We're drifting. It is time to reclaim the Common Ground.
“Monseigneur Bienvenu had been formerly, according to the accounts of his youth and even of his early manhood, a passionate, perhaps a violent man. His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping in upon him, thought by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may be worn into by drops of water.” ― Les Misérables
I hate generation theory. The very idea that a generation’s worth of unique souls can be pigeon-holed (and often caricatured) irritates me. It is an intellectual shortcut to generalize at such scale, and I do my best not to do it. That said, there are certainly significant differences in the way that I (and my generation) grew up compared to how a child would experience the world today.
And as tempting it is to get all curmudgeonly and reflect on the ‘good old days’ in a Gen-X kind of way, that is not the point of this reflection. For in acknowledging the uniqueness of individual experience we have to acknowledge that for some the ‘good old days’ were not good at all.
They were different, though. Not better, not worse, but very different in a very important way. The external meta-assumptions of society were largely unquestioned, and that left us with a very definite sense of nation (absolute, the sort of thing one would go to war for), self (hetero-normative Western-value hegemony), God (Christian, referenced in everything), and society (cohesive, homogenous). Those were, for better or worse, (probably worse) much more certain times.
While the lack of absolute certainty and universalized values that our children grow up in can be quite refreshing for those that grew up under the large socializing institutions of church, mass media, political discourse, and entrenched social expectation - these great shapers of thinking, which once spoke in unison to shape our generation’s discourse, are now discordant – fractious even- and the messages that our children receive from social media are wildly diverse, algorithmically hedonistic, largely values free, and manipulative.
The one last bastion of positive value development is school. The problem for us as educators is “whose values” and “who says they are good”? At some point, though moral relativism fails – it is unsustainable logic – and we have to take a stand. I am increasingly fascinated by the fact that, although many wars are justified on religious grounds or are positioned as a clash between religions, the more religious texts I read the less I find to justify a ‘religious’ war. The opposite is true – there are massive areas of overlap between faiths (and indeed secular thinking) as to what constitutes the common good.
And so, as educators, it is easy to teach our children about what it takes to be a good person without the dogma or rigidity of generations past - but especially without the identity politics and moral relativism that is so much part of contemporary discourse. Schools should be formative of values, not merely reflective of them. In a world that is increasingly vague and amoral, where leadership is increasingly self-serving, and where sacred cows are all but extinct, schools have a critical role to play in developing concepts of good.