Jeremy S. Adams - Hollowed Out: A Warning about Americas Next Generation

Hollowed Out

A WARNING About Americas Next Generation

Jeremy S. Adams

Copyright 2021 by Jeremy S. Adams

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ISBN: 978-1-68451-198-3

eISBN: 978-1-68451-213-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938093

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To my father, Larry Adams, whose life and legacy are anything but hollow

It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

T he first day of school.

I teach Advanced Placement United States Government to high school seniors and introductory political science to university undergraduates.

I usually begin my first class by projecting pictures onto a screen and asking students to raise their hands if they recognize the person in the picture.

Picture #1: Kendall Jenner

Most students giggle and raise their hands.

Picture #2: Nancy Pelosi

No giggles this timeand few, if any, raised hands.

Picture #3: Miley Cyrus (from her more wholesome Hannah Montana days)

Again, most raise their hands.

Picture #4: Mike Pence

This time the students look puzzled, they whisper nervously to each other, and one might hazard a He looks familiar guess. More recognize Pence than recognize Pelosi, but still, correct answers are few.

The pictures change, of course, but election years, impeachment sagas, and even pandemics have had little impact on the political illiteracy of the students Ive taught over two decades.

When I tell non-teacher friends about this, they often try to laugh it off or explain it away as kids being kids, though some will acknowledge that it doesnt bode well for the future of the American Experiment. My fellow teachers do not laugh it off; more often, they add their own disturbing anecdotes about what students dont knowand, even more important, what students arent curious about, which includes many of the high-minded ideals that got us into teaching in the first place.

In 2017, I wrote an article asking whether teachers have a front row seat to American decline. I noted that when teachers get together to discuss education, they have a common complaint: young Americans are hollowed out. It is not just that many students cant recognize Americas leading politicians; its not just that they lack knowledge that you might expect them to have; its not just that they appear to have no interest in acquiring wisdom. That would be bad enough, but it goes far deeper, and is far more worrying. They seem bereft of an understanding of what it means to be fully human. What do I mean by that? I mean that they seem mysteriously barren of the behaviors, values, and hopes from which human beings have traditionally found higher meaning, grand purpose, or even simple contentmentand little that is worthwhile has filled this vacancy.

The kids are not entirely, or even mainly, at fault. Those who came before themtheir parents, cultural leaders, political leaders, and, yes, educatorswere too often accomplices in letting these same values, virtues, traditions, and aspirations slip away, assuming that somehow their loss would be made good later or that they really didnt matter after all or that they were hindrances that should be willfully ignored. Rather than setting high expectations for students, we settled for understanding them. Unfortunately, high expectations were often not being instilled at home or in church or in other institutions either. Laxity can be culturally contagious. But high expectations are necessary for young people to mature into responsible adults; they set a framework and offer guidance. Without those benchmarks, there is something of great significance that goes missingand we see it now in our students. There is little yearning among them to be fully rounded individualsintellectually, culturally, morally, spirituallylittle interest in cultivating fallow ambition, little urgency to become a responsible adult. The lights are on, the students are at homeand they dont particularly want to go anywhere. In terms of economics and technology, they are, on a global-historical scale, wealthy. Yet they are utterly destitute in the realm of what we might call human flourishingfulfilling the timeless aspirations and deepest yearnings of the human soul: to love, to know, to honor, to serve, to lead. What is missing in our students implies that something is missing in our homes, in our culture, in our politics, and in our country. What I and many of my fellow teachers see in our classrooms is a culture that has gone terribly wrong. It portends nothing less than a generational crisis.

In Ciceros An Essay on Old Age, Cato is quoted as having said, Those indeed who have no internal resource of happiness, will find themselves uneasy in every stage of life. My worry is that a great many people today, especially our students, lack the internal resources to provide for their own long-term happiness and contentment. A few examples that form an unhappy picture: many students today show little interest in getting married or starting families; children are anathema to the students ubiquitous environmental puritanismand their equally ubiquitous self-absorption. Many refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, even labeling it vaguely fascistic; they snicker outright at the very notion of patriotism. Their view of America is nihilistic and myopicand nihilism is not generally a healthy state of mind. They are shockingly ignorant about the worlds major religions and stridently secular in their morality, and they assign little value to the great books of Western civilization or to Western liberal values or to the Judeo-Christian tradition; this, too, is part of their nihilism. They live largely solitary lives, inextricably connected to their phones but largely disconnected from parents, churches, and communities. Instead, they eat alone, they study alone, they even socialize alone in a virtual world untethered to the physical. They are often friendless and depressed, which explains why they harm themselves and commit suicide at a rate unrivaled in American historya history, incidentally, that they see as a sordid tale of endless oppression and sprawling injustices. They are sympathetic to the iconoclasm, anarchism, violence, and ritualistic self-loathing on display in the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere. They raise suspicious eyebrows at any attempt to defend or explain the achievements of Thomas Jefferson or the heroes of the Civil War (about whom they usually know nothing). In sum, they are disdainful of any knowledge beyond their computer screens and alienated from the values, aspirations, institutions, and commitments that traditionally define growing up. Older generations might remark on this generations immaturity, its absorption with thoughts and desires unworthy of a serious lifeand theyd be right.