Opportunity Knocks #45: Culture Wars and Hidden Opportunity Crises + Articles, Studies and Charts
Every Monday, I share reflections, ideas, questions, and content suggestions focused on championing, building and accelerating opportunity for children.
America’s culture wars are problem-solving black holes. The current manner in which they are prosecuted trap society in a cycle of good vs evil conflict at the cost of solution finding. They shift collective focus away from resolving issues towards defending dogmatic positions, all in the name of allegiance to ideological tribes and in service of short-term political gains. They are massive drains on energy, resources, and social cohesion. They exacerbate intolerance, selfishness, and ignorance, making it nearly impossible to advance progress on critical issues, especially those affecting children.
Nick Kristof's recent piece serves as a stark reminder of this truth. His spotlight on the alarmingly low 53% graduation rate at Bureau of Indian Education high schools sheds light on the broader, hidden crises of opportunity that we often overlook, leading to normalization. His article underscores the urgency to sidestep the culture war quagmire—we simply have too much important work to do. Here are a bunch of other examples of opportunity crises that have been obscured, and essentially normalized, by the blinding light of culture wars.
Adolescent Opioids Deaths - An average of 22 adolescents 14 to 18 years of age died in the U.S. each week in 2022.
Oral Health and Hygiene: Roughly half of all American children do not receive regular dental care due to certain social determinants of health. According the latest available data, the percentage of children aged 1–4 years of age who had a dental examination or cleaning in 2019 and 2020 peaked at 59%.
Drowning Deaths and Swimming Skills: More children ages 1–4 die from drowning than any other cause of death. And yet, 64% of African-American, 45% of Hispanic/Latino, and 40% of Caucasian children have few to no swimming skills.
Extreme Poverty: Despite overall child poverty rates decreasing—2021 was a record low year before a rebound driven by the expiration of federal funds (e.g., CTC)— over the last decade, extreme poverty rates—children under age 18 who live in families with incomes less than 50% of the federal poverty level—have essentially remained flat across race and ethnicity.
Abuse and Neglect Fatalities: 1,990 children died from abuse and neglect in 2022 a 12.7 percent increase from the 2018 actual number of child fatalities of 1,765.
Civic Knowledge: Only 4% of Gen Z respondents to a survey on basic structures and function of American government answered the four questions correctly.
There are countless other examples. The good news is it’s not impossible to curb culture wars. Here is a story about how one Ohio community did it.
If you read four articles this week:
Oppenheimer’s Second Act by David Nirenberg. Institute for Advanced Study.
“The second principle: disciplinary consensus untested by diversity is not knowledge. If our institutions of research and education are composed of people that all think alike, they will not be pushed to test their ideas. In 1931, Abraham Flexner, the Institute’s founding Director, suggested that its planned school of economics should include on its faculty the best Bolshevik economist it could find, since ideas are tested through reasoned disagreement. One of Oppenheimer’s colleagues (von Neumann) was one of the first to call attention to the disastrous potential of the human contribution of carbon to the atmosphere. Another (Freeman Dyson) later dissented from the emerging consensus about climate change. Third, the most pressing questions of humanity are not bounded by disciplines. Oppenheimer knew that knowledge in many disciplines had exploded in his lifetime. “In some sciences,” he wrote in 1960, “the last five years have produced more insight into the nature of life than all human history before.” But he stressed that this explosion of scientific and technical knowledge could not alone address the basic questions confronting humanity. In Oppenheimer’s words, “the safety” of a nation or the world “cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess.” If humanity wants to survive technology, he believed, it needed to pay attention not only to technology but also to ethics, history, religion, forms of political and social organization, and even feelings and emotions. He brought to the Faculty physicists like Dyson and diplomats/historians like George Kennan so that they could learn from each other, and he urged them all to learn from the vast archives of human culture. Every moviegoer now knows about his interest in the ancient Bhagavad Ghita, but Oppenheimer’s sense that the history of human thought provides a resource for the present was pervasive.”
School is Not Enough by Simon Sarris. Palladium. (h/t Auren Hoffman)
“It would be most desirable if there were a formula for instilling mastery, a guide of recipes and options for every child or young adult. But so long as society is committed to treating children unseriously, the obvious apprenticeships will be few. There may be more varied options than ever for any given child, but none of them will come to him on their own. They will lie just off the path, and the child will need to go looking. One reason that schools will always do poorly at finding such opportunities for children is that the very best opportunities will always be a response to local needs—a sensitivity to context is precisely the thing that systems of scale fail at producing. But both parent and child should never confuse this with a lack of options. Our era is resource-rich, including educational resources, but onramp poor. The legwork is up to you.”
Related: The War on Children’s Culture by Steven Mintz. Inside Higher Ed.
“Even as many American kids enjoy electronics and privileges unimaginable a generation ago, their childhood has also become more regulated, regimented, monitored and managed. Kids are indulged but also marginalized, segregated and juvenilized.
For a generation, adults have engaged in cultural cold war with their own kids. And this war is all the more unsettling because it is motivated by a deeply held belief among adults that it is waged for children’s own good, that it will make children safer, promote their cognitive development and make them more competitive in a global economy.
The spaces of childhood have become more circumscribed, and children’s freedom of movement has diminished. Some of the daring and danger of childhood has been eradicated. Fun-free playgrounds have proliferated, stripped of jungle gyms and hiding places and even swings, impoverishing childhood by removing some of its risks. Rough-and-tumble play has been banished from school playgrounds in order to protect children from bullying. And adults increasingly intrude in children’s everyday interactions in order to discourage teasing, scapegoating and exclusion. Meanwhile, playthings with prepackaged fantasies have multiplied.
Ours is a culture that claims to love children, but the reality is much more ambiguous. Upper-middle-class parents tend to treat their own children as a project, who need to be protected and perfected, while regarding other children as a problem. In particular, children’s culture is treated as problematic. Rather than giving children the time and space that they need to play and improvise, there is a tendency, at least among the upper middle class, to overpressure, overorganize and overstructure their lives and impose excessive demands for early achievement.”
Resist Generative AI FOMO by John Warner. Higher Ed.
“I’m wondering how many recall the ouster (and then return) of University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan back in 2012. According to contemporaneous reporting from The New York Times, Sullivan was pushed out by an activist governing board because some members of the board felt “Virginia was falling behind competitors, like Harvard and Stanford, especially in the development of online courses, a potentially transformative innovation.”
If that’s too vague, what they were talking about was MOOCs, the revolution that never barked and did not end up being a transformative innovation despite many popular books insisting this was inevitable being published at the time. As to the robustness of that market today, perhaps you saw the recent news that online course provider 2U has warned of “substantial doubt” that it can continue to operate.
I think it is a reasonable bet that generative AI is likely to persist longer than the relatively brief MOOC craze, but I shall repeat myself: we have no idea what it is going to be. Perhaps we should also be reflecting on the failure of the previous generation of “learning analytics” movement, which failed to deliver significant benefits to how faculty teach and students learn.”
If you consider one study this week:
Antidepressant dispensing to US adolescents and young adults: 2016–2022 (2024). Chua, K.-P., Volerman, A., Zhang, J., Hua, J., & Conti, R. M. Pediatrics.
“Among female adolescents, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate increased by 17.9 per month (95% CI: 13.7 to 22.2) before March 2020. The outbreak was not associated with a level change (−188.8, 95% CI: −413.6 to 36.0) but was associated with a slope increase (23.1 per month, 95% CI: 14.3 to 32.0). From March 2020 onwards, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate increased by 41.1 per month (95% CI: 32.9 to 49.2), or 129.6% higher than the rate of change before March 2020.”
Until next week, be kind and be calm,
Andrew