The Kids Aren't Alright

An alarming peek into the state of critical thinking in the American school system

In the preface of the Great Books, Mortimer Adler set out a basic framework to analyze any text you may come across:

The art of reading a book or piece of writing consists in asking the right questions in the right order. They are as follows:
(1) What is this piece of writing about? What is its leading theme or main point? What is it trying to say?
(2) How does it say what it is trying to say? How does the writer get his central point across? How does he tell his story or argue for his conclusion to produce the effect in us that he is aiming at?
(3) Is it true—factually or poetically—in whole or part? Has the writer won our assent or sympathy? And if not, what reasons do we have for disagreeing with or rejecting his view of things?
(4) What of it? What meaning does it have for us in the shape of opinions or attitudes that we are led to form for ourselves as the result of reading this piece?

Mortimer Adler, "Introduction to the Great Books"

However in an increasingly feelings oriented world, where decisions are based not around logic or critical perspectives, thinking for oneself takes a back seat. We are entering an era, where this seemingly simple and basic looking framework is siloed away in academic circles as opposed to public discourse where it belongs.

What is alarming to me is the lax nature of people around this subject. It seems to be a foreign concept to people that if one doesn't think for themselves, someone else will.

This pedagogy of learning that has slowly made its way to the American school system can be observed first hand with undergraduates. Their minds held hostage in a prison fashioned by media noise and the current generational zeitgeist. Educators have stripped students of their adventurous appetite to learn whilst replacing it with elements of complacency.

What this creates is far more sinister, they allow future generations to be left to the whims of hucksters, hustlers and hooligans.

Stories and narratives are powerful means for destroying mindsets, the bundles of presuppositions, received wisdom and shared understanding in our legal and political discourse… They can show that what we believe is ridiculous self serving or cruel.
~ Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative

Here's an example that highlights the potency of stories. Patricia Williams in her book The Roosters Egg recounts perusing the shelves of a dollar store in the late 90’s. She noticed that some dolls were marked for sale at $3.99 while others priced at $2.99 were marked down to the sale price of $1.99. Since price differences for similar goods were common, Williams thought nothing of this. But then, she noticed that the cheaper dolls were identical to the more expensive ones in every respect but one: they were black. Williams became distraught. Racism was “being made rational” by market forces! The story “captures” the “Devalued Condition” of blacks in America and the “absolute necessity of a corrective response”.

Let’s take a step back and break these statements down using the same framework that Mortimer Adler proposed. This piece is trying to link two disparate concepts that don’t mesh, in an aim to allow the audience to hand-hold themselves to the conclusion that this one oddly specific event encompasses the devaluation of an entire race.

Daniel Subotnik rebukes Patricia Williams' arguments in a paper. He claims that Patricia was “showing herself too ready to extract a global message from one experience”. Furthermore, he turns one of her arguments in on itself: “if the Black dolls regularly sold not for $3.99 but for $5.99 would you conclude this as prices reflecting the skyrocketing status of the black population?”

This recount by Patricia Williams, as logically flawed as it may be, has swayed people towards the concept of Critical Race Theory which has seen a baffling level of support from the general population. But what do you expect? When educational institutions no longer focus on deconstructing ideas but more so on the feelings of its students, these stories become too irresistible to ignore. Before you know it, someone has done your thinking for you.

Shying away from critical ideas has blunted the growth of generations by basing progress on the least common denominators of students. This faux progress leads to devastating effects, it in itself is a virus, a mutation. The more we believe we are "Doing good by doing less", we move the needle of future growth backwards.

When students are not equipped with the tools to battle the labyrinth of ideas and decide what is good and bad, they can no longer protect themselves from enslavement by parasitic ideas. This erodes the fine tapestry of progress that we have made thus far. But how are the general public supposed to know when they were never taught how to question effectively in the first place? Let me be one of the few to say, if this goes on we cannot hope to see ourselves progressing as a society because frankly, the kids aren't alright.