Your first mistake was thinking that the 60s protests were somehow noble. I was there. They weren't. They were ostensibly against the then-raging Vietnam War but they were fomented and led by dedicated leftists. Then, as now, resolute in their zeal to weaken and destroy the United States; the one beacon of hope against one-world, authoritarian rule. Woke is merely the latest excuse for and iteration of that ignoble campaign. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I will disagree that colleges are creating sheep, they are creating zealots of woke religion.
Wokeness at this points is a religious dogma for our elites. Thus it is complety normal that they they want want to create religious fanatics and not thinkers. Anyone who dears to think different or refused to fall in line will be dealt with ferocity. Sadly for years, I thought that this was a phase that will pass, in 1960-1980 there were communists and hippies, but those were only ideologies, not replacement for religion, which is far more dangerous than simple ideology. Religion doesn't require proof but only faith, it cant be sicentifly validated, but if misused it creates zealots who will stop at nothing, to defend the "Faith" from dirty non-believers who dear speak against and those zealots cannot be reason with.
Worse thing is, that those zealots after graduation go to positions of power in MSM, Universities and large companies even politics and continue to spread their religion with evermore increasing zeal. And will destroy anyone who dears to question dogma, very similarly as inquisition used to do. Even though the methods are different, results are the same in both cases.
Inquisition lasted for over 350 years, lets hope that our woke religion has significantly shorter shelf-life.
My niece graduated from Yale in 2019. I love her dearly but she exemplifies some of the worst aspects of what you're talking about. She's now enrolled at Georgetown Law, another woke enclave, where she will undoubtedly thrive by encountering exactly zero views that challenge woke dogma. To me, the "best and the brightest" are like delicate, brittle dolls who break easily because they have never dealt with conflict or adversity.
Also, she and I have agreed not to discuss certain issues because she gets too upset by my views, which in all but the bluest of blue places would be considered center left but in her eyes, are very right wing.
How would college students learn to be independent? They go from parents who do everything for them to a college that does everything for them. In hiring recent grads, I've tried to get away from prestige to getting people to look more at the local state commuter college. I find those grads to be much more adult. Most are first in the family college graduates, nobody guided them through the process, and they had to get to school everyday (rather than roll right out of bed into the classroom) while managing a life outside the campus. In short, they are 22 year old adults ready to work instead of children who still need their office to feel like a campus safe space.
While I agree with most that was written here, (and btw I was totally shocked with the video re Prof. Christakis - that student should have been expelled right then and there), I have to disagree with the following statement: “ Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of any authority that claims to have your interests at heart.” A) In most cases parents are friends, and B) I would not say “be skeptical” I would rather say think about any advice that you are offered, whether by parents or others. Be humble - you don’t need to reject it outright, the same way you don’t have to accept it outright - just think well before you accept or reject. The core of not being sheep is gather information, make sure it’s not biased to one side or the other, and think. And today, more than ever, be careful with social contagion.
Instead of going straight into college after high school, I served an enlistment in the Marines. Since then, I was going to a college in South Carolina, but I had to drop out before I finished one semester. I just couldn’t take it seriously for the precise reasons highlighted in this article.
What really got me was the low quality of education. I’ve always been an avid reader, so writing papers and such was never that difficult for me. The breaking point at school came when I devoted weeks of time and energy into writing a paper about the long-term cultural effect of Brown v. Board. As per instructions, we had to submit the paper to someone else as a “peer-review”. The guy’s paper I got was quite literally an incomprehensible mass of bad grammar and left-wing talking points. It dawned on me then that that was the norm. I dropped out two days later.
What truly demoralized me was finding out how astoundingly poorly educated your average college graduate is.
This is a very astute assessment of the problem. But I think it may have started even earlier than Mr. Deresiewicz suggests.
The 1950s was the first time in our country that children were absolutely lavished with childhood. The Greatest Generation had very little in the way of a childhood, and in the booming economy of the post-war era, they were able to give their children everything they themselves never had.
But the end result of this was a generation for whom childhood was the pinnacle of life; adulthood was all downhill from there. I think this is part of what drove the rebellions of the 60s--a desire to make adulthood more like childhood. And those rebels, eventually forced to do something resembling growing up, inflicted the same permanent childhood on their kids, only worse.
Very interesting insights, William. I think an underappreciated difference between current generations and my boomer generation was how we spent whatever time was not dedicated to school or sleep. Most of my friends had before or after school jobs, for example. Paperboy, grocery bagging, drugstore deliveries (on bicycles), yard work. They may have protested in the 60's, but they all knew where money came from, what was expected at work and how to deal with the small adversities you have in any job. Good lessons. Today, kids are chauffeured from soccer to gymnastics to baseball, tutors etc. on a year around basis, and given priority as if they were working. They're acting like a privileged class because we're treating them like a privileged class. We also didn't have all the fantasy screen time, because the only "screen" was a TV, and the few shows there were on 3 channels - gasp - reinforced community and family values.
I'm 60 and my classes at U.T. Arlington are naturally filled with very young adults. In an I.R. seminar last semester, a class made up of 'all colors of the rainbow,' the only student with an opinion that deviated from the stock woke banalities was from El Salvador. To say there was no other 'diversity of opinion' is an understatement. Black, white, brown, trans, cis - whatever, if there was any variation it was carefully concealed. It was depressing. The other thing was how dark each of the students were. Here was a class composed of the children of bourgeois America; young people who had never missed a meal, seen a war or had a 'lived experience' of material discomfort, and who could afford a graduate program at a public university were filled with despair and utter hopelessness. To a man - except the student from El Salvador. I remember saying to the class: "you know, this country is not Weimar Germany." They disagreed. America for them is place of unremitting oppression and agony for the 'marginalized' masses with a pogrom in the offing at any moment.
I raised two adults. They were not raised in child care; they were raised at home. I remember reading, probably John Rosemond, that it is the job of parents to raise competent adults. I never forgot that. I also never gave in to the "law of the soggy potato chip." Children want attention and they will seek it any way they can get it. The absolute worst thing to do is to reward (with attention and giving in), bad behavior.
Even worse? These students then expect the same "safe" environment from their workplace, environments free of open discussion, ideas, or counter-arguments that they might find "threatening". And workplaces are complying.
I’m more convinced I could not teach at a so-called elite secondary school; I would be too demanding for the parents. They would protest their child’s earned ‘C+‘ vs. the gift ‘A’ they want on the transcript.
Ron Clark, co-founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, describes this generation as “wussified”; ultimately this is an adult problem, not a child problem.
Excellent essay. As the parent of three teenagers, I try hard to teach them independence and critical thinking. But, when they go against the norms of woke thinking, they are punished by peers and the system. Currently, trying to find a university for my 17 year old where her free thinking will be accepted.
I missed the Sixties in a way, because instead of going to college I went into the Army. There, you didn't get to reject the authority of adults—or, if you did, the price was high. Its travails, frequent bouts of boredom and periodic small stupidities notwithstanding, military service, particularly in wartime, administers a sharp and salutary reality check. You're not special. Life is unfair. There ain't no free lunch. Unhappily for them, most young people today have never been forced to face these facts.
I was struck by the irony of the situation that Professor Deresiewicz describes. And it's true now that I come to think of it: Young people today are passive consumers of "social justice." They're not themselves willing to do the work—to borrow a phrase from Woke progressivism. They demand as a right the solution of problems by others. That, after all, is what university administrations, corporations and government exist to do: service the consumer. For young woke progressives, "our democracy" is kind of like Amazon.
Your first mistake was thinking that the 60s protests were somehow noble. I was there. They weren't. They were ostensibly against the then-raging Vietnam War but they were fomented and led by dedicated leftists. Then, as now, resolute in their zeal to weaken and destroy the United States; the one beacon of hope against one-world, authoritarian rule. Woke is merely the latest excuse for and iteration of that ignoble campaign. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I will disagree that colleges are creating sheep, they are creating zealots of woke religion.
Wokeness at this points is a religious dogma for our elites. Thus it is complety normal that they they want want to create religious fanatics and not thinkers. Anyone who dears to think different or refused to fall in line will be dealt with ferocity. Sadly for years, I thought that this was a phase that will pass, in 1960-1980 there were communists and hippies, but those were only ideologies, not replacement for religion, which is far more dangerous than simple ideology. Religion doesn't require proof but only faith, it cant be sicentifly validated, but if misused it creates zealots who will stop at nothing, to defend the "Faith" from dirty non-believers who dear speak against and those zealots cannot be reason with.
Worse thing is, that those zealots after graduation go to positions of power in MSM, Universities and large companies even politics and continue to spread their religion with evermore increasing zeal. And will destroy anyone who dears to question dogma, very similarly as inquisition used to do. Even though the methods are different, results are the same in both cases.
Inquisition lasted for over 350 years, lets hope that our woke religion has significantly shorter shelf-life.
My niece graduated from Yale in 2019. I love her dearly but she exemplifies some of the worst aspects of what you're talking about. She's now enrolled at Georgetown Law, another woke enclave, where she will undoubtedly thrive by encountering exactly zero views that challenge woke dogma. To me, the "best and the brightest" are like delicate, brittle dolls who break easily because they have never dealt with conflict or adversity.
Also, she and I have agreed not to discuss certain issues because she gets too upset by my views, which in all but the bluest of blue places would be considered center left but in her eyes, are very right wing.
How would college students learn to be independent? They go from parents who do everything for them to a college that does everything for them. In hiring recent grads, I've tried to get away from prestige to getting people to look more at the local state commuter college. I find those grads to be much more adult. Most are first in the family college graduates, nobody guided them through the process, and they had to get to school everyday (rather than roll right out of bed into the classroom) while managing a life outside the campus. In short, they are 22 year old adults ready to work instead of children who still need their office to feel like a campus safe space.
While I agree with most that was written here, (and btw I was totally shocked with the video re Prof. Christakis - that student should have been expelled right then and there), I have to disagree with the following statement: “ Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of any authority that claims to have your interests at heart.” A) In most cases parents are friends, and B) I would not say “be skeptical” I would rather say think about any advice that you are offered, whether by parents or others. Be humble - you don’t need to reject it outright, the same way you don’t have to accept it outright - just think well before you accept or reject. The core of not being sheep is gather information, make sure it’s not biased to one side or the other, and think. And today, more than ever, be careful with social contagion.
This article is spot on.
Instead of going straight into college after high school, I served an enlistment in the Marines. Since then, I was going to a college in South Carolina, but I had to drop out before I finished one semester. I just couldn’t take it seriously for the precise reasons highlighted in this article.
What really got me was the low quality of education. I’ve always been an avid reader, so writing papers and such was never that difficult for me. The breaking point at school came when I devoted weeks of time and energy into writing a paper about the long-term cultural effect of Brown v. Board. As per instructions, we had to submit the paper to someone else as a “peer-review”. The guy’s paper I got was quite literally an incomprehensible mass of bad grammar and left-wing talking points. It dawned on me then that that was the norm. I dropped out two days later.
What truly demoralized me was finding out how astoundingly poorly educated your average college graduate is.
This is a very astute assessment of the problem. But I think it may have started even earlier than Mr. Deresiewicz suggests.
The 1950s was the first time in our country that children were absolutely lavished with childhood. The Greatest Generation had very little in the way of a childhood, and in the booming economy of the post-war era, they were able to give their children everything they themselves never had.
But the end result of this was a generation for whom childhood was the pinnacle of life; adulthood was all downhill from there. I think this is part of what drove the rebellions of the 60s--a desire to make adulthood more like childhood. And those rebels, eventually forced to do something resembling growing up, inflicted the same permanent childhood on their kids, only worse.
"Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”
-- G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
Very interesting insights, William. I think an underappreciated difference between current generations and my boomer generation was how we spent whatever time was not dedicated to school or sleep. Most of my friends had before or after school jobs, for example. Paperboy, grocery bagging, drugstore deliveries (on bicycles), yard work. They may have protested in the 60's, but they all knew where money came from, what was expected at work and how to deal with the small adversities you have in any job. Good lessons. Today, kids are chauffeured from soccer to gymnastics to baseball, tutors etc. on a year around basis, and given priority as if they were working. They're acting like a privileged class because we're treating them like a privileged class. We also didn't have all the fantasy screen time, because the only "screen" was a TV, and the few shows there were on 3 channels - gasp - reinforced community and family values.
I'm 60 and my classes at U.T. Arlington are naturally filled with very young adults. In an I.R. seminar last semester, a class made up of 'all colors of the rainbow,' the only student with an opinion that deviated from the stock woke banalities was from El Salvador. To say there was no other 'diversity of opinion' is an understatement. Black, white, brown, trans, cis - whatever, if there was any variation it was carefully concealed. It was depressing. The other thing was how dark each of the students were. Here was a class composed of the children of bourgeois America; young people who had never missed a meal, seen a war or had a 'lived experience' of material discomfort, and who could afford a graduate program at a public university were filled with despair and utter hopelessness. To a man - except the student from El Salvador. I remember saying to the class: "you know, this country is not Weimar Germany." They disagreed. America for them is place of unremitting oppression and agony for the 'marginalized' masses with a pogrom in the offing at any moment.
I raised two adults. They were not raised in child care; they were raised at home. I remember reading, probably John Rosemond, that it is the job of parents to raise competent adults. I never forgot that. I also never gave in to the "law of the soggy potato chip." Children want attention and they will seek it any way they can get it. The absolute worst thing to do is to reward (with attention and giving in), bad behavior.
Even worse? These students then expect the same "safe" environment from their workplace, environments free of open discussion, ideas, or counter-arguments that they might find "threatening". And workplaces are complying.
I’m more convinced I could not teach at a so-called elite secondary school; I would be too demanding for the parents. They would protest their child’s earned ‘C+‘ vs. the gift ‘A’ they want on the transcript.
Ron Clark, co-founder of the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, describes this generation as “wussified”; ultimately this is an adult problem, not a child problem.
The primary curricula at "elite" prep schools and colleges includes:
A. Entitlement 101
B. Bitterness Studies
C. How to Piss Off Your First Boss
D. All of the above
Excellent essay. As the parent of three teenagers, I try hard to teach them independence and critical thinking. But, when they go against the norms of woke thinking, they are punished by peers and the system. Currently, trying to find a university for my 17 year old where her free thinking will be accepted.
I missed the Sixties in a way, because instead of going to college I went into the Army. There, you didn't get to reject the authority of adults—or, if you did, the price was high. Its travails, frequent bouts of boredom and periodic small stupidities notwithstanding, military service, particularly in wartime, administers a sharp and salutary reality check. You're not special. Life is unfair. There ain't no free lunch. Unhappily for them, most young people today have never been forced to face these facts.
I was struck by the irony of the situation that Professor Deresiewicz describes. And it's true now that I come to think of it: Young people today are passive consumers of "social justice." They're not themselves willing to do the work—to borrow a phrase from Woke progressivism. They demand as a right the solution of problems by others. That, after all, is what university administrations, corporations and government exist to do: service the consumer. For young woke progressives, "our democracy" is kind of like Amazon.