The Lost Generation

Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know nothings

So many excerpts I can paste here but these are a few:

"My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture."

"We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like "critical thinking," "diversity," "ways of knowing," "social justice," and "cultural competence."

"In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to "social justice"), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being "judgmental") are hindrances and handicaps."

I know the Millennials are taking a beating recently.  They earned it to a degree.  As I have observed elsewhere, it is every bit our own damn fault.  The good Professor here does an excellent job in explaining the depths to which we have sunk and will continue to sink.  We have wasted a generation to our own excesses and we will see them drift away at our own peril.  At a time when they need mentorship the most, we are bored to distraction and dither away the last chance at passing on freedom to later generations.  We can continue to dump on them or see this as an opportunity to pass the torch.  When this light goes out, who or when would you suppose will light it again?