|
 Some young people today seek to connect themselves to some larger entity by rediscovering their connection to the history and destiny of their "own people." This can be a healthy response to the deracinating experience of assimilation, but it can also degenerate into a form of tribalism. And although religious revivalism is conspicuous in our time, it seems driven less by religious conviction than by the search for fellowship and community.
Many Americans feel they were born too late to have a cause. Disconnected from a larger drama and without heroic possibilities, they don't see a "second act" to their lives once they achieve material success, and wonder how they can invigorate themselves and their children for what seems a relatively unobstructed and routine future.
Delbanco has no formula or prescription for "treating" what Tocqueville called this "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance," but he tries to have an impact on young people in his classes.
"Columbia has wonderful students, and I feel they have a hunger for shaping meaningful lives for themselves," he said. "They want from their teachers more than a marketable credential. But my generation--I'm a baby boomer--has not done a particularly good job of leading them.
"As a teacher of the Humanities, you do everything you can to help students expand their imagination, by which I mean to look outward, to see something beyond the consumer pleasures with which they are bombarded, to develop some sense of the complexity of the past and the diversity of the present-that is, the variety of ways in which human beings have tried to make sense of the world. Only then is it possible to develop some sense of alternative futures.
"You can't make a life for someone, and educational institutions shouldn't be in the business of pushing students in one direction or another; but we must be--and we must stay--in the business of insisting that students use their imagination to the fullest."
|
