[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-149462-en":3,"doc-seo-149462-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":90},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":27,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},149462,962084928904,"Jake","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d",9,"Religion & Spirituality","Venerating Our Youth - How Much Admiration is Too Much?","A presidential address exploring how modern education can overemphasize individualism and excessive affirmation at the cost of meaning, purpose, and belonging. It argues that young people carry an inner struggle shaped by social pressures and a culture of intense individual encouragement. The speech contrasts flattering “you can do it all” messaging and recruitment tactics with the deeper need for community that forms stable self-worth, lasting happiness, and future leadership grounded in something greater than the self.","Venerating Our Youth: How Much Admiration is Too Much?  \nSpecial feature by Father James P. Shea , President, University of Mary in Bismarck  \nThe English writer G. K. Chesterton called education “simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” Those of us who serve in colleges and universities are right to concern ourselves with quality career preparation and great job placement for our students. We do pass along skill and competence. But we should also pass along “soul,” and education falls short unless it attends carefully to this other, less tactical aspect of teaching and learning. To serve our students well, we begin by acknowledging that each one has an inner life, an arena within where the struggle for purpose and meaning takes place.  \nThis requires a kind of wakefulness, especially on the part of those colleges and universities who understand the formation and education of the whole person-body, mind, and spirit-as fundamental to our mission. We approach our students with a concern for the societal and personal pressures they face, striving to understand the particular challenges young people now grapple with in both the world outside and the world within. These young people are more than consumers to be analyzed and courted for the benefit of our recruitment and retention goals. In that spirit, I offer just a few thoughts about one of the more unsettling trends in the way we tend to think and talk about this age group and their education: a growing culture of intense individualism.  \nThe students now headed for the classrooms and laboratories of our colleges and universities have as much to bring as any generation. They are bright, talented, and full of promise. They are eager to learn. But in my experience as their teacher, chaplain, and now as a university president, there is also an anxiety which hangs over them, an uncertainty or grief of some kind. It is difficult to name and hard sometimes hard to see, but I believe it to be unmistakably real and derived from this culture of individualism.  \nIt’s foolhardy to generalize, but I think it could be said that most of our students today have received from their parents and teachers an upbringing characterized by remarkable nurturing and encouragement. From the very beginning, they have been told how special they are. Such affirmation is beautiful and tremendously well-intentioned, but it sometimes has a darker effect. I could illustrate this in a hundred ways, but one memory springs readily to mind. A 17-year-old once showed me a card he had received from his father. It read,“Son, you will never know how much I admire and respect you. You are my hero.” I’m not really sure that a young man knows what to do with something like that. Such words may support and flatter him at one level, but they create unrest in another part of him. If the adults in your life admire you with such intensity, whom are you supposed to admire? How did you get to be so amazing anyway? And maybe you’ve been wondering about this for a long time: when you’re nine and your parents take off a week of work to drive you to a soccer tournament five states away, a part of you might genuinely wonder if they don’t have anything else to do. The other part of you feels this anxious pressure to perform in what was supposed to be a fun game among kids.  \nIn fact, such intensity of individual encouragement from teachers and parents can have an unforeseen negative effect. Because of the way we are put together at the level of the soul, we can be more deeply consoled by the reassurance that we belong to a stable and meaningful community than by individual assurances that we are somehow terrific and special. For when you are made to feel exquisitely unique without being made to feel like you belong to something greater than yourself, you are left pretty much all alone. A genuine experience of community and family serves to cultivate healthy self-worth more effectively than a campaign","cbCaimcANg2dy2JI","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaimcANg2dy2JI","pdf",165794,1,2,"English","en",105,"# Venerating Our Youth: framing education as more than job preparation\n## Inner life, purpose, and the culture of individualism\n## The unintended effects of intense admiration and ego-driven encouragement\n## Reorienting education toward belonging, meaning, and the greater good","[{\"question\":\"Why does the speech say education must pass along “soul,” not just skill?\",\"answer\":\"It argues education falls short unless it attends to the inner arena where purpose and meaning are formed, not only to tactical competence and career outcomes.\"},{\"question\":\"What trend does the president describe as unsettling for today’s students?\",\"answer\":\"A growing culture of intense individualism, expressed through aggressive encouragement and affirmation that can create anxiety and unrest.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the speech suggest higher education should respond?\",\"answer\":\"By shifting from constant self-flattering messaging toward cultivating genuine community and belonging, helping students direct their search for meaning toward the greater good.\"}]","Venerating Our Youth - How Much Admiration is Too Much? 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