Is There Any Real Joy In Learning Anymore?
Can students even experience learning something intriguing or unexpected? Or are they only told what to think?
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning? - George W. Bush, 2000
What an incurious little dipsy-doodle I was when I entered university at the dawn of the Reagan Era.
My original life plan after high school was to move back to Florida and make bad horror movies with my mother’s best friend’s daughter.
But Dad said ixnay on the upidstay idea. So there I was, sitting at a long, curved classroom table at Kent State instead of sweating my ass off in a Florida swamp. It was a Sociology class. Whatever that was. It had to do with society. Or something.
I avoided taking anything boring. That meant no history, hard science, classic literature, business administration, and definitely no math classes.
I took Rhetoric (what was that?) instead, and Environmental Geology, which seemed less hard. I liked science but it was ruined by mediocre high school teachers, and arguably my lack of interest in any science that didn’t involve animals.
Something weird happened.
Sociology fascinated me. People were interesting! Who knew? It led me to Psychology. I pushed myself and took a Literature class, in which we read classics, not the pap they assign today written by some obscure mixed-recipe woke chick who can’t figure out her belly button from her heinie. My new friends and I engaged in brainier discussions than in high school, because we were all so intellectually engaged for the first time.
The next semester I took Philosophy (it sucked, but I had the world’s worst prof) and speech class, along with History, because, like, why the hell not?
A great prof introduced me to Voltaire and other 18th-century mavericks, from whom I embraced speaking truth to power. Dr. S taught me there was real context around history, an evolution of understanding humanity and social cohesion, and especially not remaking its mistakes.
My brain became an awakening octopus, unfurled, stretching its langorous tentacles in pursuit of a greater world that six months prior had contained mostly me.
My octopus embraced a plethora of interesting people, places, times, books, and most importantly, ideas. I finished my freshman year with a bad case of intellectual snobbery, arguing with my mother that you can never really know something, and how can you truly know it when—I forget what the epistemological argument was but Philosophy was useful for something, primarily annoying my mother.
I remember the sheer dopamine rush of becoming engrossed in a book I’d thought I wouldn’t like and reminding myself I had to stop as I had other homework. I checked out additional reading, spurred by new interests provoked in class. I posted my favorite Voltaire story over my typewriter because it was just so damn badass.
Science no longer needed to provide cute furry things to hold my interest; I became engrossed in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which Dad and I watched together on Sunday nights. I devoured science fiction and looked up at diamonds scattered across the night sky, pondering cosmic necklaces of other worlds and galaxies, where the alien life was. I longed to live hundreds of years in the future, when I could travel on spaceships like the characters in Heinlein’s and Asimov’s books.
My friends and I cracked intellectual jokes, not out of pretension but via a shared inside knowledge. “I require a spoon because I have an oral fixation,” one of my fellow Psych students said in the cafeteria, and we both laughed.
“Teaching is dead.”
Can modern college kids even experience joy? They crawl social media feeds, their curiosity reserved for strangers’ carefully curated lives. It keeps their chronic anxiety on life support, relieved by instant coolness and cred when adopting the mental health pop-identification du jour.
Millennials and Zoomers suffer the worst mental health problems and demonstrate fewer social skills than we had just half a generation ago.
The ones actively engaged with politics seem mostly preoccupied with pretending to give a shit about Gazans.
They graduate, seemingly, several magnitudes more ignorant than they entered.
Critical thought makes them feel ‘unsafe’; as in, their friends will hate them. They render the campus more dangerous for anyone daring to question whether the Renaissance was truly an orgy of privileged white male Eurocentric supremacy.
They will never be introduced to Voltaire, a hated old white European dude.
Maybe they’re afraid of him and his maverick buds.
I know I sound like an annoying “Kids these days!” grandma and maybe I am; but students aren’t taught to think anymore. Not that my gen was a bevy of untamed original thought. Nearly forty years ago Garry Trudeau famously lampooned us Xers in a classic Doonesbury comic featuring a college professor assigning an essay on independent thought. Touché, Mr. Trudeau. We deserved that.
Ultimately, we can’t blame today’s students. Blame the parents, the teachers, and out-of-control woke ‘progressives’ that regard the young as brainless little bots that must be programmed with leftist, self-defeating, mental health-reducing cultural Marxist theology to function correctly.
It reminds me rather a lot of the spectre of the old Soviet Union with which I grew up. Russians and other Communist students were taught what to think, not how to think. As were, to be honest, American kids who went to conservative religious schools.
Both were anti-intellectual, and I was anti-anti-intellectual.
Education was power. Thinking was power.
Not so anymore.
Social justice constipation
The most brainless, doughnut degree you can get, I suspect, is ‘social justice’.
I have an ex-friend who defriended me on Facebook, I assume because he didn’t like my Substack article headlines. He had just gotten a ‘social justice’ degree.
He had a brain before he went back to school to get an MBA. I helped him out. I think I proofread his application essay.
Unfortunately, he minored in ‘social justice’. They turned him into another insufferable programmed wokie-bot.
‘Social justice’ wonks are like the pretentious Philosophy-major pedants I used to encounter in college. They considered themselves morally superior, they were boring as hell, and they never, ever shut up.
My job was to sit there and placidly listen, but I wasn’t very good at it.
Eddie would call, often late at night and ask, “Have you got a couple of minutes?” which meant, if I’d valued our friendship over sleep, two or three hours of the dreariest social justice gibberish. I poked his self-importance by challenging his silly-ass sermons. Like making fun of the pronouns obsession. He archly informed me such thinking was ‘colonization’ of others’ identity, and a marker of my white privilege (isn’t everything?). I asked if he even knew what ‘colonization’ was, because it didn’t mean what he thought it did. Then I’d chastise him for supporting ‘colonization’ of women’s identity, sports teams and private spaces by men in dresses. That’s typical misogynist thought, I informed him.
When he blathered about American white privilege I reminded him that he hailed from the original imperialist, cultural oppressors, the Chinese civilization, the oldest in the world.
“Yes, I know but—” He wanted to talk about white privilege, not the Chinese conquest, colonization and subjugation of large swathes of Asia during the Han and Tang dynasties.
Another ‘social justice’ friend got mad because I wasn’t convinced George Zimmerman had muttered the N-word just before he shot Trayvon Martin. Later he got peeved when I failed to insufficiently condemn the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi who was only fifteen minutes into being accused of physically assaulting dates. (Evidence? SJWs don’t need no stinkin’ evidence!) He defriended me too. It wasn’t as painful as he’d hoped. He was another one for calling for ‘just a few minutes’ and regurgitating a dog’s breakfast of woke balderdash. Like, he didn’t even stop to breathe!
It won’t kill kids to read The Great Gatsby
College kids have always been intolerant of ideas they don’t like. Hippie protesters shut down classes in the 1960s and 1970s.
But they still got to talk, debate, disagree, get mad, and no one ever lost a career for saying something someone else didn’t like, even if they supported something unpopular like the Vietnam War. Just like we expostulated at Kent State twenty years later.
Today KSU ranks 44 on FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, ‘slightly above average’. Uh, yay?
Students miss out on some of the greatest literature and art ever produced because of racist, misandrist hatred of anything white and male, replaced with culture created by ‘marginalized’ people whose experiences don’t resonate as universally as do the Old Dead White Dudes’.
We need to learn those stories of genuine marginalization, but when one is preoccupied with one’s self and one’s out-group, it doesn’t leave much room for considering the greater, broader questions about humanity’s many commonalities. Group narcissism has its place, but so do the ground-breaking ideations of the educated European classes.
“When assigned classics such as The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird, both of which are set in the early to mid-1900s, students often find the text difficult to comprehend as they are written in a language and style that’s much different than what most teens are accustomed to,” writes Tisyah Singh, online editor for a high school student newspaper. Cripes, girlfriend, Harper Lee isn’t Chaucer! Singh gets points for writing a more cogent essay than many of her classmates probably could, but demonstrates why assigned reading is important. Neither novel is lengthy, and easy to read with a little historical context to illuminate the times in which they’re set. Both novels address themes of interest to today’s students: Gatsby handles the American Dream, capitalism, white supremacy and gender role expectations. Mockingbird feeds the modern obsession with racial inequality.
Push yourself a little, Tisyah!
Students might find they actually enjoy required reading. If not now, then later. Fahrenheit 451 reads relevantly today with both progressives and conservatives fighting over which books to ban from schools and libraries.
Read enough, and you’ll be keen to swap insights with anyone who’ll listen. Curiosity leads you down unexpected paths. My obsession with Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers led me to the works of the Founding Fathers, who were much inspired by their European contemporaries. That was how I learned what a hoot Ben Franklin was, especially his sarcastic commentary on the unpleasant treatment by Americans of the original inhabitants.
Public school has always been a bit of a drudge and that used to be a selling point for college: To educate, inspire, and instill a sense of wonder and curiosity. How much can you truly learn while you’re scratching out notes from the professor’s lecture, secretly wondering why colonialism and imperialism by Africans wasn’t mentioned. Or why Indigenous bands are never asked to provide their own land use acknowledgements, since they too stole the land from others. But thou darest not ask, lest ye be called a racist and shamed into dropping the class.
Moving beyond groupthink
Learning is torturous when you worry more about your grade point average than whether it’s righteous to pull down statues of men erected because of amazing things they wrote and did, simply because they owned slaves at a time when everyone with wealth did, especially in slave-mad Africa.
Thou shalt not ask obvious questions.
How can you value knowledge when you’re constantly policing others’ speech rather than attempting to leave the world a better place than you found it, based on what you’ve learned from your own ever-stretching octopus?
How can you support anything other than the fascism you claim to despise when you don’t believe in the fundamentals of democracy, free speech, free thought, racial equality, women’s rights, and children’s right to just be, as they were born?
How can you know you’re on the ‘right side of history’ when you can’t even summarize the millennia-ancient history of two sides fighting over a slice of land caught between a polluted river and a sea you can’t even name, let alone spell?
Kids can’t learn anything valuable when they passively consume ideological drivel, regardless of whose. Decades ago, conservative Christians figured out that getting elected to school boards was the best way to subvert education with religious dogma. Later, woke SJWs applied a similar, quite ‘successful’ strategy.
I don’t know if President-Elect Trump will destroy the Department of Education or not, or whether it wil be a good thing, or not, but what North America needs is for everyone to work together to create a better education system, broader, more nuanced, that awakens the octopus in everyone.
When I’m not reading Forbidden Books and watching Forbidden Movies, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.