what are we telling young people about the world?

My parents came of age in the 1960s. During family dinners as a young child I remember my parents talking with me about politics and current events.They would share their opinions with me about positive and tragic national and international events. They would often ask me what I thought.
My parents would often give me a history lesson about the nature of change. Usually the story would end with my Mother saying, “We were a generation, just like prior generations, that tried to change the world and make it a better place.”

Then we would play music to shift the mood. Usually this meant that my parents would put a Fleetwood Mac album on the record player. However, sometimes my Mom would play Ten Years After’s 1971 single “I’d Love to Change the World.” She would sing along. The chorus sung by Alvin Lee goes

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I'll leave it up to you

George Packer has written recently in The Atlantic about how adults are turning schools into battlefields with children being the casualties. What are adults telling young people about the world?

Packer writes, “Adults keep telling you [young people] the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.”

Yep, the world does look and feel broken. A global pandemic, war, systemic societal issues, and perennial human problems and struggles persist. I recognize that privilege can foster a just-world belief, that people get what they deserve, good and bad. Yet, there is obvious suffering that exists throughout the world outside of people’s control. On many days the forces of fatalism have triumphed, leaving little reason to be hopeful.

However, in the mid 2000s, while I was teaching modern World History and AP U.S. History, I began to wonder whether my class lessons and narratives about the world might be transforming adolescents into misanthropes.

The history of the modern world was generally described by students as an ‘awful history.’ From their perspective, modern world history was a progression of centuries where war-war-revolution-genocide-war-imperialism-war-genocide-revolution-war-colonialism-oppression-economic underdevelopment-famine-war-human suffering were recurring themes.

These are upsetting realities, but necessary case studies. I ask students to connect history to modern day. History provides insights and backstories that help to better understand where we are today. History helps provide a framework for measuring progress and shortcomings.

I was becoming concerned that young people were leaving at the end of the school year with a myopic understanding of human nature and the positive possibilities of the present and the future. 

Were my lessons fostering an unintended learned helplessness? As Aaron Beck’s research has demonstrated, beliefs about one’s self, future and environment shape behavior. 

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Mean world syndrome, first coined in the 1970s by Dr. George Gerbner, is a cognitive bias where the world begins appearing and feeling to be more dangerous than it actually is, due to repeated exposure to violence-related content on mass media. Increased feelings of pessimism, fear, and even a hyper-vigilance of perceived threats may develop. This bias impacts people’s beliefs and attitudes about the world. 

Repeated surveys and polls in the United States and around the world reveal that people hold a pessimistic outlook about the world and about the future of the world. But why?

Richard Curtis who wrote and directed the film Love Actually, perhaps tapped into this outlook when he said: 

‘If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years-something that has happened probably once in history-it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.’

What should we tell young people about the world? Primal beliefs or (‘primals’) are beliefs about the general character of the world. For example, one primal we tell our children is that the world is dangerous. 

Research from Jeremy Clifton and colleagues has provided insight into primals and mean world syndrome. In his research he discovered that parents overemphasize negative primals or beliefs about the world. Parents reported that the best way to prepare their children to navigate life successfully was to teach them the world is a bad place. Parents think they are preparing their children for the real world by teaching them that the world is dangerous, unfair, rarely funny, unstable, cut-throat, and getting worse. What if this is the wrong message? 

Clifton’s research indicates that these messages may not be helpful. He based this on data derived from six samples, 4,535 subjects involving 48 occupation groups. These revealed that negative primals were almost never associated with positive outcomes.

Clifton found that negative beliefs about the world resulted in negative outcomes like less job satisfaction, worse health, substantially increased negative emotions, substantially increased depression symptoms, and substantially decreased life satisfaction.

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While far from perfect, when you look at various measures, the world is actually improving. As Max Roser has shown, we are making progress against the world’s problems and alleviating suffering. In measurable ways the world has changed for the better. Our world is improving. 

The late author and researcher Hans Rosling in his book Factfulness noted that if he went to the zoo and hypothetically quizzed chimpanzees by throwing three different bananas with three different answers to questions about the positive progress happening around the world, the chimps would outperform well-educated humans working in government and NGOs. 

The chimps through the pure luck of selecting and eating a banana would score better on evaluating positive trends in human societies than humans. Rosling’s experiences working with international organizations around the world has led him to lament that, “every group of people thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless than it really is.”

The allegory of the cave appears in Book VII of Plato’s Republic. The cave can be interpreted to symbolize many different things. The cave can represent a schema or perceptual set. Much of what we know is shaped by prior experiences, ideas, knowledge, biases, etc. Much of what we don’t know remains hidden from us. 

Plato encourages us to see things as they actually are, habitually uncovering truth, beauty and goodness. What we come to understand about the world comes from critical thinking and shared knowledge. 

In her book Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, Anne Lamott wrote, “Stories hold us together. Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here, and how its best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination…Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us and seems to work.” 

Thanks to social media, information can be shared quite easily. People are bombarded with massive amounts of information. Raw and unedited footage from all parts of the world can be seen at any time. 

Humans have a built-in negativity bias prone to having negative information grab our attention and stick in our memories more than positive news. Humans are aversive to loss and threats to our survival. That is one of many reasons why negative information affects us more than the positive. 

Another reason may be because of declinism, humans are predisposed to biased thinking about the past. We tend to view the past positively, and worry that the future is going to be bad. 

News today doesn’t highlight the slow, gradual positive improvements in global living standards and progress that have been witnessed over the last 200 years. Pessimistic misconceptions about the world continue to persist. 

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By exploring goodness and positive progress we come to realize what Martin Seligman wrote, “we learn more when lighting candles than when cursing the darkness.” 

Classes and schooling should provide adolescents the tools and opportunities to put their education towards a purpose higher than just themselves. As research shows, acting for the benefit of another or the greater good is an incredible source of wellbeing and personal happiness.

As Piaget noted morality is fundamental and essential to one’s identity. It is what we care about in other people. Children need opportunities to cultivate moral agency in thought and action. Piaget believed schools should provide these opportunities.

Bandura’s theories of moral development in children and adolescence reveal that pro-social behavior can be influenced by moral models. Bandura believed that most human behavior is learned through observation, imitation, and modeling. People we admire can motivate and inspire us.

Noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown that people are wired to be inspired. When we see people do good things for others we are moved to tears or feel a warm glow in our chests. He defined this as moral elevation or a “warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness and compassion.” Various social psychological experiments have shown that when we are exposed to moral exemplars and experience elevation, this can lead to various prosocial behaviors. 

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In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin published an essay in the journal science called The Tragedy of the Commons. It remains one of the most cited scientific papers of all time. It provides an oversimplified explanation for the failure of human cooperation and destructive capabilities. 

In his version of the tragedy of the commons, he asks the reader to picture a pasture that is shared by an entire village. Each day, the farmers that live near the common bring their own cattle to the common area so their own cows can graze. If each farmer is careful and limits the amount of cows and how much the cows are able to graze on the common grass, the commons could last a lifetime. 

However, if every farmer brings all their cows and allows them to graze without limit, then there won’t be enough grass to sustain all herds. Thus lies the tragedy. The more selfish the farmers act, thinking only about themselves and their own herd, the less likely the commons are able to sustain everyone. 

By thinking about oneself without considering the needs of the many, the commons become exploited as a result. Thus, Hardin wrote, “the logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy…freedom in the commons brings ruin to all.”  

Interestingly history proves that people often work together and when they do, it leads to positive outcomes. The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware continues to illustrate that since 1963 in over 700 field studies of major catastrophes, like natural disasters, there is never anarchy, chaos, or even a mentality of every person for themselves. 

Rather a cooperative and socially responsible mentality develops. Resources are shared and helping behaviors emerge to ensure collective survival. Catastrophes often bring out the best in people, which often include ensuring the welfare of others as much as oneself. This might be why Mr. Rogers revealed that his mother would tell him ‘to look for the helpers’ when something tragic happened in the world.

Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel Prize researcher in economics, studied examples of commons (collaborative management systems of resources) around the world from cattle herders and shared pastures in Switzerland, farmland sharing in Japan, to communal irrigation in the Philippines. Ostrom and her team of researchers set up a database to record examples of commons from all over the world. 

Ostrom concluded that for centuries people had been sharing resources like water, forests, fisheries, successfully and not tragically. When it comes to pooling resources, human behavior can be wonderfully constructive, not tragically destructive.

In everyday life, we witness cooperative behavior. We also witness selfless behavior. When we experience the fight, fright, or freeze response activated in extreme situations we feel danger and a desire to survive. 

However, our desire to survive and fight for our lives also includes fighting for others. 

Often this is seen when tragedy strikes. Communities can and often do arise in disaster. In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell Rebecca Solnit examines many disasters throughout history. For example, the 1906 earthquake and fires in San Francisco, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The disasters are different in their causes but her research and writing reveal the altruistic responses to them are consistently the same. The best of human nature often emerges in tragedy, not the worst. 

Choosing to believe in the possibilities of the human spirit doesn’t make you a naive idealist. It makes you human. It cheapens our humanity to suggest to young people that the human condition is fixed and inherently destructive. 

Teaching and modeling behavior that encourages children to open their hearts to the world, to others, and to themselves is the most worthy and important endeavor we can provide to them as adults.