You may have a few dings, but you're not 'broken'

"We're all broken . . . that's how the light gets in," said the motivational quote posted on a classroom door. That's a "terrible message to send to kids!," tweets teacher James Furey.

I responded: "We are all 'sinners in the hands of an angry God' has more pep to it."

Photo: Unsplash

Why encourage students to see themselves as "broken" -- or to see brokenness as a virtue? Few of us -- and even fewer children -- have been shattered by life, rendered "unable to work" or given up hope.

We're all imperfect. That's human. But we can learn -- that's what school is for -- and improve. Or we can wallow in performative victimhood. It seems like a foolish choice.

School curricula and culture "seem nearly to revel in the bad and the broken," wrote Robert Pondiscio in The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling in Commentary in 2022. Children are told they've been born into "a country that is racist to its core" and a world that's doomed to burn to a crisp.

Educators see "this pedagogy of the depressed — America the Problematic — . . . as a mark of seriousness and sophistication," he writes. They think they're inspiring children to "set the world right." But, mostly, they are "creating a generation of overwhelmed young people paralyzed into learned helplessness."

On The Free Press, Charles Lane quotes a speech by Vince Lombardi, coach of the Green Bay Packers.

"It is time to stand up for the doer, the achiever, the one who sets out to do something and does it. The one who recognizes the problems and opportunities at hand, and deals with them, and is successful, and is not worrying about the failings of others. . . . We will never create a good society, much less a great one, until individual excellence is respected and encouraged.”

You have to be able to take a few hits.