Senator Ben Sasse’s new book The Vanishing American Adult calls attention to a coming-of-age crisis: The undeniable drag that consumerism, technology, and other modern forces have had on the institution of family and the work ethic for which Americans were once recognized around the world.
But, above and beyond the many other millennial naysayers, Sasse looks back—and he casts a critical eye on John Dewey, the turn-of-the-century progressive whose reforms set the stage for schools to be a (very poor) substitute for family. For Dewey, the philosophical architect of American public schooling, progress was an end in itself, so school became the whole point, with no real incentive to reach the other side well-equipped for a full life. In the biggest of pictures, the Deweyan model—with the partitioning of grades, the invention of a “warehouse” for the years between dependency and self-sufficiency, and the creation an arbitrary finish line—made the liminal state a stultifying slog.
Removing children from families that typically put them to work and sealing them together to take all the same lessons was wildly democratic at the time. But the underlying ethic of continual progress toward nothing in particular, also the atheistic “common faith” Dewey preached, precludes the purpose-driven life Americans—and all people—need and crave. The Deweyan model “spread like kudzu” and it may have done much more harm than good. But in practice, “Children cannot be inspired individually in a system that treats each exactly as it does every other,” Sasse writes—and, to read Dewey, you know: His student has no life beyond the school, no soul. “The need to keep busy at meaningful work is a consequence of human brokenness,” Sasse writes. Onward-ness untethered by any actual starting point or destination rules out meaningful work.
Plenty of factors play into the generational decay that concerns Sasse, considering, “America’s next generation will be our next generation of rulers—that’s how a republic works.” Every sign of diminished self-reliance traces to the end of necessary and purposeful work. Technological advancements deserve the brunt of the blame, but the problem with kids these days keeps tripping back to John Dewey.
Dewey didn’t invent the adolescent, but his pedagogies housed them and permitted their directionless stewing. (He might also be, inadvertently, the founder of the distinctly American style of teen angst.) Adulthood-as-destination first really started to go out of fashion in the 1950s, Sasse points out, when parents tried to understand their moody children at the behest of “soft” parenting gurus and, desiring to be young again, tried to emulate the fairly new phenomenon of “teen culture” themselves. Pop culture enshrined a phase that was supposed to be passed through en route to adulthood. First adulthood was undesirable—and then it was joke. For the archetypal neurotic baby boomer who resents his dad’s tough love, what’s on the other side of perpetual adolescence is a gross caricature of adulthood: The stoic dad who threw his sniveling kid off the dock and said, “Aw buck up, would ya.” He was probably also worried about a coming of age crisis among kids these days.
It’s a stark and a telling contrast to Sasse, who also makes an example of his children’s first swimming lessons: “Instead of always wrapping them in floatation devices, get in the water with them. Let go and re-grab them, let go longer and re-grab them, go again—and then celebrate their survival.” The philosopher statesman is not the most convincing tough guy. He and his wife Melissa homeschool their three children in his native Nebraska. According to the stories he tells, the Sasses talk about their feelings, praise their exemplary brood for their rugged successes—and, we’re to understand, foster a world of ideas. Ideas that work.
Sasse’s belief that meaningful work gives life purpose, grounded as it is in ancient philosophy and lived experience, is hard to argue with. Same goes for the parenting philosophy informed by it. “Anxiety and depression are now among students’ top life concerns. More than 24 percent of students who arrive for counseling are taking some kind of psychotropic drug.” Needless, insatiable worry and restlessness seem so clearly symptomatic of distance and insulation from purposeful work and the gritty stuff of life.
“Our national forebears had an almost compulsive preference for productivity over passivity,” he points out. “Historically Americans have needed to be working. We have needed to be producing.” While the wisdom of Poor Richard’s Almanack has yet to fade, the model of early the American child as a “little citizen” and an emerging member the workforce will seem perversely impractical to today’s parents, who don’t tend to indulge the sweeping historical context of their child-rearing. But it’s also what makes this such a senatorial book: The author is looking for the long view, in both directions—upper-chamber style—of the state of the nation.
Plus he knows how to appeal to parents: “The older American ethic—of teaching them why good work rather than the absence of work will make them happy—must be recovered in order to serve our kids better.” We want much more for our own children (I don’t have any, but I was one, and I used to teach them), or much less depending on your perspective, than for them to rescue the nation from moral decay. It’s what we want in the abstract collective, something other people’s children should focus on. We want our own to be reasonably happy, and to be well-equipped for whatever life throws at them once we’re gone.
Maybe, I wonder, what we most for our young is for them to approach work and death and success and disappointment—and God, and the common moral precepts that would be holding up our republic if only we’d held onto them—not just with fortitude, or “grit,” but with the good humor that, hopefully, comes with it.
And the sort of sensibility that revels in life’s little joys—the things you miss while you’re sitting at the computer—can’t really be taught or modeled. But it certainly can be fostered. Set up responsibilities and challenges that’ll test your children and push them to be resiliently joyful, and to observe bright spots while surviving setbacks.
Sasse tells us more than a couple times that Vanishing is. not. a. policy. book. Considering the breadth of common ground between its covers, this an important point. If the book were brimming over with policy recommendations, readers inclined to disagree with a Conservative Republican Junior Senator From Nebraska on health care, abortion, or the right to bear arms wouldn’t get to the part about our shared moral precepts—work ethic, civic-mindedness, religious pluralism—being the republic’s only hope.
In a chapter on travel, he reminds us of the virtues of voyaging into the unknown—being savvy enough to survive with as little stuff weighing them down as possible—and then finding so much in common with folks on the other side of the world. But also that seeing the world lets young Americans at least begin to see ourselves as Tocqueville saw us: our shared assumptions about work and citizenship, and our susceptibilities, all of it upstream of politics. But without a eye on history it’s impossible to see our failure of self-reliance and broken commitment to these civic virtues. The problem, what Sasse calls “civic ignorance,” has worked its way downstream—a painfully timely lesson.
Reading the review of Sasse’s book in the New York Times Book Review clarified something else. The Vanishing American Adult avoids the most of the traps millennial think-pieces fall into, but Jennifer Szalai writing “To Make America Great Again, Give Your Kids Chores” seems to seek them out: She finds Sasse, for whom hard work counts more than good luck, overdue for a “privilege check.” She recoils from a self-help prescription for “phony adversity,” alluding to the senator’s disrespect for the authentic adversities endured by the underprivileged. But, flipped on its head, phony adversity is also a more apt stand-in for the affluenza—”the historically bizarre inclination to view consumption as somehow their main occupation or ‘work'”—that Sasse diagnoses.
Create phony adversity is exactly what we do to fill up a life lacking purpose. Endowing children with meaningful work and a gratifying personal sense of its value teaches them not to manufacture adversity, not to imagine a crisis or an offense where there isn’t one. And, when there is a crisis, to rise to the challenge, come up with a plan, and get to work.
