Ben Sasse

despite being a historian, I am more interested in the future than the past

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 2 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

I believe our nation is in the midst of a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history. We are living in an America of perpetual adolescence. Our kids simply don't know what an adult is anymore—or how to become one. Many don't see a reason even to try. Perhaps more problematic, the older generations have forgotten that we need to plan to teach them. It's our fault more than it is theirs.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 2 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

I simply couldn't reconcile the decision to leave while work was still incomplete with how my parents had taught me to think about assignments. I couldn't conceptualize growing up without the compulsion—first external compulsion, but over time, the more important internal and self-directed kind of compulsion—to attempt and to finish hard things, even when I didn't want to.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 3 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

The hypergenerational segregation of our time is bizarre, unhealthy, and historically unprecedented. It takes intentionality and work to overcome it.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 9 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Consumption is not the key to happiness; production is. Meaningful work—that actually serves and benefits a neighbor, thereby making a real difference in the world—contributes to long-term happiness and well-being. Consumption just consumes.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 9 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

America, as the world's first modern creedal nation—that is, a nation built not on shared ethnicity but a set of shared ideas about freedom, of speech, press, religion, and assembly—is even more dependent on the conscious transmission of precise beliefs about liberty and adult responsibility than other nations.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 10 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Peter Pan is a story about a boy who refuses to grow up. We often misremember it as a fairy tale. It isn't. In the end, the Peter of J. M. Barrie's classic is not at all a commendable hero. He's selfish and shortsighted. "I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things," Peter tells us. "I don't want to be a man."

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 13 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Living only in the present isn't freedom. Living only in the present isn't even human if you think about it. Humans, unlike any other animal on the planet, remember the past. We understand our nature. And we try to build on both of them. We are an aspirational species; we look to the future.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 14 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

With every crisis comes opportunity, and this time is no different.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 14 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Endless adolescence... is bizarrely oxymoronic.

Adolescence has always been a means to an end—its point was to aid the transition to adulthood. It was not an end in itself.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 17 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Dewey] has, in my view, the single best claim to be the father of the modern American public high school.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Dewey] is responsible for allowing schools to undermine how Americans once turned children into adults.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

To the degree that we have forgotten the fact that a school should be a tool—a means to an end, not an end in itself—Dewey is the culprit. For him, the school would become everything—the literal center of the world, he said on occasion. In Dewey's dream, the school ceased to be an instrument supporting parents and became instead a substitute for parents.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Dewey] never admits to his readers what is obviously one of his ambitions... He doesn't want the school any longer to be in the handmaiden role, aiding parents in their goal of passing literacy and tradition and deferred gratification on to their progeny... his schools now have the socially transforming purpose of displacing the parents, with their supposedly petty interests in their children as individuals.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 26 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

School is obviously an important tool... but it is still a tool. It is only one of many tools. And it is most fundamentally a tool in the service of parents—and grandparents and neighbors and local communities.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • pp. 26-27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

I want my children to be formed by ideals and principles that are definable and debatable—by me and by them—even if such ideals and principles are not always in vogue. I want my children to be introduced to the enduring debates between Augustine and Rousseau, not to have these debates hidden from them, as Dewey seeks to do.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Rousseau does a splendid job of nudging us to raise our sights to the possible. Hence my fondness for wrestling with him, even though I disagree more often than I agree with him.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

[Rousseau] is not making a total claim of ownership on my kids without any existential acknowledgement that they are my kids—which is basically the claim on them that Dewey is making.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 27 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

The failures of Dewey's vision for our kids weren't as obvious when America's economic upward trajectory was climbing at a historically unprecedented pace...

No longer. We cannot assume the middle class will easily self-perpetuate in the future.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 28 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)

Everyone typically (and usually wrongly) believes the moment they're living in is the most critical time in human history.

• The Vanishing American Adult
  • p. 30 (St. Martin's Press, 2017)