Schools Foment Shootings by Undermining Self-Esteem

I don’t recall what exactly he said—I just remember throwing my inch-thick biology book end-over-end at the back of his head. It had been weeks of relentless “your mom” jokes and the like, but what I felt as the book thudded against his skull was not righteousness but helplessness. And that feeling only intensified when he—twice my size—picked me up by the throat and held me there in front of my ninth-grade science class. I’m not proud of having resorted to violence, but I felt cornered, out of options.

Thankfully, my sense of helplessness was not generalized but delimited to dealing with bullies. Many young people today are not so fortunate, flooded with debilitating, all-encompassing doubt. As the nation struggles to understand why schools have become killing grounds, this fact gets buried under debates about mental illness, the so-called news contagion effect (whereby news of a shooting inspires copycats), and of course, access to guns.¹

Certainly, these are factors to consider. But they don’t change the simple fact that kids with a healthy sense of self-esteem do not kill other kids, regardless of what they see on the news or how easily they can access firearms.

Self-esteem is a vital human need. It is not something that can be given or taken, though it can be cultivated or undercut. It can’t be gained by obsessing over amassing followers or likes on social media, nor by bullying others and asserting one’s dominance, though these things can help destroy it. Rather, self-esteem is the conviction that one’s own mind is competent to deal with reality and that one is worthy of success—that one is capable of accomplishing healthy, life-serving goals and deserves to do so. It’s an achievement, a result of careful thought and sustained effort.

But how much harder is it to achieve when those whose job it is to nurture self-esteem instead work to undermine it? Not only do many educators and parents fail to encourage and help children learn how to think and become efficacious, but they also paint the whole of mankind as incompetent, or worse, self-destructive.

Instead of science, children are taught that we’re destroying the planet. They “learn” that new generations must work overtime not only to zero out their own impact on the environment, but also to beat the clock and mitigate centuries of their ancestors’ shortsightedness. If they fail, it’s lights out for Mother Earth and her inhabitants. This may motivate them to act from fear and a shackled sense of duty, but not from personal passion. It’s understandable that a Greta Thunberg would feel the need to get up and scold world “leaders” at the United Nations: “you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”²

Instead of history or the humanities, children are taught that America—and even the world at large—is systemically racist. Witness the horror of “privilege walks,” such as one recorded and posted to YouTube under the title “Heartbreaking Moment When Kids Learn About White Privilege.” Educators line students up and ask them to race—but only after taking several steps forward or back in response to questions designed to highlight supposed racial inequalities. “What I see in the video,” as one commenter put it, is “kids who use[d] to get along and not care about race, have now been divided and started to resent each other. Great Job teachers!”³ Such activities, of course, don’t solve any problems but only compound them. They teach kids that one’s failures and achievements have nothing to do with hard work and personal merit but rather with the success of one’s “identity group” in pushing its own agenda.

Yes, we may in fact face a mental health crisis, but if so, it’s one that many parents and teachers are helping to stoke with guilt trips and apathy-inducing tales of how bad things are. Young people feel the emotional heat of the issues they’re bombarded with, even if they don’t understand what’s really happening. They don’t yet have the tools to separate manufactured problems from genuine ones, or to see that virtually all the latter, ultimately, are solvable. And those tasked with equipping them with these tools are instead stripping them of those few they already have. Instead of imbuing kids with a can-do attitude and a sense of optimism, what they’re teaching amounts to learned helplessness. They are thereby creating a crisis of confidence.

Sun Tzu observed that you can push an enemy back by flanking him on three sides. But if you cover the fourth or corner him, he must fight. Well, sadly, many of today’s students feel completely surrounded by issues they don’t know how to deal with. They feel they have nowhere to go and no hope of getting there even if they did. Is it any wonder that some resort to violence?

We must stop sending kids to fight on the front lines of our culture war. Education is not a tool for teaching children what to think about the political or “social justice” issue du jour but how to think about any issue at all. Feeding them narratives about which they lack the ability and context to understand and evaluate is not education, it’s indoctrination. And it has grave consequences, not only for individual students but for all of society.

Instead of injecting children with apathy and a sense of helplessness, parents and educators should inspire curiosity and a love of learning by highlighting the incredible progress that mankind has made: the science and math that have taken us from sticks and caves to smartphones and skyscrapers, the heroes and ideas that replaced tribal warfare with civilized society, and the beautiful art that has accompanied man’s rise. Instead of trying to mold the unformed into the image of their own desires, parents and educators should encourage and nurture children’s ability to use their own minds to actualize their own potential.

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

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