May 25, 2022 10:53 PM
(This post was last modified: May 25, 2022 11:29 PM by C C.)
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-aren...e-breeding
EXCERPTS (William Deresiewicz): I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students [...] But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”
These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.
But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.
I was so struck by this—that our “best and brightest” students are so often as helpless as children -- that I wrote a book about it. It came out in 2014, not long before my former colleague Nicholas Christakis was surrounded and browbeaten by a crowd of undergraduates for failing to make them feel coddled and safe -- an early indication of the rise of what we now call wokeness.
[...] Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of conformity. ... The truth is that campus protests, not just in recent years but going back for decades now, bear only a cosmetic resemblance to those of the 1960s. The latter represented a rejection of the authority of adults
[...] In a recent column, Freddie deBoer remarked, in a different context, that for the young progressive elite, “raised in comfortable and affluent homes by helicopter parents,” “there was always some authority they could demand justice from.”
That is the precise form that campus protests have taken in the age of woke: appeals to authority, not defiance of it. Today’s elite college students still regard themselves as children, and are still treated as such.
The problem [...] stems from the nature of the authority, parental as well as institutional, that the young are now facing. It is an authority that does not believe in authority, that does not believe in itself. That wants to be liked, that wants to be your friend, that wants to be thought of as cool. That will never draw a line, that will always ultimately yield.
Children can’t be children if adults are not adults, but children also can’t become adults. They need something solid: to lean on when they’re young, to define themselves against as they grow older.
Children become adults -- autonomous individuals -- by separating from their parents: by rebelling, by rejecting, by, at the very least, asserting. But how do you rebel against parents who regard themselves as rebels? How do you reject them when they accept your rejection, understand it, sympathize with it, join it?
The 1960s broke authority, and it has never been repaired. It discredited adulthood, and adulthood has never recovered. The attributes of adulthood -- responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control -- are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled.
So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how. They want to be adults, but it’s easier to remain children. Like children, they can only play at being adults... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (William Deresiewicz): I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students [...] But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”
These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.
But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.
I was so struck by this—that our “best and brightest” students are so often as helpless as children -- that I wrote a book about it. It came out in 2014, not long before my former colleague Nicholas Christakis was surrounded and browbeaten by a crowd of undergraduates for failing to make them feel coddled and safe -- an early indication of the rise of what we now call wokeness.
[...] Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of conformity. ... The truth is that campus protests, not just in recent years but going back for decades now, bear only a cosmetic resemblance to those of the 1960s. The latter represented a rejection of the authority of adults
[...] In a recent column, Freddie deBoer remarked, in a different context, that for the young progressive elite, “raised in comfortable and affluent homes by helicopter parents,” “there was always some authority they could demand justice from.”
That is the precise form that campus protests have taken in the age of woke: appeals to authority, not defiance of it. Today’s elite college students still regard themselves as children, and are still treated as such.
The problem [...] stems from the nature of the authority, parental as well as institutional, that the young are now facing. It is an authority that does not believe in authority, that does not believe in itself. That wants to be liked, that wants to be your friend, that wants to be thought of as cool. That will never draw a line, that will always ultimately yield.
Children can’t be children if adults are not adults, but children also can’t become adults. They need something solid: to lean on when they’re young, to define themselves against as they grow older.
Children become adults -- autonomous individuals -- by separating from their parents: by rebelling, by rejecting, by, at the very least, asserting. But how do you rebel against parents who regard themselves as rebels? How do you reject them when they accept your rejection, understand it, sympathize with it, join it?
The 1960s broke authority, and it has never been repaired. It discredited adulthood, and adulthood has never recovered. The attributes of adulthood -- responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control -- are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled.
So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how. They want to be adults, but it’s easier to remain children. Like children, they can only play at being adults... (MORE - missing details)
