Our schools and libraries have been teaching children for decades that they need to be changemakers and activists. It seems we've gone overboard on that score.
“Children can change the world” is a fine notion on its own. Every place and generation needs rabble-rousers, questioners of the status quo, and leaders who will rally people to help make the world a little better. And change will often come from the passionate
But may I suggest that in the United States of America, in the year of our Lord 2024, we have an excess of changemakers? We have a youth-activist glut, and maybe young folks should focus on understanding stuff more before they try changing stuff? Elite college campuses today are characterized by unusually high impatience and intolerance of dissent — these are the attitudes fit for revolutionaries and activists, not for students. Now that the quads of many major universities have turned into occupations and protests with demands pertaining to U.S.
If you are constantly taught throughout your youth that your destiny is to be a changemaker, then you are going to be looking for changes to make constantly. Maybe this helps convince young people that the world is extraordinarily bad.Schools for children — that is, K-12 education — are properly understood as parents’ partners in transmitting the culture to the next generation. Activism and changemaking are part of America’s history, and so some amount of that is proper in American education.
We have made a generation that is disproportionately revolutionary, even before they know enough to have something to revolt against.
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