There is a shifty look in a 19-year-old’s eye when he tells you about how he has learned to “play the game” while taking a college course. I saw that look the other day as a friend’s son reported on the language of “privilege” he uses in class to coax a good grade out of his highly political philosophy professor. 

The student says he doesn’t believe a word he is saying in class. Afterward, he and his friends laugh together at their acting skills and the absurdity of what they are able to utter publicly without cracking up. 

It isn’t a look you want to see on the face of a young adult. It suggests a certain cynicism our culture has bred into someone who should have had a few more years under his belt before being corrupted. 

He’s no longer in class to learn, but to say the right things, get the “A” and move on. His professor is the subject of mockery rather than esteem. He is an engineering student who will never again make the mistake of taking a humanities course for the sake of broadening his horizons.

Sadly, a similar look can be seen on the faces of many high school students. A teenage girl told me about an English teacher who came to class with a Democratic Socialists of America sticker on her laptop. She strategically placed it in front of her class each day with the sticker facing the rows of teenagers she was perhaps hoping would be influenced by the not-so-subtle messaging. . 

The kids laugh at her, the girl told me, with a canny but depressing “knowing” about the teacher’s intentions. How sad. Fourteen-year-olds expect that there may be efforts to manipulate them in class and they aren’t shocked by it. They know that their teachers are trying to use them and they laugh about it in the lunchroom. Really, what have we become?

Parents all over the country are worried that educational institutions are indoctrinating their children with a socio-political, partisan orthodoxy — and rightly so. What has been less examined is the psychological and emotional damage this kind of manipulation by trusted authority figures may inflict on kids. Young people learn some very unfortunate and long-lasting lessons when the bond between teacher and student is betrayed. 

Teacher-student relationships are widely studied in psychological and educational circles precisely because they are found to correlate with outcomes such as academic achievement, behavior, and motivation. We risk bad outcomes when we allow anything, including dogmatic ideology, to erode an otherwise sacred bond — and not just in our classrooms. 

Young men and women learn to manipulate others after they have been manipulated. They learn to game the system for personal advantage and to make learning a secondary priority, just after learning to get by. They end up distrusting and resenting authority and checking personal integrity at the door when jockeying for position and power. Systems become suspect.

Does any of this sound familiar? As a country we are churning out a generation of kids with advanced skills in skepticism and cynicism, and then wondering why our political class is the way it is. We wonder why tech companies design algorithms to manipulate us and why actors shamelessly engage in public groupthink as they chase ratings and validation. 

We are shocked that hypocrisy about everything from mask-wearing to flying private jets to climate-change conferences is rampant. We snicker to ourselves when corporations making billions of dollars in China donate millions to “equity” projects in the U.S. All of these people graduated from our schools, too. 

Whether the current push toward partisan proselytizing in schools is effectively recruiting an army of young minds to its various causes is yet to be seen. There are a lot of silent eye-rollers in the back rows of classrooms who play along but aren’t bought in. They are being changed by the experience, either way. 

Something happens to the hearts and souls of young people when they are victimized by the indecency of adults who have no boundaries. Those kids may be joining friends in laughing at their activist teachers, but they are surely crying on the inside for trusted adult models of dignity and respect. True educators will cringe at the thought of it.