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Teaching Children to Despair

Teaching Children to Despair

Last updated on: September 5, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Teaching Children to Despair 2025-08-31T18:22:28-04:00 Gene Veith

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We are teaching our children that their country is bad, that oppression is everywhere, that there is nothing they can do about it, and that they will perish in a climate apocalypse. In doing so, we are making children hopeless and depressed. We are teaching them to despair.

So says education think-tanker Robert Pandiscio in his article (behind a paywall), There’s Too Much Doom and Gloom in the Classroom .

He begins by following a hypothetical 13-year old girl in the eighth grade going through her typical school day. In English, she studies with her class a young adult novel about a girl who self-harms and attempts suicide, with her teacher praising the book’s “unflinching emotional truth.” In Social Studies, she does a worksheet from the 1619 Project on how racism is “baked into the structure of American life.” Next is science class, where they are studying climate change and she is told that unless the world reaches “net zero” carbon emissions, humanity will be doomed. The climate catastrophe will take place around the time she is in her thirties. Then, after lunch, she meets with her “action civics” project group to “identify a systemic injustice” and “propose a structural solution.”

So much doom, gloom, and depression is an intentional educational strategy, an application of two specific educational theories currently in vogue. Pandiscio writes,

If you spend time in American classrooms today, especially in schools shaped by the dominant ideas of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP), you might get the impression that the world is a broken and dangerous place — and that wise and loving adults equip children to navigate it successfully by making them aware of just how bad things are.

We think we’re helping them. But what if we’re not?

It’s certainly true that children today are often miserable. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40% of high school students say that they persistently feel sad and hopeless, a jump from 28% ten years ago. One fifth of high schoolers have seriously considered suicide. Girls are especially troubled. Almost 60% feel sad and hopeless. Almost a third, 30%, have considered suicide.

Are the schools helping students cope with this misery, or are they causing it? Pandiscio cites research by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Jeremy Clifton who has studied how our “primal world beliefs”–we Christians might say, our “world view”–has a profound impact on our psychological condition.

In an interview, Clifton told teachers, “Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.” I love the metaphor that Clifton told Pandiscio in an interview:

“The enemy of learning is not danger but expectation that there is little worthwhile to be learned,” he told me. “What stops great quests to discover buried treasure is not the snakes and the pirates — it is the expectation that there is little to nothing of value that is probably buried out there in the sand.”

Pandiscio concludes,

We tell ourselves that presenting children with a stark and unsparing view of the world is a form of honesty — that by confronting them with injustice, danger, and decline, we’re preparing them to be thoughtful, engaged citizens. But what we may actually be doing is fostering despair. When students are repeatedly exposed to narratives of systemic failure, moral decay, and looming disaster, they may come to believe that the world is not just flawed but fundamentally broken — and that they are powerless to change it. Instead of cultivating resilience or agency, we risk producing paralysis, cynicism, and a diminished sense of possibility.

Christian know that the world is indeed broken, but that’s not the final word. God reigns, despite the reality of sin, and through Christ He heals the world’s brokenness and our brokenness.

Children do need to learn about sin, but we also need to protect them from being overwhelmed by a darkness that they are not ready to encounter. They need to be taught what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. That kind of curriculum can prepare them to battle what is evil, what is false, and what is ugly. Schools should not teach children to be nihilists.

Photo by Liza Summer: https://www.pexels.com/photo/worried-young-woman-covering-face-with-hand-6382634/ via Pexels, Public Domain

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