So True, So True

Barbara Nicolosi on teaching a newer generation:

One of the things that marks Gen Xers is the way they apprehend attempts to educate them as an assault on their personal dignity. Not everybody, but it is a generational trend. My experience with my students is that they are nearly incapable of debate, because every time you disagree with them, you suddenly find yourselves in a battle with their emotional survival. It makes many of them invincibly ignorant, I’m afraid.

An example of this comes up every time I teach Gen Xer’s this class I’ve got on the nature of beauty. Invariably, after I have gone through the three elements of the beautiful from St. Thomas – wholeness, harmony and radiance – one of the undergrads will prop a limp elbow into the air – what is it with this generation that even asking a question in class has to be a statement on how ambivalent they are about even being there? – and then he or she will issue forth, “I don’t agree.”

And then I respond, pretending all the while that this is the first time I’ve heard the astonishingness, “You don’t agree that there are elements to the beautiful? Okay, cool. Give me an argument.”

“Well, I think, you know, that any body can just decide what, you know, they like.”

“That’s not an argument.”

“I don’t need to give you an argument. It’s what I think. I have a right to my opinion.”

AHHHHHHHHHHH. There it is. The “rights” thing. And the abuse of the word “think.” There isn’t thinking going on here. There is resentment and petulance and the need to assert one’s existence. But it ain’t thinking. A huge inhibitor to great art coming out from the young generations today is that the assertion of knowable truth (including all of the skills that go into excellence of craft) comes off to Gen Xers and Millenials as an assault on their autonomy and personhood.

I understand Barbara Nicolosi’s frustration.

I’ve seen and heard of this sort of thing myself. But I think the problem is alot bigger than just blaming it on “Generation X.” (This “Generation” crap originated with the media. Why does the media obsess with categorizing everyone? Oh, right. They do it with gays, women, blacks and everyone else.) The bigger problem is that students aren’t taught to think; they’re not taught to defend what they believe. So when confronted with someone who dares challenge them to actually support their beliefs, it’s soon obvious that they’re incapable of doing so. To overcome that insecurity and inability, we get psuedo-answers like “I have the right to my opinion.” Um, nooo, you don’t. Jackass. Not if you can’t support it with facts and logic. You might, for example, have the right to believe that the color blue is better than red, but in that case, there’s no objective standard to determine which color is better. But something like the minimum wage: whether it is good for people or not is not a matter of “opinion.” (It actually hurts the very people it’s meant to help, but the union$ sure as hell like it.)

A public school system that can’t teach students beyond “I have the right to my opinion” is a failure.

Filed under: Everything Else , Barbara Nicolosi, Generation X