What do I mean? I’m thinking of the “Equity Collaborative” teaching educators that “independence” and “individual thinking” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism”. I’m thinking of the KIPP charter schools ditching the mantra “Work Hard, Be Nice” as a legacy of white supremacy culture. I’m thinking of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History debuting an online guide for “Talking about Race” that tagged “hard work” and “self-reliance” as troubling “assumptions” of “white culture.” In each of these cases (and so many others), “forward-thinking” reformers insisted that longstanding, widely shared values were suddenly wrongthink that needed to be abandoned.
One mundane but revealing instance of how toxic things got occurred in 2021, when the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education invited financial self-help guru Suze Orman to keynote their annual conference, only to freak out when she urged the audience to take charge of their financial futures. Scandalized by this advice, the organization apologized for Orman making remarks “offensive” to the audience’s “lived experiences” and declared:
We cannot discuss financial literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.
Fortunately, you can tell a lot of the most toxic stuff is behind us because so many who had endorsed or remained mum about it are now happy to let it fizzle out, while insisting no one ever really meant it all that seriously. It’s nice to see common sense reasserting itself. But it’s not like the aversion to timeworn values arose out of the blue, and it certainly hasn’t gone away. In fact, even as anti-responsibility sentiment has started to recede on the left, it appears to be gaining steam on the populist right among prominent influencers who regard self-centered, performative “toughness” as a good thing and self-restraint as a sign of weakness.
Perhaps the first time I fully appreciated the backlash against traditional notions of responsibility came back in 2017 when I was giving a talk at Columbia University. I’d expressed concern that too many schools had gotten squeamish about teaching foundational values. An audience member asked what I had in mind, and I cited respect, personal responsibility, and timeliness as examples. The audience member responded that she found the phrase “personal responsibility” offensive, saying, “It sounds like you want to blame students if they don’t succeed.”
It became clear she had plenty of company. Over the past decade, many in education have come to view “responsibility” as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. While those who decry it generally shy away from a nihilistic implication that no one should ever be held responsible for their actions, they come pretty darn close. This has bled into debates on everything from school discipline to student loans.
