FROM THE EDITOR: Youth Is the Time for Intellectual Rigor, Not Short-sheeted Options
Anti-intellectualism is enjoying a hay-day, and our youth are the ones feeling the effects.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Email Martin
Say this much for Meryl Streep — she knows how to play the villain. Her newest film, “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” resurrects Miranda Priestly, the arrogant and sadistic head of the mythical Runway magazine she first played in the original 2006 film of the same name sans the “2.”
Only this time, her villainy is shaking up not young personal assistants as in the first film, but a whole cultural movement that is telling women to forget a career and embrace the “trad wife” lifestyle.
The telltale line this is the film’s target comes toward the end, when Streep says to Andy Sachs — the terrorized assistant in the first film turned confident journalist in the second — “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”
In her review of the film for the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg rightly notes:
Young women increasingly distrust the idea of throwing themselves into a job, especially amid a brutal labor market. In “Girls®,” an often sharp new book about the online commodification of young women’s lives, the Gen Z writer Freya India laments that for her generation, work “became an end in itself, the path to female empowerment.” India is a conservative, but her critique is shared by many on the left who dismiss the idea of “dream jobs” with the declaration, “I do not dream of labor.”
For Goldberg, Priestly’s clarion feminist line is a wake-up call to women and girls willing to walk away from professional careers for the sake of the domestic life.
“That’s no reason to tell girls and women to curtail their aspirations,” Goldberg writes. “People should know, Miranda says during her reverie about her career, that there’s a cost to a life like hers [divorce, absence from her children’s lives]. It’s clear she doesn’t regret paying it.”
It not just girls and women, however, who need to be reminded that it’s no sin in going after a successful, fulfilling professional career.
The Short-sheet Generation
In a range of ways, adults and institutions today are shutting off opportunities before students have an opportunity to fully discover for themselves what they might want to pursue.
The motivation isn’t malicious, but the effect is damaging. Students find themselves steered into less-challenging career options that are short-sheeting their intellectual growth and aspirations.
The push for Career and Technical Education (CTE) offers but one example.
In Spotsylvania County and Fredericksburg City Schools, the push to accelerate CTE is growing. Part of the push is legitimate and based on market demands — high student interest and too few seats in available programs. School leaders are attentive to those demands and are working to meet them.
However, the push also stems in part from the growing anti-intellectualism that is driving our culture.
One hears this criticism of intellectual pursuits in statements like, “Not everyone is cut out for college.” It’s one often floated by CTE defenders, who point to bypassing college and going straight into a career that can lead to a comfortable life.
To be sure, CTE is a solid choice for some students. Before pushing them in that direction, however, advisors should reflect on another possibility before promoting CTE options. Though well-intentioned, pushing CTE may actually be less about what is best for the student and more about what school reformers have long accused public education of falling victim to — “The soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Somewhere over the past several decades, a sizeable sector of American culture has become terrified of intellectually challenging work.
We see this in a variety of ways. One is the growing distrust of highly educated people. Academics themselves are acutely aware of the problem, as evidenced by a book the MIT Press published last year by Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson: “The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism.”
This distrust of the intellectual elite runs deeper than professors in ivory-covered halls. It includes high-school teachers, school leaders, journalists, professional government staff members at local and state levels, along with judges, attorneys, and doctors. Most of these professions require advanced education. And most are seeing people’s trust in them reach record lows with the general public. (See “Americans’ Ratings of U.S. Professions Stay Historically Low” from Gallup. While doctors rank well in this survey, doctors themselves have for more than a decade expressed concern about patients’ declining trust in them and their profession.)
The push, therefore, to funnel kids into CTE careers is not just about recognizing college isn’t for everyone (and, in fact, it isn’t), but it is likely also tied to our growing distrust of intellectual pursuits.
Consider a student, for example, with an aptitude for car repair. To be good at that works requires some core skills that, properly nurtured, can lead to careers beyond a service bay.
People who are mechanically inclined tend to have good spatial intelligence, an innate understanding of mathematics, and the rudiments of engineering. Perhaps automotive repair will suit them. But they should also be presented with an understanding of how to build upon those skills and pursue more challenging disciplines — engineering, automotive design, chemistry, or physics.
Setting a Table, Not Closing Doors
Our educational system has significant challenges before it. The move to create more opportunities through programs like CTE is, in part, a response to those challenges.
But those opportunities should be about setting a table that allows students to experiment and explore a range of more-challenging options. They should not be shortcuts to employment that may work in the short-run but significantly handicap students who forgo more-challenging work.
Middle school and high school are a time to explore, and to be pushed to do hard things. And it must be a conscious choice on the part of adult leaders to set these challenges before students.
Youth is the time to build young people’s core skills in challenging areas — math, literature, science, writing, engineering, and philosophy — not lock them into futures that don’t equip them with the knowledge they need to adjust in a changing rapidly economy.
Our work lives are growing longer, not shorter. And we should want our children to love working in jobs that allow them to pursue their full intellectual and creative potential.
Yes — those jobs are demanding and they come with trade-offs. But those are decisions for individuals to make. Not adults who want to shield them from intellectually rigorous work.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
