Miguel Cardona's Terrible, Very Bad, No Good Tweet

So this popped up on Twitter.

Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.

— Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona) December 16, 2022

It was swarmed, "This is not education," said many posters. "This is a bad tweet, and you should feel bad for writing it." And "Our children do not exist to serve." And "This sounds like the Chamber of Commerce, not the Department of Education."

Some were dipped in a bit more acid. "At this point, why not just send kids back to the mines" and "my parents always told me when i was growing up that i could be anything that tomorrow's global industrial workforce demands."

All of which are on point. 

Look, it is important that children be able to support themselves when they grow up, and that they have a set of skills that can be marketed. We would do a huge disservice to students to send them into the world unemployable.

But to imagine that education is simply a means of providing employers with a full supply of useful meat widgets is such a sad, narrow, meager vision of education. It is certainly not what wealthy parents send their children off to school to learn. 

Education should align with student needs, not industry demands (and why is it that industry gets to make demands). Education is about providing choices for students, not employers. It is about helping young humans figure out how to be their own best selves, about learning how to be fully human in the world. That certainly includes figuring out what work they are here to do, but if all you are is your work, then you have a problem. 

And that should all be true for all children. It is not okay to say, "Well, those poor kids don't need a real education--they just need something that will get them a good job." This is the old idea, popular in certain Democratic administrations, that education is the only thing we need to fix poverty (and so we don't have to do other things). This is the old idea that poor people don't need rich lives or choices or the kind of deep, enriching education that not-poor kids get. And that is just all kinds of wrong.

So, yes, this was a terrible tweet, and I hope that whatever social media intern wrote it feels bad. Because this is a lousy thing for the United States Secretary of Education to put out there.

Profiteering Does Not Mix With Human Service

The line that jumps out in the story is this one:

“I feel like this is not being ran as a school but as a business,” the parent told Washington’s education department. “Kids seem to be a paycheck.”

The story is a ProPublica piece about United Health Services, a Washington state company that hoovered up $38 million in taxpayer dollars to provide special education services. And, unsurprisingly, parents and former teachers charge the company with cutting corners, short-changing students, and just generally failing to provide the services it promises to provide.

The company runs private companies like Northwest SOIL, Washington state’s largest publicly funded private school for children with disabilities, where one administrator quit after banging her head on a corporate brick wall that would not provide the resources necessary to fulfill its promises. After being required to cut staff hours, she banged out a resignation letter.

“It is truly like living in the dark ages,” she wrote about the school, detailing its cost cutting at the expense of students. “I cannot ethically or morally be a part of this any longer.”

UHS, ProPublica notes, 

is one player in a small but growing market of special education and disability services, as investors recognize the potential for profit from insurance, public education funding and other sources. A February report by a private equity watchdog group noted a flurry of recent corporate acquisitions of autism service providers. One national broker marketing the sale of a special-needs private school group touted it as a good investment and “extremely profitable.”

There's a lot to unpack in this article, but I want to note two important things here.

One--this is yet another reminder that profiteering and human services don't mix.

Two--what the article describes is a school voucher system. This one is for special ed, but this is how any school voucher system works.

This is school choice in action. The money is following each child, equipping each child with a backpack full of cash, and that turns each child into a courier, a conveyance, a cash cow. This is a system (and it is a system, no matter how much choicers insist that we should fund students, not systems) in which a child's function is to carry money to the profiteers operating the "schools." 

As one expert puts it

“There’s a lot of money at stake here,” said Kathleen Hulgin, a University of Cincinnati associate professor who studies the funding of private special education schools. Companies know they can depend on steady revenue with a “stable, publicly funded system.”

In a school choice system that is wedded to the marketplace, the interests of the owners of the education-flavored businesses will always conflict with the interests of the children. Always. And the main means of maximizing profit will always be to find ways to spend less and less serving the "customers." 

The defense offered by UHS and its various wholly-owned subsidiaries is a familiar one-- we haven't broken any laws, we provide exactly as much as the law requires. 

And in many states, that's particularly alarming because the law requires very little. 

Corner cutting is the least of the terrible outcomes. We have only to look at the privatized health care industry to see the worst cases in action, like this story about a hospital in Pennsylvania.

Or rather, what used to be a hospital, because the private equity company that bought it judged it too hard to make profitable, even after stripping away various services. The problem was that the hospital served too many poor people. So they shut it down.

As I've said repeatedly, the goal of making a profit is not inherently evil. But it does not mix well with human services. 

I can opt out of certain commercial transactions for a variety of reasons. I might not buy a velvet widget because I don't like it or because I can't afford it. But I can't opt out of needing to have a broken leg set, a disease treated, or emergency treatment for a sudden medical issue. I can't opt out of an education for my child, especially if my child requires special accommodations to get it. That gives these sorts of operations a built in customer base, but if the service is provided by someone in search of profit, they have no incentive to provide anything but the least they can get away with and still make money. 

Venture capitalists, hedge funders, private equity owners-- put them in the education business, turn loose children carrying backpacks full of cash, and the business focus will be on collecting those backpacks. Those who believe in economism might shrug and say, "Well, yes. What else would possibly motivate people other than the chance to collect cash?" But for folks who believe in bigger things, the problem is obvious. If you're going to take care of people, you've got to have your eyes on their humanity and needs, and not the cash strapped to their backs. 

Why "Just Teach The Facts" Doesn't Work (A Message from the Past)

I want to direct your attention to an old article--forty years old--that provided a valuable and even-handed look at Mel and Norma Gabler, a couple that became the driving force in Texas behind pushing a conservative bent to that state's textbooks, and thereby the textbooks of much of the nation. Because this article, though old, speaks loudly to our current situation.

The article (from Texas Monthly's November 1982 issue) is a reminder that the grievances of today's "culture warriors" are not new (the group they founded, Education Research Analysts, is still operating), but in taking a close at the Gablers (who really were a couple of ordinary citizens who ended up running a major activist movement out of their home-- Norma Gabler was an actual grandmom), writer Wiliam Martin offers some important insights into the problems with the Gabler world view.

The Gablers’ views are straight-forward and comprehensive. They believe that the purpose of education is “the imparting of factual knowledge, basic skills and cultural heritage” and that education is best accomplished in schools that emphasize a traditional curriculum of reading, math, and grammar, as well as patriotism, high moral standards, dress codes, and strict discipline, with respect and courtesy demanded from all students. They feel the kind of education they value has all but disappeared, and they lay the blame at the feet of that all-purpose New Right whipping boy, secular humanism, which they believe has infiltrated the school at every level but can be recognized most easily in textbooks.

Yeah, it was secular humanism forty years ago, the critical race theory of an earlier age.

But the Gablers also feel that even those students who learn to read through intensive phonics, memorize their “times tables,” diagram sentences perfectly, and win spelling bees and math contests must still cope with an educational system that is geared to undermining their morals, their individuality, their pride in America, and their faith in God and the free enterprise system. Much of this corrosive work is accomplished through textbooks in history, social sciences, health, and homemaking.

I'm going to remind you that the article was written in 1982.

The Gablers seem to believe not only that the proper subject of history is facts rather than concepts but also that all the essential pertinent facts are well known and should be taught as they were in older textbooks, in a clear chronological arrangement with a tone that is “fair, objective and patriotic.”

They were also upset about the elevation of certain Civil Rights movement figures, what they saw as attacks on religious thought, and as to sexual issues, "their view of the family falls into the Father-Mother-Dick-Jane-Spot-and-Puff mold, with no doubt as to who does what." Women who want equal pay, the Gablers argued, were abandoning their highest profession--motherhood. Sex education = bad. They helped push the rules that said evolution had to be clearly labeled in texts as "just a theory.

Values? Martin quotes from a Gabler pamphlet:

“To the vast majority of Americans,” it asserts, “the terms ‘values’ and ‘morals’ mean one thing, and one thing only; and that is the Christian-Judeo morals, values, and standards as given to us by God through His Word written in the Ten Commandments and the Bible….After all, according to history these ethics have prescribed the only code by which civilizations can effectively remain in existence!”

And they bristled at the invasion of privacy in asking students about opinions of, well, anything.

Where the article gets really interesting is where Martin starts to consider the effects of the Gabler point of view (which contains more familiar moments)

A major result of the Gablers’ misunderstanding of a humanistic approach to learning is a stunted and barren philosophy of education. In a manner typical of those distrustful of the intellectual enterprise, they take pleasure in scoring points against the professionals; Norma says she has read so many textbooks that “I figure I know enough to be a Ph.D.” It is clear, however, that they have little appreciation or understanding of the life of the mind as it is encouraged and practiced in many institutions of learning. They tend to cite the Reader’s Digest as if it were the New England Journal of Medicine and to regard a single conversation with a police chief or a former drug user as an incontrovertible refutation of some point they oppose.

And this next part really gets at the essence of why this "just teach the facts that are the One True Thing that has never changed" approach doesn't serve human beings well:

In general, they know precisely where they stand but have difficulty dealing with a question that originates from different premises. Norma showed me a ninth-grade history book that observed that the route most likely taken by Israelites in their exodus from Egypt would have been across a swamp known as the Sea of Reeds. The book adds: “IT may be that the Sea of Reeds was later called the Red Sea by mistake.” Norma found this highly amusing: “Can you just imagine pharaoh’s army, with all his horses and all his men, completely disappearing into a swamp? Now, that’s a miracle!” I pointed out to her that many scholars feel the biblical story may be an embellished, rather than strictly accurate, account of Israel’s escape from slavery. I noted that there is no record in Egyptian history of such a catastrophic event, and that the Hebrew Bible does indeed say “Reed Sea,” not “Red Sea.” She faltered, then said: “But still…okay…what happened to pharaoh’s army?”

In similar fashion, questions posed by members of the textbook committee at the August hearings characteristically received oblique answers or a puzzled “I don’t think I understand the question.” That, of course, is the point: when one regards education as simply the ingestion of facts and not the investigation and analysis of ironies, ambiguities, uncertainties, and contradictions, one will be far less likely either to understand the question or to provide a useful answer. And that kind of trained incapacity will endanger the vitality and ultimately the survival of treasured forms of religious, political, social, and economic life.

Emphasis mine, because yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Too long for a t-shirt, but I'd gladly put a poster of it in classrooms across the country. You can object to the narrow Gabler view on moral or ethical grounds, but there's also a practical problem--it's a very ineffective way to engage with the world.

The Gablers were a piece of work--

Norma Gabler’s difficulty with unanticipated questions is a communicable disease, and she is working to spread it. “What some textbooks are doing,” she has complained, “is giving students ideas, and ideas will never do them as much good as facts.” Further, in her view students should apparently not show any interest in facts not found in their textbooks. Norma objected to a fourth-grade book that urged students to verify facts by consulting other sources, on the grounds that “it could lead to some very dangerous information.”

On their failure to understand how history works.

The shortcomings of the Gablers’ view of education — as a process by which young people are indoctrinated with facts certified to be danger-free, while being protected from exposure to information that might challenge orthodox interpretations — can be seen by looking at three areas: history, science, and the social sciences. One may or may not agree with the particular objections the Gablers make to various history books, but it is clear that they are oblivious to the idea that the writing of history has never been, nor can it ever be, factual in any pure sense. Those who provided eyewitness accounts and other records with which historians work were engaged in interpretation, not only in adjusting the light under which they chose to display the materials they assembled but even in their selection of events, dates, and people from the infinite possibilities open to them. And to imagine that they or anyone else engaging in the historical enterprise does so free of the influence of his or her values, perceptions, and ideological biases is to believe something no reputable historian has believed for generations.

Nor did they accept that a textbook could contain any criticism of America ever. They were Young Earth creationists. 

There's lots more. This article is worth a read; it's thorough, thoughtful and fair. I'd never run across Martin before--he spent 54 years teaching at Rice and has a variety of other accolades--but he wrote a profile that turns out to have resonance across the decades. It shames the christianist nationalists and astroturf culture panic artistsof today. I'll leave you with his final paragraph of the piece.

It may not be possible to prove that an open mind is better than a closed one, or that the proper antidote to a bad idea is not censorship but a good idea, or that a society in which some questions are never answered may be preferable to one in which some answers are never questioned, but I believe these things to be true. I not only believe them; I have bet my life on them.

Finding the Sweet Spot for Teacher Autonomy

How much autonomy should a classroom teacher have?

On the one hand, a teacher with no autonomy, who simply reads from the book or the canned script is not an actual teacher at all. If you're not bringing something to the classroom as a professional, educated adult, then why are you there? Some autonomy is absolutely necessary for real teaching.

On the other hand, there are limits. I always believed that I worked for the taxpayers, that I had been hired (and paid) by them to teach their children with the best of my professional, educational judgment. My standard response to student requests for a movie day or a free day was, "That's not what the taxpayers hired me to do."

Teaching is such a consuming job, a job that you put yourself into, and so it can be easy to let the line blur between your professional judgment and your personal crusade. The Libs of Tik Tok twitter account dragged into "woke"-shaming prominence a teacher who announced her intention to undermine ideologies with which she disagrees in her classroom. I disagree with most of those same ideologies, but when Robert Pondiscio charged that "what she’s really drunk on is power—albeit a power she does not have," I can't defend her. 

Teachers from all over the ideological map make this mistake. I think of my Jewish student's story of the elementary school teacher who tried to convince her that she was all wrong about Jesus. There are plenty of teachers across the country who are certain that their personal mission to bring souls to Christ should be part of their pedagogical practice. They are wrong, too. The guy in Texas who was fired after explaining to his Black students his belief that his race was superior? Also wrong.

But when I hear all the indoctrination panic, I also think of Lois Anthony, my tenth grade social studies teacher. She was new, and it was 1972, and she really wanted us to understand that George McGovern was a better choice for President and that he would get us out of Vietnam, which was the only right thing to do. She preached it--she even brought in a local liberal newspaper guy to sell the message. But anybody who thinks that any of this would indoctrinate high school sophomores has never met a high school sophomore. All she managed to indoctrinate into us was the knowledge of which buttons to push in order to get her riled up and off track. 

Teacher autonomy is a critical part of serving students, or capturing teachable moments and adjusting the class to meet the needs that students present. At the same time, teachers who write their own complete curriculum from scratch created trouble for the school as a whole. But the argument out there currently isn't really about curriculum--it's about personal stuff.

The best teachers are real people, and they bring their real people stuff into the classroom. Not all of it, and not all the time, but students do not respond particularly well to robot teachers. And teachers' real people stuff includes their beliefs and their values. We're hired to teach students to the best of our professional ability, and it's impossible to draw a hard, clear line between personal and professional beliefs.

So how do we decide how much autonomy is too much? How do we decide that too much of the personal has slid over into the professional?

I don't have a hard and fast answer (because I don't believe that one exists), but I have some thoughts about the guidelines.

Most importantly, the personal can't interfere with the work. Drawing on what we know about human relationships to add to a discussion of relationships in a novel? Probably okay. Talking to students about relationship problems instead of covering the day's lesson? Probably not okay. Letting details of your home life slip through now and then, like photos on a desk? Probably okay. Starting each class with a five-minute update on what your family members are up to? Probably not okay. Letting your personal biases affect how you treat particular students? Not okay. Refusing to consider what those personal biases might be? Also not okay.

When you teach and live in a small community, it's impossible to hide your own story. You can't pretend you don't believe things, haven't been through things, don't worship at a particular church (or no church). 

But what you can do is make sure that your students believe--really, truly believe--that your personal beliefs will have nothing to do with how you treat them, teach them, and evaluate them in your class. That for me is absolutely key. Particularly in a class about communication, you cannot send the message "I want you to express yourselves, but only certain expressions and ideas will be accepted." 

This is not easy. It really isn't. I've known a non-zero number of teachers who have sincerely said, "I don't want to teach students what to think--I just want them to think." But unfortunately, the unspoken--often unacknowledged second part of this was "And I will know they have really thought about this if they reach what I believe is the correct conclusion." (And a great number of folks outside of education operate on the same premise.)

The most basic thing that student suss out in September (if they don't already know via reputation) is whether the teacher wants them come up with ideas of their own, or if students are supposed to come up with the teachers' ideas. Once they've decided that their job is to mimic and regurgitate the teachers' thoughts, any kind of deeper or richer education becomes less likely. And the teacher becomes doubly ineffective if students learn that they need to have a different identity to pass the class. 

Everyone needs to feel safe in that classroom, including safe to freely express whatever it is they have to express. That does not mean they can be free to express hostility and disrespect to other students in that classroom (and in my experience students don't push back against that rule as long as they believe that it applies to everyone). 

It requires restraint and reflection from the teacher. In my case it meant not assigning essays about topics on which my feelings were so strong that I was concerned my biases would leak through. It also requires a certain kind of optimism. I realize that's not on brand here, but I have long believed that if one is open, thoughtful, curious, and willing to move forward, one will move toward better understanding.

Or to take it from another angle--fear and anger are obstacles to understanding and truth, so it's a teacher's job to get fear and anger out of their classroom.

Look, I promised that I wouldn't have a simple answer for this, and I don't. Teacher autonomy is one more string on the educational instrument, and like any string, it only makes music when it's being pulled in opposite directions. Too little autonomy and teachers can't do the work. Too much autonomy and teachers get in their own way of doing the work. Don't trust anyone who says they have a simple answer. 

School Choice Is Not The Goal

Well, Jay Greene told us what he was going to do. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." And he's been giving it a big sloppy hug ever since. At the same time, he's part of the choice movement that is revealing it isn't really interested in choice at all.

In a piece for Fox News, Greene and his colleague Ian Kingsbury (Educational Freedom Institute) offer some really half-assed "research" to show that there's a "disconnect" between rural Texas teachers and rural Texas ("Progressive teachers vs conservative families: School choice can help level the playing field"). 

Let me break down how hard they reached to prop up their point.

They dug up 1,400 contributions by checking school district employees against zip codes with fewer than 500 people per square mile. Then they determined that 90.2% of those contributions were made in support of Democratic candidates. But hey-- Greg Abbott won re-election with 80.7% of the vote. So there you have it-- rural teachers are out of touch with rural parents.

Here are some things they don't look at. How many of those school district employees are teachers? How many teachers are there total in those areas-- are the 1,400 contributions out of 100,000 employees? How did things go in elections other than Abbott's gubernatorial race? 

Nor do they offer a theory about what exactly is happening. Are a bunch of progressive teachers being airlifted into rural areas as part of some socialist assault on rural areas? Or do rural teachers go to teach in rural areas for the same reasons that other folks go to live in rural areas?

They don't mention that teachers are remarkably non-monolithic, as witnessed, for instance, by the huge number of NEA members who voted for Donald Trump. They do mention that rural areas of Texas has been staunch in their opposition to school choice, particularly the vouchers that Greene and Kingsbury are pushing in this article. 

And push they will. Having manufactured their point, they move to the sell.

A teacher who is an active supporter of Democrats could be a perfectly fine teacher of the children of active supporters of Republicans in the same way that the children of Baptists could receive a quality education in a Catholic school. But we don’t compel Baptists to send their children to Catholic schools nor should we compel conservative, rural Texans to send their children to public schools dominated by progressives.

Which is a heck of a leap--should we just assume that everyone who believes something is automatically trying to impose that belief on everyone they encounter? And then this

Rural superintendents have been blocking the expansion of school choice in Texas by whispering in their state legislators’ ears that doing so might jeopardize jobs in the local public schools. But it is unclear why rural legislators should heed these concerns given that rural educators may be undermining the values of their constituents and donating to their political opponents.

Choice is not the point. 

I spotted this piece on Twitter because choicer Corey DeAngelis was using it as part of his reply to Elon Musk's tweet of "The woke mind virus is defeated or nothing else matters." 

Select quotes from the article that he chose to use in that conversation include "All that school choice would do is shift some of the jobs from public schools dominated by Democrats to other schools whose values would be more likely to align with those of parents in those areas" and also "There is no reason to trap rural families in schools dominated by people with sharply different values and priorities." This is thin-sliced baloney (first, Greene and Kingsbury proved nothing and second, do these rural districts not have elected school boards?) but it points us at the real idea here, as does one other response to Musk

we win this war with school choice. https://t.co/iXMewD5Cxk

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) December 12, 2022

 In other words, the goal for these folks is not choice. It's to replace the current public school system with a private one that's aligned with the Proper Values, to wipe out any and all school systems that teach The Wrong Values. 

There are folks in the choice world who believe that choice is in and of itself a virtue. There are people who believe we should have woke schools and conservative schools etc etc etc. But these are not those people.

I have long argued that people do not really want choice, that they just want to get what they want. 

We are seeing repeatedly that choice is not what some folks who nominally support choice actually want. Choicers have campaigned against LGBTQ charters. Patron choice saint Ron DeSantis is not in Florida fighting for every parents' right to have whatever school they want, but to Stop WOKE and CRT wherever it appears. The Libertarians of Croydon, NH, actually trashed a functioning school choice system because they wanted lower taxes. We are seeing repeatedly that choice-loving folks like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education don't want choice for everybody--they just want schools to reflect their values. The book banners do not campaign for libraries where everyone can get the books they want, but libraries where people can only get the books the banners approve of.

Hell, we've now got an entire legal theory that argues that the Framers didn't really want liberty and democracy--they wanted a government that was based on the Right Values.

I will say, again, that this is not all school choice fans. Education policy makes strange bedfellows (remember back when that wacky Common Core united people who love public education and people who hate it). But right now this is a big chunk of the school choice crowd clamoring for an end to schools that teach things they don't approve of. We don't really need choice, reads the subtext. We just need one system that teaches the things we want it to teach. 

This is not a system that would serve anyone but a select few. It's not democratically owned and operated public education in a pluralistic society, and it's not actual school choice, either. It's just another version of the conservative-ish christianist call to "take back our schools" and make them all ours again (and keep us from having to pay taxes to fund schools for Those People). This is not a system that would uphold any of the ideals of American education. 

When Democracy Is Not The Common Good

I've seen many people make versions of the point, and I've done so myself a few times, but Katherine Stewart in her book The Power Worshippers does it really well.

This is not a "culture war." It is a political war over the future of democracy,

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

In other words, this is a brand of "conservatism" that believes that Thomas Jefferson got it wrong and that democracy is not the correct way to run a country. 

This guy

And now, according to a recent piece at Politico, these folks have a formal legal to back it up. 

It's called Common Good Constitutionalism, and one of its proponents is a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeule. As the article explains it

The cornerstone of Vermeule’s theory is the claim that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself”

In other words, democracy is bunk. Liberty is bunk. All that matters is the common good, as defined by wise men who understand that things like abortion bans, the end of same sex marriage, a government that extends its reach to do things like ban naughty books--that's all okay, even if the majority of citizens oppose it and vote against it.

As one might expect (and the article delineates), there are plenty of conservatives who disagree with this theory. The American Conservative wrote of Vermeule and his "moral madness" that "One can critique the limits of freedom and excesses of libertarianism without echoing the nihilism of totalitarians." 

But it has great appeal to the folks who make up what I think of as faux conservatism, the not-my-father's-conservatism that has swept through the GOP. It is also, as many critics of the article have pointed out, awfully fascist-looking. (They are also, the article points out, mostly Catholic).

Well, at least we have a name for it now, this movement that says "We should just take the power and exert it to impose what is Right and True." And we should understand that when we say an attack on public education is an attack on the foundations of democracy, these are people who don't care, people who believe liberty is only for those who align with the Right Values. Moral madness indeed.

Scaring Our Children To Death

In the Washington Post last week, yet another alarm sounded about the mental health crisis among our children, calling it "much vaster than we realize." 

This alarm has been rung again and again over the past year, including a declaration of a national emergency in the fall of 2021 from the American Academy of Pediatrics (and underlined it this year), but for folks working in the field, it's not exactly news. 

I wrote about this, sort of, in 2015, and did so in response to a story about the high rate of teen suicides in Silicon Valley. Back then I focused on the One Wrong Move syndrome, the message we send students that a single screw-up, a critical failure, can leave your whole life in shambles. And I still think that's part of it.

Things have not improved. The WaPo piece cites data saying that 75% of schools report concerns about student depression and trauma. Counselors are in short supply, both in school and out.

Causes? Some folks would like to blame the pandemic and the closure of school buildings or the trauma of personal loss to the disease, but according to the AAP, suicide was already the second leading cause of death for youths age 10-24 in 2018.

There's no doubt that the reasons are complex and varied, that the pandemic and social media and generational trauma (I just saw somebody refer to the under-25 crowd as Generation School Shootings). But I want to point at one factor in particular.

Everyone lives in scary times. In the 1930s, it looked as if the world was going to collapse, first economically and then with a rise of fascism. In the 1970s, we grew up with the assumption that nuclear holocaust was a when-not-if proposition. 

But we live in different times. For the past couple of decades, the go-to political strategy is to whip up fear and anger, anger and fear. From the days when every initiative was The War On [Your Cause Here], we have moved on to an endless series of existential crises. Every election is about the continued existence of democracy and/or our country. Every Congress vote is critical test; every Supreme Court decision is a turning point in the struggle for our very existence. Our enemies want to destroy Western Civilization. 

We are all-apocalypse, all the time.

For those of us who have grown up with this steady escalation, there's a certain recognition that this is political puffery, ever-anxious marketing designed to herd the electorate one way or another. For those of us who live in circumstances that allow us to assume that the floodwaters will not so much as soak our shoes, it's easy to distance ourselves. And much of the country is just sort of numb, hence the impulse to scream louder to cut through the haze and mobilize people.

But if you're a young person in this country, you were born into a theater where people were already screaming "Fire," and your whole life, they have never stopped. Our constant soup of rage and fear may be background noise to adults, but to students, it defines the world they have navigated for their entire lives.

There is no sentiment more quaint than "Not in front of the children." We don't have differences of opinions that the grownups need to work out on our own; we have enemies who must be silenced and obliterated and called out publicly on cable news. School exists downhill from the culture, and our culture is all about fear and anger and oncoming disasters that YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY SURVIVE SO YOU'D BETTER SEND US SOME MONEY AND GET OFF YOUR COUCH AND VOTE AND ARM YOURSELF AAAH AAH AAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

I can't remember the last time the prevailing message on an issue--any issue--was "This is probably going to suck, but we are tough enough to get through it." 

For students, in addition to the general noise about onrushing catastrophe, we send messages about their weakness, about all the things they must be protected from because otherwise they'll be broken and bent, about how they must either be kept in a protective bubble or taught to put on the armor of "grit" or some other quality that we imply they naturally lack. 

Young people are the canaries--the young, vulnerable canaries--in a cultural coal mine. They suffer from adults who forget to affirm them, to tell them that they are in fact strong and resilient and beautifully and wonderfully made, that despite the fact that life will often go in directions contrary to plans or expectations, that they can still rise and advance. And they suffer from adults who reject nuance and complexity in favor of an always-on scream of impending doom, that we must all be terribly afraid because Something Terrible is about to deliver Destruction That Cannot Be Withstood.

I expect that plenty of people will not heed any of this, that the plight of the canaries will not move them. We are a culture that likes to talk about how we value children, especially when we're using it to justify our latest policy initiative, but our actions and choices show that mostly we aren't serious about it. But we could be. We could decide tomorrow to do better, to listen for the canaries, to act like the people they need us to be.