The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
When was the last time you sat down with nothing to do other than reach for your thoughts?
Nowadays, at the slightest hint that a class, party or TV show might not be as exciting or entertainment-filled as we hoped, we reach for our phones. Our phones, rather than the world around us, have become where we find inspiration and learn about ourselves.
Social media provides carefully thought-out sentiments about what we should wear, what we should eat, who we should be and what we should and shouldn’t say to people.
There is no need to figure things out for yourself when we are constantly presented with perfectly curated how-to guides. We’re a generation that is inundated with the need to project a version of ourselves that is 100 percent sure of everything all the time — which translates strongly to our politics and everyday conversation.
We aren’t open to hearing opinions that don’t align with our own and we reject the expectation that we should be able to articulate why we believe what we do, often hiding behind buzzwords or a sense of moral superiority. As a result, we’re losing our ability to be wrong, uninformed or even simply curious in a setting where we should be.
Discourse is stifled by our inability to come to our own conclusions. We’ve replaced the process of learning with AI summaries for the sake of efficiency and the rise of social media has made many of the ideas we hold simply reproductions of things we’ve heard from various influencers.
Having entire ways of thinking presented to us in summarized, streamlined formats might be fine if we were supplementing the information we took in with our own research and observation. But even our critiques of certain people, language or behaviours are adapted from comment sections and analysis videos from our phones.
We’re simply parroting ideas. “I saw this thing on Tiktok…” someone says as they try to capture the pre-scripted nuggets of wisdom verbatim. Often, the word TikTok is replaced superficially with “podcast” or “book” or “article” in the hopes of seeming more credible. It’s become increasingly common to speak from a place of authority and fact even if we don’t know if the information we’re sharing is backed by evidence.
We’ve all been there. There’s no malicious intent — we’ve just come to believe that to speak on anything our words need to be vetted or cosigned and that there’s no room for error.
As retaliation for certain political views rises on campuses across the country, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for students to feel they can express their ideas and have meaningful discussions. Professors are tasked not just with teaching students, but tiptoeing around the realities of the world and their areas of research in order to diffuse political tensions.
When we strip back education because we’re afraid of lived experience and being intellectually challenged, choosing comfort over truth, we erode what education is supposed to be. After a few years, we graduate and receive a piece of paper, but no real learning has happened. It’s effectively a pricey participation trophy.
We shouldn’t be scared to interrogate what we know or what we think we do. If we never sit alone with our thoughts, in favor of other people telling us how and what to think, then how authentic is our understanding of who we are?
Where can we do this learning if universities — which should preserve existing information and serve as a birthplace of new knowledge — are not actually places where people can be wrong and learn without being ridiculed and shamed? More than 80 percent of students report censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time, with 21 percent saying they censor themselves often. We should be spending these years making mistakes, educating ourselves and growing as people, but we’re too scared to take on the risks required to do so.
Much of the time, we hope that avoiding tough conversations or simply silencing ideas that perpetuate discrimination eradicates hate broadly. But the real change is much uglier and significantly more difficult, it comes from being an active participant in changing those ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid to raise our hands and answer questions, offer critiques or share our own ideas. In both formal and informal settings, we should want better from our education than being coddled and we should be more open-minded when people get it wrong. If perfect consistency is the standard, everyone fails, because change is never a possibility.
Adria Liwewe is a Junior in the School of Public Affairs and a columnist for the Eagle.
This article was edited by Harry Walton, Addie DiPaolo and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Avery Grossman, Arin Burrell and Paige Caron. Fact-checking done by Andrew Kummeth.
