Society's Child

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

Patrick Deneen
mindingthecampus.org
Tue, 02 Feb 2016 16:09 UTC

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.

It's difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I've taught - Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their "fault" for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them - to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students' ignorance is not a failing of the educational system - it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that's an allusion to Lincoln's first inaugural address, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.

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."

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes "flexibility" (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

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.

Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for "multi-culturalism" signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of "diversity" signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

We Must Know...What?

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is the true end of education: the only essential knowledge is that know ourselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions.

Ancient philosophy and practice praised as an excellent form of government a res publica - a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world's first Res Idiotica - from the Greek word idiotes, meaning "private individual." Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

They won't fight against anyone, because that's not seemly, but they won't fight for anyone or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

I love my students - like any human being, each has enormous potential and great gifts to bestow upon the world. But I weep for them, for what is rightfully theirs but hasn't been given. On our best days, I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself. But even on those better days, I can't help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited - a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares - is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.

About the author

Patrick Deneen is David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.

Comment: The Untold History of Modern U.S. Education

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether education is fulfilling its purpose.

A great majority of the so called educated people do not think logically or scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us the objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education.

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals." - Martin Luther King Jr.

Reader Comments

dougnicholson · 2016-07-08T08:58:37Z

Thanks!

Thank you, Professor, for perfectly expressing what I have been observing, and lamenting, for the past 20+ years. The only thing you didn't cover is who or what is responsible for the detached pliability of the millennial generation that we see today. It is the result of a conspiracy. A conspiracy with the intended overthrow of all national governments, especially of the United States, in order that a "One World Government" may, in the near future (they hope), take charge of everyone and everything on the Earth.

Research the terms, "New World Order" and the United Nation's, "Agenda 21" to get a small sampling of what our would-be future rulers have in mind for the future of mankind...all under their benevolent (or not so benevolent) control, of course.

Here's David Rockefeller, brother of former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, on this subject: [Link]

Here's former U.S. President George H.W. Bush on the "New World Order: "[Link]

The "dumbing-down", if you will, of the upcoming generation is part and parcel of this conspiracy. The political left has long ago taken over the education system in America with the goal of teaching young people just enough to make them think that they are self determining in life, but a generation of young people who have no real concept of their history, even their relatively recent past, can have no idea of who they are, or truly ought to be, and will therefore be more easily manipulated to "fit in" to the ordered future that the "elite" of the world have in store for them.

God help them.

blouinm · 2016-07-10T21:17:35Z

Myopic

The fact that "better angels" is actually attributed to Charles Dickens by way of William Seward who offered revisions to Lincoln's speech is omitted here (one must assume through the literary/historical/cultural ignorance the good professor eschews and which one must also assume is a condition under which he himself travels) is just one aspect of this article that might lead one to believe Professor Patrick Deneen to be out of touch, doddering, self-serving and myopic. Fifty dollars says he can't quote anyone of cultural significance in the last five years. A thousand dollars says his students can.

Clearpupil · 2016-07-31T06:01:14Z

Plato preferred empty students

Unless Professor Patrick Deneen has the dullest batch of students since George Bush Jr hopped on the school bus, perhaps he should wake up. He admirably demonstrates the hardened arteries of a pons! How little he learned from the youthful teachings of the Greeks and the outrageous Chaucer! So Professor Deneen's students are indifferent to the ideas he turned to in his formative years and are straying from the booklist! How Socratic of them all! They eschew the lessons of the New Testament and the Peloponnesian Wars and even, God forbid, Guy Fawkes? He doesn't consider that perhaps they might prefer reading Goethe, Freud or Derrida. They may read other histories like the Muqaddima or see meaning in the religions of the East. This is not the end, but the fruition of western civilization which he is apparently oblivious to. We are learning that the Greeks knew of the Apanishads, Chaucer quotes Rumi and Dante quotes Qur'an none of these were "western". He could learn a thing or two from his students and come to embrace some of the more effervescent ideas of the modern age. Once he sees their ideas as inspiration rather than "emptiness" he will be able to teach through them rather than against them.

temnix · 2018-08-16T16:34:11Z

Responding to an article from two years ago...

You are absolutely right about your analysis here. Personally, as someone with artistic pretensions, I get to see the same situation from a somewhat different angle - the uselessness of artistic erudition, discrimination and talent in today's world, among all the creators flooding the scene. Traditionally an artist in any genre had to hunt for skill and inspiration, seek unusual experiences, talk with the learned, visit historical sites, monuments, grand works of genius on Grand Tours, compare different styles, know to use allusions and so on... But this no longer serves any purpose, because mastery acquired as a result is lost on audiences. Today they no longer even recognize, and become offended at distinction, of basic skill. If you are not familiar with the topic, simply compare, say, book and videogame covers from 1970s-1990s to modern stuff, and be prepared for a shock.

Allusions are actually a key word here. In a way, any fact of culture that may be expected to resonate with an audience is a ready allusion, whether obscure or well-known. To say nothing of writers, a painter, for example, used to be able to rely on the effects of colors and their combinations, of lines and shapes on the viewers, which made painting a form of communication. The more advanced arts were never, of course, targeted at the crowd. But given well-developed sensibility, even an abstract painting carried its meaning across to the middle class just fine. A splotch of blue in the center does not work the same way and does not mean what a line of red in a corner does, and this was something a person could be taught to feel.

Young artists are no longer taught this, in fact, there is an aggressive backlash against any allusions per se and complexity - because they are "elitist." The ability to express truths of one's spirit is needed just as little as those truths themselves. Which makes personal development for an artist, with those searches, boosts, experiences I began with, an exercise in a strange form of archeology. All good things are in the past now - evicted there. Developing means going backwards to a past which, unlike the future, is limited, it can be depleted, and it recedes. An artist finds something good there, because he cannot find anything of the sort around him. He improves after all, but nobody cares, because it is an abandoned legacy for others. Who needs fresh influences in, on his work? Who cares that he finally read "Paradise Regained" or visited the Great Barrier Reef (what is left of it) or found appreciation and meaning of ritual body-painting of an Indian tribe? Those things are not part of the consciousness of today, nor do they penetrate to enrich it. The present rolls along like an armored behemoth, destroying the track as it goes. Not only is the education system discouraging critical thinking and self-realization broadly, it eliminates conversation and belonging even for those who somehow slip through.

As for your expressed hope of a collapse of this system under the weight of its own ineptitude, I cannot share it. A system can become progressively more primitive. Structures will fall, of course, but this does not bother our contemporaries, especially the young, who have never been those structures' beneficiaries. Who have never enjoyed the financial independence, the leisure or the political power necessary for curiosity and self-reflection as well as assertion of values.