"Ambitious, dissatisfied, and vaguely angry'

Peter Wood explores how college today is shaping the American character of the young.

Children never learn or remember all the details of they are taught, but they drink in the basic messages about what is important and what’s not. In that sense, America has its own madrasses—secular madrassas of multiculturalism and sustainability. We call them public schools. Ashley Thorne’s article here last week, “Green Goblins,” pondered the recent poll of American school children by an environmentalist group that purported to find, “One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up.”  Our success in teaching reading and math may be a bit spotty, but our success at instilling eco-apocalyptic fear in preteens is outstanding.

American Character, the Remix: How College is Shaping Us Now

The character that contemporary American education seems most to foster is also a person unmoored to any abiding sense of reality. He or she—more often she given that about 58 percent of the students are young women—is ambitious, dissatisfied, and vaguely angry.  College has made it a settled fact that America is a profoundly unfair society, but that the “structural inequalities” run so deep that there is little that can be done about them. This allows the alternatives of resentful passivity or frenetic pursuit of symbolic protests and acts of atonement. Often you see both in the same person. Lethargically pessimistic one day, stridently assertive the next.