In the public libraries in the places I have lived, the children’s book sections always display, prominently, books urging children to become activists who change the world.
“Children can change the world” is a fine notion on its own. Every place and generation needs rabble-rousers, questioners of the status quo, and leaders who will rally people to help make the world a little better. And change will often come from the passionate youth.
But may I suggest that in the United States of America, in the year of our Lord 2024, we have an excess of changemakers? We have a youth-activist glut, and maybe young folks should focus on understanding stuff more before they try changing stuff?
Elite college campuses today are characterized by unusually high impatience and intolerance of dissent — these are the attitudes fit for revolutionaries and activists, not for students. Now that the quads of many major universities have turned into occupations and protests with demands pertaining to U.S. foreign policy — all at the expense of inquiry, education, and normal college life — it’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that America’s youth could use a little more listening and learning and a little less demanding and changemaking.
But the educational establishment in America is and has been for years dedicated to turning children into young activists.
Here’s Scholastic: “Five tips that kids can utilize to be changemakers.”
Here’s the George Lucas Educational Foundation: “Guiding Students to See Themselves as Changemakers.”
Here’s a prominent education nonprofit group called Ashoka: “We are looking for pioneering institutions who want to support a generation of children & adults to be powerful changemakers.”
If you are constantly taught throughout your youth that your destiny is to be a changemaker, then you are going to be looking for changes to make constantly. Maybe this helps convince young people that the world is extraordinarily bad.
Also, it convinces them that they already know what is right and wrong before they really know anything.
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Schools for children — that is, K-12 education — are properly understood as parents’ partners in transmitting the culture (knowledge, norms, history, etc.) to the next generation. Activism and changemaking are part of America’s history, and so some amount of that is proper in American education. But the education that goes too far in making activists and changemakers ends up doing the opposite of transmitting the culture.
We have made a generation that is disproportionately revolutionary, even before they know enough to have something to revolt against.
