Doom and Gloom

A friend of mine is friends with Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. My friend leans to the right a bit more than I do, but it’s my friendship with her that has led me to be interested in what Pondiscio is thinking and writing. Recently, Pondiscio wrote an article for National Review titled “There’s Too Much Doom and Gloom in the Classroom”:

“Maya is 13 years old and in eighth grade.”

“First period is English, where her class is reading a young adult novel about a teenage girl who self-harms, spirals into depression, and eventually attempts suicide. Her teacher praises the book for its honesty and ‘unflinching emotional truth.’ After a brief discussion, the class writes about how trauma shapes identity.”

“Second period is social studies. Today’s reading assignment comes from the 1619 Project, followed by a worksheet asking students to reflect on how racism is ‘baked into the structure of American life.’ Last week, students read a chapter from A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and discussed whether the U.S. was founded to protect the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Maya takes notes quietly, worried she might say the wrong thing.”

“In science, the class is studying climate change. The teacher plays a documentary that includes images of wildfires, melting glaciers, and disappearing coastal towns. Maya learns that humanity will face catastrophic collapse if global carbon emissions do not reach ‘net zero’ by the time she’s in her thirties. During lunch, she tells a friend she’s not sure she wants to have kids someday.”

“In the afternoon, Maya joins her ‘action civics’ project group. Their capstone project is about gun violence. They’re creating a slide deck and organizing a letter-writing campaign. The project guidelines encourage students to ‘identify a systemic injustice’ and ‘propose a structural solution.’ Her group adviser urges them to ‘center’ their personal stories.”

“Tomorrow is a half day. Teachers will spend the afternoon in professional-development workshops on ‘trauma-informed pedagogy,’ where they’ll learn to spot signs of anxiety, disengagement, and despair in students – and to treat these as evidence of trauma.”

“Almost no one will consider the possibility that we are the ones traumatizing students.”

“If you spend time in American classrooms today, especially in schools shaped by the dominant ideas of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP), you might get the impression that the world is a broken and dangerous place – and that wise and loving adults equip children to navigate it successfully by making them aware of just how bad things are.”

“We think we’re helping them. But what if we’re not?”

“That question lies at the heart of a compelling and underappreciated body of research led by Jeremy Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Clifton studies ‘primal world beliefs,’ or ‘primals’ – deep, often unconscious assumptions about the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Enticing or dull? Alive or mechanistic? His work suggests that these beliefs shape everything; our sense of well-being, our resilience, our openness to experience, even our mental health outcomes.”

“Clifton’s research has not made its way into teacher-training programs, education-policy debates, or district SEL initiatives. The only mention I’ve found of it in a publication aimed at teachers is a 2022 Education Week interview in which Clifton offered a quiet warning: ‘Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.’ This quiet warning, if heeded, could spark a revolutionary change in American education. It could also guide those seeking to respond more productively to the mental health crisis afflicting America’s children.”

“That crisis is  no longer abstract or emerging – it is measurable, visible, and urgent. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, more than 40 percent of high school students reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, up from 28 percent a decade earlier. Nearly one in five seriously considered suicide. Among girls, the numbers are even more dire: Nearly 60 percent reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, and 30 percent said they had considered suicide. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association have jointly declared this a national emergency.”

…

“Primal beliefs are, as Clifton describes them, ‘the lenses through which we interpret everything.’ They act as default assumptions – about the world, not about ourselves. And they are stable, subconscious, and consequential. Clifton and his colleagues have identified 26 such beliefs, organized into clusters, with three especially predictive of life outcomes: whether the world is (1) safe or dangerous, (2) enticing or dull, and (3) alive or mechanistic.”

“What’s most fascinating and counterintuitive is that our primal beliefs aren’t shaped by life experience so much as the shape our experience of life. For example, Clifton’s research found that people who work in high-risk professions such as law enforcement – who routinely encounter danger – are more likely than the general population to believe that the world is safe. It’s not that they’ve been shielded from harm; it’s that their belief in a fundamentally safe world appears to shape how they interpret risk, navigate uncertainty, and process adversity. In other words, it’s not life events that determine primal beliefs; it’s primal beliefs that determine how we process life events, how we understand and absorb them.”

…

“To be clear, none of this is an argument for rose-colored glasses. Children need to know that the world contains hardship, injustice, and danger. But they also need to know that it contains beauty, opportunity, and meaning – and that history contains a record of genuine progress and that further progress remains possible. And only one of those orientations leads reliably to flourishing.”

“As Clifton puts it, ‘There’s beauty everywhere – we have only to open our eyes to see it.’ But someone must show children how.”

“Perhaps the most remarkable and underreported aspect of primal world beliefs is that they’re not fixed. They’re beliefs, not traits. They can be influenced by what we emphasize, what we model, and what we direct children’s attention toward.”

“Every day in school, children like Maya learn math, reading, science, and history. But they also learn – through countless implicit and explicit signals – what kind of world they live in. That world, they learn, might be a battleground and a graveyard. Or it might be a treasure map.”

“The question is: Which signal are we giving them?”

I think I might have agreed with Robert Pondiscio 20 years ago. But today? Nah.

The fact of the matter is that our country is split right down the middle. One half is following a president that wants to rewrite history, has cut billions from science and health research, and is a denier of real threats like pandemics and climate change. The other half believes the world is burning and can’t figure out how to save it.

And I have ocean front property in Arizona to sell you if you think this split hasn’t seeped into our K-12 classrooms. It has, and this particular world view split has been damaging to everyone – but especially our young learners.

Richard Elmore, the long-time education professor at Harvard, who passed away in 2021, used to play a game (and wrote a book) called (and titled) “I Used to Think…And Now I Think…” Let me employ Professor Elmore’s prompt to show how my primal beliefs have changed over the years.

I used to think the world was safe, and now I think the world is dangerous.

I used to think the world was enticing, and now I think the world is dull.

I used to think the world was alive, and now I think the world is mechanistic.

That’s probably why I don’t see much value in Pondiscio’s cry to end the doom and gloom inside our schools.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB