They so want to do the right thing and they know so little

'Tis the day for teachers to speak out. What with the NRA and our inhumanly oblivious simulacrum of a president bleating that teachers ought to carry guns and be taught to use them, many educators have joined their students in talking back for civilization.

Meanwhile, Erudite Partner's latest on what it has been like to teach college ethics throughout the U.S. Forever Wars since 9/11 has hit the internet.

Recently, former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus admitted to Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour that the war on terror’s first battlefield, Afghanistan, has become the locus of a “generational struggle,” one that more than a decade and a half later is not “going to be won in a few years.”

I’ve watched that generational struggle as it developed in the classroom. ...

These days, my students live in a country that has been at war almost since they were born, and yet, as is true with most of their fellow citizens, the fighting could be happening on Mars for all the impact it has on them. ... Most of them haven’t yet realized that, if their government hadn’t spent $5.6 trillion and counting on those very wars, there might have been federal money available to relieve them of the school debt they will carry for decades.

... The good news is that they want to learn. ...

Involuntarly, Parkland students are showing how the next generation might lead. E.P. has offered a chronicle of how the coming generation is growing into taking on the mess adults have made for them.