LISTENING THE KIDS ARE How the Current Culture of Division Is Affecting a Generation of Students

By Karla Joyce

Let’s play a game.

I say current cultural assumptions (out loud) and you react.

Here goes:

America is systemically racist.

Obedience to preferred pronouns is forced speech.

Lockdowns and vax mandates saved lives.

“Hate speech” is simply opposition to prevailing narratives.

Abortion is…

Where did everybody go?

If this were an ordinary independent school magazine, I would reel off our Middle School debate program’s unparalleled record of victory and chalk up the spicy lead-in to the sophistication of our curriculum. We embrace this kind of debate. We encourage intellectual diversity. We hail neutrality.

While all true, I’m not going there.

I’m right and you’re wrong, I’m big and you’re small, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

~Roald Dahl, Matilda

The Pegasus Magazine was, in fact, established in 2011 to represent in a periodical Laura Hathaway’s educational vision that transcended the conventional. Let’s test the commitment to intellectual safety, we said. Let’s invite constructive disagreement. Right out of the gates we tackled the controversial designation of giftedness that had been attached to the school since its founding. We consistently challenged the parental push for academic acceleration and championed play, personal expression, and happiness itself. We dared to suggest that the looming college application process compelled branding instead of selfactualization.

Twelve years later the idea of taking a stance on anything is daunting. Why is that? Where once we could disagree on political ideology, social this and fiscal that, today those subjects are fraught. Was it the COVID lockdowns? The video circulation of George Floyd’s death by law enforcement? There are so many options to cut and paste into this paragraph, from the mainstreaming of gender ideology to the margins of bodily autonomy, suffice to say this cultural crossroad has marked the death (of sorts) of debate. The war of words has become emotionally heated, factious, and routinely morally condemning.

The magazine’s inaugural issue coincided with the debut of the Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP) as a seventh- and eighth-grade elective. It was famously brought to fruition by Jim Conti, former Pegasus teacher. In that issue, Conti wrote: “Middle School students are not shy about sharing their ideas, and they love to engage in argument, but the grand prize is to win an argument.” To do that, “students need more than passion and enthusiasm.” (Bingo) “They need to identify credible sources, evaluate which pieces of evidence will help their case most, organize their thoughts, prepare arguments well in advance, see issues from multiple angles, and speak in anything is daunting. Why is that? front of a group with confidence and conviction.” Then: “They must listen to their opponents, take notes, and think critically about the information.” (Bingo, bingo, bingo.)

While these skills are still taught in Pegasus classrooms, the classroom of life sends students mixed signals. If the portrayal of argumentation among adults is laden with animosity, if subjects are discussed at the dinner table in a framework of right and wrong, it’s not debate. There are countless hypotheses as to how “tribalism” has taken root in our society, but for the sake of an independent school publication we are asking: how is this affecting our students?

Yes, I’m going there

Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. Around 2008, Haidt became concerned by how politically polarized America was becoming, a polarization that has only worsened since. “There are several trends that are very disturbing,” he said in an Atlantic Monthly article dated May 2020, “including the rise of affective polarization.” (That is the mutual dislike and hate each political side feels for the other.) “When there’s so much hatred, a democracy can’t work right,” he said.

The same holds true in an educational environment, he added. “You can’t be hating and learning at the same time.”

As far back as 2018, Pegasus Magazine broached the subject of opinion and heated rhetoric usurping reason in Middle School discussions. The article, Pop Goes The Bubble identified the drip, drip of influence that naked political hostility and a segregated media stream might be having on our students. “Name-calling, profanity, and shouting is threatening to inhibit genuine debate,” we wrote then. “ As a result, so goes critical, independent thinking. Even at Pegasus.”

Cut to 2023.

The Science Of Hypocrisy

“All animals are equal,” said Napoleon, the Berkshire boar of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s classic novel. “But some animals are more equal than others.” If looked at through the lens of Haidt’s theories on moral judgment and polarization, the pig was just being, well, human.

Through the work of Haidt and colleagues, we understand that people form opinions on difficult and controversial topics based on six moral foundations. Moral Foundation Theory operates with the recognition that each foundation has intrinsic value, but people vary in how they prioritize them based on their group

• Care/Harm refers to our mammalian instinct toward kindness and nurturance.

• Fairness/Cheating stems from our evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism, giving life to the ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

• Loyalty/Betrayal speaks to our history as tribal creatures with shifting coalitions.

• Authority/Subversion underlies virtues of leadership and followership.

• Sanctity/Degradation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination and underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal way.

• Liberty/Oppression is linked to the feelings of resentment people feel toward those who restrict their liberty.

Haidt’s research into moral psychology has a natural application in U.S. politics and culture. The red/blue divide of American politics, he explains in his book The Righteous Mind, can be attributed to a variance in moralities; liberals tilt toward the care/harm while conservatives weigh the six morals equally. Each perspective, he says, “provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.”

The framework may explain the matrix-like biases of our postpandemic world. Simply recognizing that we have different moral matrices and moral foundations, Haidt suggests, may help alleviate tension over hotbed cultural issues. In other words, “if we can view others, rather than lacking morals entirely, as simply having moral foundations different from our own, then we should be able to engage in more reasonable conversations.” Translation: neither side is evil.

Haidt’s personal evolution from self-proclaimed “self-righteous hypocrite” to the model of intellectual honesty should be a playbook for every one of us, but especially for parents of young children. “If we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials,” he says, we need to “step out of our moral matrices, turn down the moral condemnation of our fellow citizens, and analyze the game we’re all playing.”

Meanwhile, On College Campuses…

Haidt openly acknowledges the existence of moral matrices in higher education. “They have a word in Swedish, ‘åsiktskorridor,’” he says. It means opinion corridor. “Here is where your opinions are allowed to be. You cannot step outside.” My college-age twin daughters (Pegasus ’17) have made unwitting appearances in my articles over the years and, once again, their experiences deliver.

Like most students, Molly and Emma’s cultural positions were formed by the usual line up of intentional moralizing and our own, boorish lapses (like screaming at a TV during presidential debates). Both girls participated in the debate program at Pegasus, and both noted that political arguments in the halls of their high school were emotive and undeveloped by comparison. It was all adolescent normalcy, until COVID.

The lockdowns left no one unscathed. From the loss of nearly two years of routine schooling and socialization to the siphoning of ideological diversity into social media feeds, the impact was incalculable. For us, this episode of family togetherness coincided with the developmental teenage need to disconnect and a rite-of-passage for twins called “acrimonious divorce.” (I made that up.) By the time college finally rolled around, we were a house divided by the bias of our personal news sources, a mix of conservative and liberal, vaccine-advocates and antivaxxers, agitators and silencers.

What happened next hearkens back to Haidt. (Note: identities have been cloaked by request.)

You can’t be hating and learning at the same time.”

Jonathan Haidt

Twin A stormed her East Coast campus hoping to join a Turning Point USA chapter and engage in spirited debate organically, at parties even, but wanted to “make friends first.” She “outed” herself inadvertently within the first few weeks when Morgan Wallen was spotted on her playlist. Brazen by nature, her budding commitment to conservative ideology was so potentially isolating that she sidelined that side of herself. Conversely, Twin B’s quiet adherence to åsiktskorridor was tested immediately when she found herself surrounded by a single viewpoint, even if her own. Rebuttal was unacceptable; visiting speakers with opposing arguments were an outrage worthy of spray paint. Her matrix is currently in flux. (As it should be.)

In both cases, the lesson learned was silence.

One of the hallowed characteristics of higher education is the spirited exchange of ideas and points of view that challenge curious minds and, hopefully, instill the belief that we can make things better; that, working together, we’ll find answers. The community matters more than the message. It is through relationships that disagreement is safe, beliefs are challenged, and minds change. According to a groundswell of surveys abridged by Real Clear Education, “When students lack peerto-peer connections, they self-censor.”

(That was the part where I emphasize common ground, so we can agree that we disagree on far less than it may seem.)

Great Minds Don’t Always Think Alike

In 2015, a nonpartisan professional organization consisting of 4,000+ professors, administrators, and students was formed to address the threat to ideological diversity on college campuses; they called it the Heterodox Academy and coined the tagline: “Great Minds Don’t Always Think Alike.” “Our commitment to heterodoxy within the academy has taken shape as a response to the rise of orthodoxy within scholarly culture,” explains John Tomasi, president, “when people fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social or professional retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea. We believe that the best way to prevent orthodoxy from taking root within the academy is by fostering three key principles: open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”

These principles, if distilled for younger years, might also be known as: A Safe Place to Be Smart.

The Pegasus School, too, was founded as an antidote to orthodoxy. Laura Hathaway’s first six students were intellectually exceptional kids who, in many ways, had been silenced by a linear public school curriculum. Hathaway envisioned “a haven-like space where children of all stripes could interact, experiment and learn in ways that didn’t exist elsewhere” (Pegasus Magazine Spring 2019, “Where We Hang Our Hat.”)

The Pegasus motto of intellectual safety is vigorously maintained to this day and is now interpreted on the school’s website under the heading DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). “Why label it ?” I asked as a former Board Member, wondering if the (arguably loaded) labels suggested an ideological tilt when the essence remained Hathaway’s. “It is exactly the same message,” said Jason Lopez, Head of School. “You belong, period.”

The culture war continues, our heels dug in (all while we say that we wish it weren’t so.) “I can’t stop what’s happening in the world,” said Lopez. “I can only manage our response.” The way he manages it involves deep breaths, examining the facts, and safeguarding the expectation that “we may disagree out there, but we have a standard of discourse inside, and we stick to it.”

That’s a wise strategy…for all of us. wuw