An Educated Tolerance

The questions we are led to ask are, Why does the educational emphasis on tolerance not work better? No country in the world emphasize tolerance more than we do. Teaching now about bullying is a great idea, but will this be effective?

Elizabeth Scalia, in First Things:

The recent, tragic, suicides of eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi and fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince—both bullied beyond their endurance by contemporaries, both unable or unwilling to admit into their confidence an authoritative person who might have helped—have generated a great deal of ink about bullying and how to combat it. We hear that children must be more emphatically taught “tolerance and kindness,” and that awareness must be raised.

That’s all well and good, but it bears mentioning that this generation of teenagers has been raised on near-daily lessons in tolerance and “everyone is specialness” from their first Sesame Street episode to their Senior Proms; there is a disconnect, somewhere, between theory and practice, and that disconnect is a killer.

Part of the disconnect is a society-wide inability to walk that tolerance talk. Everyone pays lip-service to the Golden Rule, but it is easy to find an intolerant anti-Catholic bigot on Huffington Post, and MSNBC or an anti-secularist one on Free Republic.com or Fox News. Our decades-long grounding in Political Correctness allows anyone to proclaim their noble, “tolerant” instincts while huddled in insulated enclaves where the limits of their tolerance are made all too plain, extending only to the like-minded.