comments on this article from both sides are further evidence of this.
Happy to function as the whipping boy of the left and the right. That is the nature of things in our highly politicized era where politics has become an apocalyptic game of epic importance. But I think there are more important things–family, community, faith–things we have direct agency over and responsibility for. Speaking of, I’ve got to get back to those things. Thanks for engaging with the article, and I hope this interchange in beneficial for both of us.
Cheers – JDP
I wonder that the high school level has perhaps become vice-squeezed between both ends of the educational spectrum. Where these kids came from and where they’re going to.
Add to that the importance (as always was) of a knowledge-based foundation that not only inspires but enables critical thought.
When I drifted through high school in the latter half of the 1960s, every critical or radical thought I had emerged from an autonomous and individualized platform. Was that just me or a sign of the times?
The power of social anything, back then was not remotely the kind of steamroller that exists now. One could take a long sabbatical from it, in many ways, and most ways that were important. In other words, there was an idea of personalized control that allowed lots of wiggle room.
Just as a topic might be discussed among a few close friends from the inception of its arrival, significance, or affect on a personal life. That has multiplied exponentially, now. The din and racket of it has become astonishing.
Some years ago I found a book in my university’s main library (whose title and author have long departed from my memory, alas…)
But the theme of the book was explored under the thesis of an American societal dislike of youth. Not so much a war, but a multi-layered attack on anyone from preschool to grad school.
This fascinated me, inasmuch as the mixture of “child-centered” pedagogical philosophies would beg to differ with the idea. But yet the outcomes often support the notion.
Personally, because I have lived a life which started out with a socially and politically neutral decent education, after which I departed academia quick and got out with my faculties intact, my main objection to contemporary educational philosophy is a pretty simple one:
the will, the ability, and the freedom to actually educate.
Which appears to come apart at the seams when that will is decidedly to indoctrinate, and that no young person of any age within the system is of any value whatsoever unless blessed, baptized and born again in the name of what has now become a curious wonderland of fake justice.
Fake because it bows down low, genuflects to that long horizon, to mere power. Always.
As if everyone suddenly forgot the power of knowledge. To simply know, to be able to know, and to be enabled by that very knowledge to come to grips with the evidence, whatever that happens to be.
As if a mere doubt were capable of bringing that babel’s tower down, instead of actually strengthening the foundation with the mortar of further exploration (and what used to be known as a healthy curiosity.)
From the age of five to twenty-five, whatever Leviathan or behemoth one must struggle through in this particular modernity, to acquire the tools of construction which enable safe arrival, the end goal should have been learning how to learn. Autonomously. Let the “social” chips fall where they may.
The most precious possessions of all are still the intangibles. To be truly awake, aware, alive and alert dances well with carpe diem, and a moral casing that fits as closely as the skin you’re in.
Boethius – Thank you for engaging with the article, and for your insightful comments. I agree that part of the issue is the lack of meaningful moral formation for students. One of the ways that such commitments form, as you mention, can involve religion practiced in a community. But even more basic than that I might suggest that much of our moral development takes place in the context of the family structure, the original social unit which historically provided one’s primal, core identity–who one is, and to whom one is most closely related. As such elemental, familial identities are overshadowed by a growing number of other identity categories, the formation takes place in different ways, and is perhaps aligned towards different ends.
I understand the skepticism about public schools playing a large role inculcating morality into its students. I am sympathetic to that point, and from my experience with teachers and in teaching programs at the university, this seems to be a very common approach teachers take. However, I might suggest that in practice, such moral neutrality is nearly impossible. I think schools by their very nature are involved in moral formation, and even the attempts to avoid addressing morality, are in fact teaching certain things about moral issues. The longer I’ve taught history, the more I am concluding that in practice, neutral teaching is an illusion. Teachers make countless decisions each day about what information to include or exclude, which is not an unbiased process. Teachers also choose how to frame certain issues. The attempt to avoid, or sit the fence on issues of morality also models for students a basic indifference to such topics, which is internalized by students. I think feigning classroom neutrality is also dangerous because the teacher’s presuppositions remain hidden under the cover of referee-ism. Without such cards on the table, students have no tools to evaluate the teacher’s point of view. In an era where meaningful narratives and shared moral frameworks are lesson common, it makes the whole concept of a public school even more challenging.
Also, in the absence of strong moral formation taking place elsewhere, the schools become the de facto place for such formation, where students are left to fend for themselves with their peers to navigate perennially challenging human dilemmas and ultimate questions. From my experience, what tends to happen is, that in the absence of strong moral commitments, and in the absence of any meaningful debate or discussion on such topics in the classroom, the culturally mainstream positions come to dominate, which then takes a lot of guts for a student to challenge. As you mention, with the curriculum choices being made, schools are already tweaking moral sentiments of students in countless ways. Ideally the classroom is a space for the free exchange of ideas. The question is whether or not it actually is.
Cheers – JDP
It sounds like what is missing is the meaningful moral formation of young people. So this would be religion NOT as mere ceremony and nostalgia but also as a way of living in community with other people. I’m highly sceptical that public schools can (or should) play a large role in trying to inculcate morality into its students. Though, on the other hand, with the teaching of critical race theory it is arguably true that public schools are already “tweaking” the moral sentiments of its students. So I think in the absence of students having strong moral commitments that they are ready to discuss or defend, maybe the best thing a teacher can do is provide *space* for students to work towards developing these commitments on their own. The key here is that you cannot expect students to always stand up and defend their commitments in the classroom in front of their peers, and the goal should NOT be for the class as a whole to develop a common set of moral commitments (since that would probably just devolve to standard Social Justice fare anyways).