Trump’s flag-burning bull, stop teaching kids to despair and other commentary

Schools beat: Stop Teaching Kids To Despair 

Thanks to “dominant ideas of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP),” schools today teach children — “through countless implicit and explicit signals ” — that the “world they live in,” is ” a broken and dangerous place,” warns Robert Pondiscio at National Review. Argh!

An important “body of research led by Jeremy Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania” finds that our “primal world beliefs” (i.e., “deep, often unconscious assumptions about the nature of the world”) tend to “shape everything: our sense of well-being, our resilience, our openness to experience, even our mental health outcomes.”

Teachers must “examine what kind of world we’re portraying” to kids.

“Children need to know that the world contains hardship, injustice, and danger. But they also need to know that it contains beauty, opportunity, and meaning.”

Eye on Britain: A Revolt of the Plebs

Amid “dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming ‘race war,’” The Spectator’s Brendon O’Neill sees “something different: a class war.”

Witness recent faceoffs between “the keffiyeh-adorned” defenders of open borders and “working men and women, many of them mums, all wrapped in the England flag as they state their case for the restoration” of national sovereignty.

It’s a “revolt of ‘the plebs’” against the “luxuriant moralism of an activist class blissfully blind to the struggles of everyday Brits.”

Yet many of “ideologies of the professional-managerial classes seem to be dropping like flies” in the face of pushback on issues like immigration and borders, trans rights and “Islamophobic” cultural tensions.

Working-class communities are standing up and saying: “We matter.” 

Housing watch: YIMBY Scores in Red States 

“The progressive YIMBY [Yes In My Back Yard] movement” aims to “reset the discourse around policies like zoning,” but it’s not a “high-cost blue state like California or New York” that’s passing major “reforms to rein in regulations that drive up housing costs,” observes M. Nolan Gray at City Journal; it’s Texas and Montana, “the beating heart of conservative politics.”

Such answers to the housing crisis “come naturally to principled conservatives,” who favor “stronger property rights,” even if they can conflict with “conservative lifestyle preferences,” as witness President Trump’s vow “to defend the ‘suburban lifestyle dream’ against alleged threats — namely, apartments.”

Though “nearly every issue” seems “polarized along partisan lines, a shared desire for more housing has happily been spared” — even if  “in red states, the juice generally flows more easily.”

Libertarian: Trump’s Flag-Burning Bull

One “big problem” with President Trump’s executive order aiming to protect the American flag is that “flag burning is clearly protected by the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court has twice affirmed that this is so,” points out Reason’s Robby Soave.

“It’s understandable why people don’t like flag burning,” but free speech “is among the most fundamental American values of all” and “does not apply solely to benign, polite, socially acceptable speech.”

Trump’s order argues that “flag burning ‘that is likely to incite imminent lawless action’ could still be criminalized”; Soave answers: “If the federal government could abridge speech because other people might react negatively to it, then the First Amendment would cease to be a useful defense against censorship.”

Culture critic: Back-to-School Blues

“The waning days of August trigger my annual funk,” gripes The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey.

“The days get shorter. The nights get cool. Soon it will be time to start setting the alarm and packing lunches.” Summer’s “freedoms will become a memory.”

“Melodramatic”? Well, school just “never agreed with me. I hated every minute of it.”

He wanted his “freedom” but “you had no choice” about school. “You had to go — all day, every day, seemingly forever” — much like doing “hard time” in prison.

His son’s now heading off to college, which for him is “the beginning of something great.” But “for me, it’s the end of a season. And I hate that.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board