I'M THE BOSS. YOU'RE THE KID.

The critical studies types are notorious for using wordnoise to turn a phenomenon of long standing into a thought crime.  Simply take a commonplace situation and tack a "-normativity" on the end and just like that you've pronounced anathema on it.  A few weeks ago it was "autonormativity," which is only slightly more ludicrous than the long-standing "heteronormativity."

If that doesn't work, there's always tacking an "-ism" or a "-phobia" on it.  This week's example is "adultism."

Unattributed bit of investigative journalism retrieved from Joanne Jacobs.

The Random Postmodern Phrase Generator then goes to work.

Teachers who chose to attend learned that "the relationship between students and educators is an oppressive one," as a slide explained. Adult supremacy “constructs adults as developed, mature, intelligent, and experienced, based solely on their age and ensures that adults control the resources and make the decisions in society.”

In addition, success “within the Western context” is “demanding, overwhelming, and dehumanizing.”

Another slide cited adultism's link to "cultural imperialism, marginalization, exploitation, powerlessness and violence," writes [California Post reporter Annie] Gaus.

Because of course it does.

A Santa Clara County agency included "ageism and adultism" in "anti-oppression" training. “Participants consider how the myth of independence, rooted in settler colonial capitalism, contributes to the marginalization of youth & elders by diminishing agency, excluding perspectives, & reinforcing stereotypes in behavioral health practice,” an invitation read.

It's probably adultist to insist that California can count votes in a day or two the way a normal polity does.

Mrs Jacobs suggests that if "adultism" is a pejorative, maybe the best thing for adults to do is to make the most of it.

In 21st-century American culture, nobody seems to want to grow up. Teenagers are slower than earlier generations to get a drivers' license, an after-school job and a girlfriend or boyfriend. (Non-binary teens can't even commit to a sex or gender.) Young adults complain they don't know to cook, clean or budget their money. Not-so-young adults fear having children who will impinge on their leisure time.

I have a few slogans for the adult supremacy movement: "Don't make me count to 10! Stop whining and just do it! Grow up already!" I guess I need one that rhymes: "Hell, no! Time to go! Just because I said so!"

Although Freddie deBoer did not go to that conference, nor, as far as I can tell, is he still waiting to learn the results of an election he voted in, he, too, would like to see full-throated adultism.  "You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually."  Well, clear that throat first.

There’s a particular sound a room full of educated adults makes when a young person does something wrong; you’ve heard it many times before and so have I. It’s the sound of a roomful of tightened throats clearing in unison, preparing to explain that it isn’t really the young person’s fault. Consider this remarkable document from The New Yorker. In it, a bunch of career college educators lament the rise of AI cheating in higher education, discuss techniques they use to try to curtail that cheating (or, often, rationalize giving up on that effort), and sing sad dirges for what college used to be. The one thing that seems anathema to most of them is judging college students for engaging in straightforwardly unethical behavior. Why, we couldn’t do that! We couldn’t look at people deliberately and knowingly violating a basic agreement that they’ve made with their professors and their schools and say “Perhaps this is a bit immoral.”

The teachers interviewed in that piece are largely sympathetic, if a bit myopic and far, far too eager to please their students. I’m afraid the broader tendency on campus is less thoughtful and less enlightened. No, we don’t do a lot of judging of students anymore, certainly not on the university level, where there’s palpable anxiety over not being among the young hip understanding young down to earth accommodating young professors who keeps it real, youngly. There’s an inescapable drive to be liked by the people you ostensibly have authority over, a fog of “student centered” anxiety that clouds undergraduate institutions, the impulse that brought us Cool Professors. That linked piece led to absolute howls of anger and recrimination on social media, which is just a reminder that a hit dog will holler. The reality is that academia, like media, is an industry that a lot of people join in an effort to stave off their terror at their advancing age, to be around youth and (they hope) maybe suck some of it up by osmosis.

If anything, he's more scornful of the inclusive pedagogy set than Mrs Jacobs.

The student who cheats and then conceals it knows he did something wrong. The only people pretending not to know are the adults.

Yes, the students are behaving as you might expect most eighteen-year-olds to behave. Sure, groovy. But the whole point of existing as a moral being is to be the exception to the “most,” to have an individual ethical self and to make choices not as an avatar of an age range or as a subject stricken by stru-stru-structural conditions. But sure - eighteen year olds often cut corners. Eighteen year olds can be lazy and self-justifying and frightened. Sure. That’s a not-entirely-wrong description of youth. I don’t expect every last nineteen-year-old to have the moral spine to resist a tool that produces a passable essay in nine seconds while his roommate sleeps and his deadline approaches. But, again, what is moral is not about what everyone does; it’s about what the individual does. If behavior was justified by how many other people were doing it, well, there would be no such thing as a coherent morality.

The problem is the grown men and women (tenured, bylined, salaried, blue-checked) who have constructed an entire rhetorical apparatus with the sole function of ensuring that no young person is ever held responsible for anything, ever, under any circumstances. And they’ve done so not out of compassion but out of personal vanity. They’ve seen the cultural construct of the old person who complains about the youth these days, probably on Twitter, and because they have no fundamental sense of self to call their own, they fear that the construct will become their reality. So they forgive and they excuse and they rationalize and they dissemble…. This relentless exoneration of the young is less a matter of generosity and more a type of status play. It’s a way for a 36-year-old podcaster or a 45-year-old columnist or a 58-year-old dean or a 63-year-old author to purchase (at the students expense) the one thing those people want more than tenure or relevance or grandchildren: the assurance that they are not old.

Put another way, you cannot justify behavior with an ad popularum fallacy.  (The generalization to Democracy^(TM) is left as an exercise, but I digress.)  Norms of long standing have demonstrated some evolutionary fitness and ought not be deconstructed for light and transient causes.  Thus, Mr DeBoer concludes, "Education is a form of coercion."

Indeed.  Deny reality at your peril.

Civilization itself is the long, uneven process of forcing our worst instincts into contact with better obligations until habit and conscience start to take over. We have truancy laws for a reason! Leave a pack of kids in a room alone with a textbook, even bright kids, come back in a few hours, and you will find them no smarter. That’s just how kids work. And yes, a big part of teaching is forcing students to be ethical. Not because we want to be wardens of their souls, but because ethics, like algebra or music theory or writing a coherent paragraph, are not magically summoned from within by vibes. Ethics are cultivated under constraint. They’re learned, like almost anything worth learning, through rules, standards, penalties, and the repeated experience of being told “no.” The fantasy that students will become honest scholars while we refuse to impose honesty on them is just another adult abdication masquerading as humane insight. It asks nothing of them, cultivates nothing in them, and then flatters itself for its tenderness while the whole enterprise rots.

Our society has now spent decades marinating in the idea that the best we can do for people is to make excuses for them and ask nothing of them; this is the heart of therapeutic culture, people insisting that they can’t be blamed for cheating on their partner because of their trauma, a nation of busy little meritocrats who lie about having ADHD or autism to get more time on the test, insisting to themselves that capitalism is rigged so they can’t be blamed. The exoneration racket dresses contempt up as compassion because to refuse to blame someone is to refuse to take them seriously as a moral agent. It is to say “I don’t expect anything of you, because I don’t believe you are capable of anything.” When you tell a young person that cheating isn’t their fault, that they’re merely a leaf on the river of capitalism, you’re telling them that they’re not a person but a puppet jerked around by forces they cannot resist and shouldn’t bother trying. That’s about as insulting as it gets. Blame, on the other hand, real blame, the kind that says “you did this, you’re better than this, and I am holding you to that,” is at heart an assumption of dignity, the refusal to give up on someone. Every parent who’s ever loved a child knows this in their bones; it’s only in public, in print, in the great laundering machine of professional opinion that we’ve forgotten it.

Amen.