Education and the Restoration of Moral Agency
by R J Snell, Public Discourse:
Many students today lack a real formation in moral order and agency. Few adults have taught them what a worthwhile life looks like and what they could do to achieve it. University educators must give students access to authoritative moral claims, even as they allow them to judge and decide for themselves.
In many ways, our time is like all others. Humans are born, live, fall in love, die—the basics. Every person still encounters the challenge of living well, and of facing that daunting task without knowing precisely how to do it. We’re all, as Walker Percy noted, slightly lost in the cosmos. Still, there are moments throughout history in which the task of living well becomes especially difficult—times when the institutions, mores, laws, and social prescriptions are unusually confused or weak, unjust or irrational. Sometimes a collective hysteria or moral revolution uproots the sane and settled ways. And there are occasions when the authorities are supine, abdicating their responsibilities.
Some would consider ours to be such a moment, claiming that we live, in the hyperbolic words of Michel Houellebecq, “in an age . . . miserable and troubled,” in countries “sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries,” and where people live “lonely, bitter lives.” As Mark Lilla riffs, our polity, having lost its way, all but forces individuals to live “like elementary particles spread out in space, each rotating at its own speed and following its own trajectory.”
I’m hardly alone in noting that young people are particularly affected by the loss of authority and tradition, to various effect: some—the young who make the news—are full of passionate intensity and riotous indignation, but a good many are simply lost, uncertain what to do or how to live. Many lack a sense of moral agency, the urgent responsibility to shape their lives and character. Some of the following is anecdotal, gained from personal interactions with students, but it conveys, I think, a sense of need and longing expressed by the many young people shamefully robbed of their cultural patrimony by their parents, clergy, and teachers.
See also:
University: the battleground for young minds, by Campbell Campbell-Jack, Christian Today
TSM Dean and President reflects on theological education in a time of Covid, by David W Virtue, Virtueonline
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