The conditions in our daily lives reinforce cancel culture and decentralized dictatorship. Instead of feeding an illusion that your children will automatically replicate the old forms of socializing, you should help them to develop interpersonal capacities the contemporary situation has deprived them of.

A 2018 US survey has found out that 95 percent of teenagers (13 to 17-year-olds) have smartphones or an access to one. 45 percent have reported to be almost constantly online.¹ This potential for pedagogical intervention can hardly be outmaneuvered by parents or schools. Peter McLaren has developed the concept of “hidden curriculum.” In a hidden curriculum, the school setting reinforces a culture of the obedience to an exploitative system. It is not the content that is being taught, but the unspoken norms expressed by classroom practice. We can also frame our understanding of social media through a hidden curriculum. The architecture of social media invites incendiary and reactionary engagement as opposed to deliberated opinions. An emotional reaction is conflated with expressing an opinion. It is more like a multiple-choice test than writing an essay. If young people are lucky to go to a school where intellectual development is fostered, they may have an opportunity to write out an argumentation or participate in a debate. But they may not have such a chance at all. Social media may be the only proxy for having a discussion and inculcate respective habits.

The human brain develops intensely until the mid-twenties. During this period, brain capacities that are not being used are pruned away. Therefore, it is crucial to ask what teenagers are not doing when spending time on social media. Screen time can shape teenagers’ brains or inhibit their development because they do not spend time on other activities. A Norwegian study has revealed that screen exposure at the age between 4-8 retards the development of the capacity to understand emotions.²

The structure of family plays an essential role in shaping minds. We can imagine how having two parents discussing and having differing opinions is an exercise in accepting that there are various ways one can think. The idea of nuclear family is an abnormality in human history. In tribal societies, parenting activities were undertaken by more than two adults.³ A 2018 UK survey revealed that 14.7 percent of families were single parent families. In such families, there is only one child in slightly more than the half of them.⁴ 23 percent of US and 15 percent of Canadian children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults.⁵

The recent trend to introduce woke training in schools may induce a further legitimization of canceling. Paul Rossi, a whistle blower, used to be a teacher in Grace Church High School in New York City and had to participate in such training measures. According to his account, the facilitators stressed individual’s race as something defining their character. His arguing with such treatment and the philosophy of the training caused his redundancy in 2021. Similar situations may model canceling as a legitimate way of having a disagreement among adults.

Furthermore, these trainings may legitimize stigmatizing people because of the characteristics that they have had no influence on. For example, the Australian Christian Lobby has reported labeling white, male and Christian students as “oppressors” during a “Diversity and Inclusion” lesson in a Victorian high school. In another high school, male students had to apologize for sexual predation on behalf of all men.⁶

I wonder about the professional ethics behind such framing. Educations and media are giving young people a tool for building up their identification that may harm them in the long run. Considering victimhood scores as the source of moral grandstanding and attention can have unforeseeable consequences for the development of young people. According to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, attention is the capital that the information society offers to the users, while the questions of resource distribution are managed by the elites.⁷ These victimhood-related metrics can replace the framework of qualities that one needs to make an effort to gain such as social popularity or scholarly achievements. In contrast to these ways of gaining self-esteem, benefiting from the inherited victimhood status requires pursuing activities that further reinforce missing out on success defined in terms of old definitions of success. This self-sabotage may drive further frustration and escalation in form of canceling “oppressors.”

We do not know how widespread this rhetoric is in these new trainings. However, we may expect that the facilitators are still in the phase of educating themselves about the theoretical underpinnings of the contents they transfer. Since the outpour of these trainings has been relatively sudden and widespread, the organizers may have not had enough time to reflect about professional ethics and the implications for students in regard to both the contents and the delivery of such programs. Students and teachers are taking part in a grand experiment.

However, there is also a positive future scenario. The outpour of woke trainings, which often demonstrate the inherent contradictions in what is being taught, will flex critical thinking muscles among the young. Seeing how adults let themselves be manipulated by crowd dynamics, they will develop a healthy approach to examine fads and various forms of manipulation.