When Ignorance Goes Viral
I am reposting a wonderful article having to do with education (originally published May 26, 2026). Jenna Robinson, Senior Editor of Education at Restoring the West, is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Follow her on X @jarobinson1.
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The Whatever podcast exposes some of the worst tendencies of online Gen Z culture: performative, ignorant, and obsessed with gender-war debates.
Why this list matters: A free society depends on citizens who possess the civic knowledge and habits of mind necessary for self-government. Sadly, too many young people lack these important dispositions—and often show little concern about acquiring them. What’s more, they are often “influencing” the generation that comes next via social media. The Whatever podcast doesn’t represent all of Gen Z, but it does reveal a visible and influential slice of it.
Most pointedly, the podcast makes clear that our educational institutions are failing even seemingly successful young adults. These products of a performative, social media-driven subculture are not high school dropouts—they’re employed, and many are enrolled in postsecondary programs. Yet too often they lack basic factual knowledge and the intellectual humility to recognize what they don’t know. Here’s what the podcast discusses:
Ignorance is common. Far too many guests on the Whatever podcast can’t answer basic factual questions. Most can’t identify the dates of WWI and WWII, the names of all seven continents, or other basic facts related to geography or history. This is especially concerning since many of the show’s guests are recent high school graduates, current college students, or recent graduates. They have just finished years of formal schooling, with very little to show for it.
Knowledge itself is treated as optional: Most of the podcast guests wear their ignorance proudly. Some clearly believe that “school stuff” needn’t follow them past graduation. While there are a few exceptions, the guests aren’t ashamed of their lack of knowledge. New volunteers keep showing up week after week, knowing they’ll be asked questions they can’t answer. Our educational institutions have failed to convince these young people that learning itself is important.
Education is seen as low ROI: Many of the podcast guests work in the new economy; they’re minor social media personalities, influencers, or content creators. Others work at gigs instead of a 9-to-5. Accordingly, their attitudes toward formal education are dismissive. The ones that are current college students aren’t much kinder, often reducing education to a financial transaction. If it doesn’t deliver a paycheck, they see little point in it.
Cultural knowledge has replaced civic knowledge: This year—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—it’s especially hard to believe that some young people can’t identify 1776 as the year of our country’s founding. But that’s exactly what I witnessed while watching the Whatever podcast. More disturbing, the same young people who don’t know this basic civic fact can readily name at least three Kardashians, suggesting that cultural fluency is crowding out the knowledge required for informed citizenship.
Confidence routinely exceeds competence: While guests of the show are content to admit “I don’t know” about an astonishing variety of factual questions, they are nevertheless extremely confident in their opinions on political, social, and cultural topics. They present themselves as experts in it all: sex, dating, politics, men, feminism, and pop culture. This mismatch is telling. Education has failed both to impart knowledge and to cultivate the humility needed to recognize the limits of one’s understanding.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If seemingly successful young adults leave our schools without knowledge or humility, that points to a deep problem. In order to transform such young people in a lasting way, schools must rethink how they educate, not just what they teach. To be sure, schools must continue to teach the basics. But they must also radically change students’ attitude toward learning, cultivating dispositions of curiosity, humility, and respect for knowledge.
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John’s closing comment —
My only beef with this is that Jenna does not mention that these young people have no Critical Thinking skills. That is the fault of our K-12 education system which is purposefully teaching them the opposite: conformity. I can’t blame the children here as they are literally being brainwashed. The simplest minimum solution is to require that all K-12 students have to take a two semester Grade 9 course: Critical Thinking and AI Literacy.
I now have the Standards for this and am optimistic that Tennessee will be the first State to not only see the extraordinary merits of such a mandated stand-alone class, but will lead the pack in making it happen.
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Americans wear a number of hats. We are wage earners, consumers, parents, and citizens. But our education system fails to teach the last two. Instead it concentrates on perfecting the wage earners to create consumers. Almost nothing is taught to create smart voters or great parents.
No wonder our youth thinks they know everything necessary if they can receive a paycheck and exist in America. What else is important to them?
Think about it. We are born consumers and start at day one being efficient at consuming. By age 18 we are legally declared to be eligible to vote and graduate high school. Some go to work immediately, others choose higher education, but none are taught civics or parenting any longer. Our youth has been taught to wear two hats and figure out the other two. A fifth hat might be investor. This is a subset of consumer, but it is actually a subset of wage earners since we all hope to retire someday and we need to have a nest egg socked away so we can remain a consumer after we give up our wage earner status. Shouldn’t that be taught in high school?
School should be a religious experience. The glory of God’s world creates compound growth by design and we are all a part of it. Investing in your own future allows you to compound your life into a sustainable being. Isn’t that what our education system should achieve? It has to teach us to wear a lot of different hats efficiently.
The "Whatever" podcast is an appropriate name. "Whatever" became a popular "attitudinal" response in the 90s(?) to a question or minorly confounding situation. It usually meant, "I don't know and I don't care" and that's the end of the thought process. The irony is the generation that walks around with a computer in their hands is not smarter. If they consider education only in terms of ROI as far as a job is concerned, they sadly lack appreciation for great ideas in the past or for their own future. We can see how lemmings are made and they will become the proles. Here's your trophy.