Thursday All Is Not Lost Open Thread

May I introduce young Zach Gottlieb, a senior in a Los Angeles high school.

My revelation came in the spring, after a typical day in 11th-grade AP English. The topic was gender and how the experiences of the authors we were studying related to our world today. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear anything I hadn’t heard many times before.

Class discussions tend to go like that. We’ve been inculcated with approved positions on issues such as gender identity, patriarchy, cultural appropriation and microaggressions. Any perceived misstep can ruin a reputation in a flash.

and,

Almost a century ago, the psychologist Jean Piaget defined the stages of cognitive development. Up until about age 2, children learn about cause and effect through their actions. For the next five years, they learn through pretend play but struggle with logic. By middle school, they’re in the “concrete operational stage.” Their thinking is more logical but still rigid. Then around age 12, children enter the “formal operational stage,” becoming capable of theoretical and abstract reasoning. This progression isn’t just about acquiring knowledge; it’s about a change in the very nature of how we think.

Madeline Levine, a psychologist and expert in child development, says today’s adolescents aren’t making it all the way: “We’re turning out kids who don’t think in complex ways.”

“Some of what I see,” she adds, “is even pre-operational thinking. It’s I can only see it from my point of view. This egocentrism starts to go away in concrete operational thinking.”

maybe it used to,

During lunch at school recently, someone brought up transgender females getting banned from British rowing. Letting trans women compete on a women’s rowing team, one kid said, would be like allowing a trans LeBron James to compete in the WNBA. A girl we were sitting with immediately called him transphobic and patriarchal. She didn’t just disagree with him. She demanded that he retract what he said.

“Just because you’re offended,” he replied, a little frustrated, “doesn’t mean it’s offensive.”

What happened next was predictable. The girl shunned him, told her friends he was a jerk, and later, when another student complained to me about what he’d said, I avoided the topic entirely because I knew the drill: If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong. If you offend me, you’re canceled.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”

This boy, Zach, is only 17 or 18 years old.  Let us all pray he is among the many and not the few of his generation.