{"id":1596216,"date":"2022-08-09T08:48:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-09T12:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1596216"},"modified":"2022-08-09T08:50:08","modified_gmt":"2022-08-09T12:50:08","slug":"the-heart-breaking-inside-story-of-how-we-hollowed-out-a-generation-of-young-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-heart-breaking-inside-story-of-how-we-hollowed-out-a-generation-of-young-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"The Heart-Breaking Inside Story Of How We Hollowed Out A Generation Of Young Americans\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-heart-breaking-inside-story-of-how-we-hollowed-out-a-generation-of-young-americans%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1596216&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The following is an excerpt from the newly released paperback edition of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.regnery.com\/9781684513802\/hollowed-out\/\">Hollowed Out<\/a>: A Warning About America\u2019s Next Generation (August 2022, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.regnery.com\/\">Regnery Publishing<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In 20I7, I wrote an article asking whether teachers \u201chave a front row seat to American decline.\u201d I noted that when teachers get together to discuss education, they have a common complaint: young Americans are \u201chollowed out.\u201d It is not just that many students can\u2019t recognize America\u2019s leading politicians; it\u2019s not just that they lack knowledge that you might expect them to have; it\u2019s not just that they appear to have no interest in acquiring wisdom. That would be bad enough, but it goes far deeper, and is far more worrying. They seem bereft of an understanding of what it means to be fully human.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What do I mean by that? I mean that they seem mysteriously barren of the behaviors, values, and hopes from which human beings have traditionally found higher meaning, grand purpose, or even simple contentment\u2014and little that is worthwhile has filled this vacancy.<\/p>\n<p>The kids are not entirely, or even mainly, at fault. Those who came before them\u2014their parents, cultural leaders, political leaders, and, yes, educators\u2014were too often accomplices in letting these same values, virtues, traditions, and aspirations slip away, assuming that somehow their loss would be made good later or that they really didn\u2019t matter after all or that they were hindrances that should be willfully ignored. Rather than setting \u201chigh expectations\u201d for students, we settled for \u201cunderstanding\u201d them.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, high expectations were often not being instilled at home or in church or in other institutions either. Laxity can be culturally contagious. But high expectations are necessary for young people to mature into responsible adults; they set a framework and offer guidance. Without those benchmarks, there is something of great significance that goes missing\u2014and we see it now in our students. There is little yearning among them to be fully rounded individuals\u2014 intellectually, culturally, morally, spiritually\u2014little interest in cultivating fallow ambition, little urgency to become a responsible adult. The lights are on, the students are at home\u2014and they don\u2019t particularly want to go anywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In terms of economics and technology, they are, on a global-historical scale, wealthy. Yet they are utterly destitute in the realm of what we might call \u201chuman flourishing\u201d\u2014fulfilling the timeless aspirations and deepest yearnings of the human soul: to love, to know, to honor, to serve, to lead. What is missing in our students implies that something is missing in our homes, in our culture, in our politics, and in our country. What I and many of my fellow teachers see in our classrooms is a culture that has gone terribly wrong. It portends nothing less than a generational crisis.<\/p>\n<p>In Cicero\u2019s An Essay on Old Age, Cato is quoted as having said, \u201cThose indeed who have no internal resource of happiness, will find themselves uneasy in every stage of life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>My worry is that a great many people today, especially our students, lack the \u201cinternal resources\u201d to provide for their own long-term happiness and contentment. A few examples that form an unhappy picture: many students today show little interest in getting married or starting families; children are anathema to the students\u2019 ubiquitous environmental puritanism\u2014and their equally ubiquitous self-absorption. Many refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, even labeling it \u201cvaguely fascistic\u201d; they snicker outright at the very notion of patriotism. Their view of America is nihilistic and myopic\u2014 and nihilism is not generally a healthy state of mind. They are shockingly ignorant about the world\u2019s major religions and stridently secular in their morality, and they assign little value to the \u201cgreat books\u201d of Western civilization or to Western liberal values or to the Judeo-Christian tradition; this, too, is part of their nihilism. They live largely solitary lives, inextricably connected to their phones but largely disconnected from parents, churches, and communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Instead, they eat alone, they study alone, they even socialize alone in a virtual world untethered to the physical. They are often friendless and depressed, which explains why they harm themselves and commit suicide at a rate unrivaled in American history\u2014a history, incidentally, that they see as a sordid tale of endless oppression and sprawling injustices. They are sympathetic to the icono-clasm, anarchism, violence, and ritualistic self-loathing on display in the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere. They raise suspicious eyebrows at any attempt to defend or explain the achievements of Thomas Jefferson or the heroes of the Civil War (about whom they usually know nothing).<\/p>\n<p>In sum, they are disdainful of any knowledge beyond their computer screens and alienated from the values, aspirations, institutions, and commitments that traditionally define \u201cgrowing up.\u201d Older generations might remark on this generation\u2019s immaturity, its absorption with thoughts and desires unworthy of a serious life\u2014and they\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the COVID crisis of 2020\u2014with its mandated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is an excerpt from the newly released paperback edition of Hollowed Out: A Warning About America\u2019s Next Generation (August 2022, Regnery Publishing).\u00a0 In 20I7, I wrote an article asking whether teachers \u201chave a front row seat to American decline.\u201d I noted that when teachers get together to discuss education, they have a common &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1596456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1596216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1596216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1596456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1596216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1596216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1596216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}