The ‘Great Awokening’ is proof that professors are failing the younger generation

People keep asking me what I plan to do after Brexit. To be honest, I’ve always wanted to have a go at teaching. I have spent the past three weeks at a summer school in Normandy, tutoring, lecturing and marking essays for teenagers from around the world, and I have discovered two things.

First, this is incredibly satisfying work. Secondly, and of more general interest, the censoriousness that has descended upon young people over the past five years – that odd blend of intolerance and grievance known as “the great awokening” – is largely a product of how they are being taught.

I am here with the John Locke Institute, which prepares teenagers to go on to Oxford, Cambridge and elite US universities. This year, it is hosting 107 students from every continent (except, as far as I can tell, South America). They are a truly diverse cohort. I don’t mean diverse in the BBC sense of “people who look different but think the same”. I mean there is real heterodoxy – yes, of ethnicity and sex; but also of outlook and opinion. There are kids on full bursaries from some of Britain’s most deprived boroughs and there are five King’s Scholars from Eton. There are Marxists and libertarians, Leavers and Remainers, Muslims and atheists. Yet no one wants anyone else censured, silenced or no-platformed.

The John Locke Institute is run by a former Oxford academic called Martin Cox. Cox started out preparing people for PPE courses but, as his institute grew in popularity, he branched into history, psychology and theology, bringing in top-of-the-range university lecturers. He encourages what he calls “generous listening”, by which he means engaging properly with someone else’s idea, rather than just waiting to jump in with your own. He teaches his students to confront their opponents’ strongest arguments, not their weakest. He tells them that, if they don’t change their minds on at least one major issue during the course, he will have failed.

That might sound trite, even platitudinous, but open-mindedness does not come naturally. We are tribal creatures. Our instinct is to judge an idea not by its intrinsic merits, but by whether we like the person advancing it. We have to be taught not to do this. Empiricism, reasoning, the scientific method – all these things are counterintuitive. They run up against the huntergatherer rules of thumb – what psychologists call the heuristics

– that have been encoded in our DNA for more than a million years. Enlightenment precepts need to be continuously drummed in. As Hannah Arendt once put it, “every generation, civilisation is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’”.

For three centuries and more, that drumming in was carried out by universities. Professors taught their students to be sceptical, to think for themselves, to test new ideas. Universities haven’t stopped doing these things, of course. But the great awokening has also seen a very different tendency emerge on campus, one that subordinates logic, merit and free inquiry to identity politics. Students are now frequently taught that the intrinsic strength of an idea does not, after all, matter as much as the identity of the person proposing it. We are held to be defined by race and sex. The feelings of a designated victim trump the facts of a designated oppressor.

Wokeness is a child of postmodernism – the notion that there is no objective truth or, more precisely, that truth is a product of power structures. A better name, though, would be “premodernism”, for the idea strikes at the essence of the Enlightenment. Its growth on campus is the single most depressing phenomenon of our age.

The John Locke Institute offers A-level students a form of intellectual vaccine, teaching them the importance of free speech and free thought. It is a pity that such inoculation is needed. But how apt that it should be administered in the name of the great 17th-century thinker whose ideas, as much as anyone’s, made the miracle of modernity.