If you’ve set foot on a college campus recently and dared to engage in dialogue, you might find that mission… impossible. Discourse has been replaced by chants, knowledge by slogans, and thought by rigid ideology.
Academia is hardly recognizable.
And it begs the questions:How did we raise a generation so quick to dismiss, to shout down, to chant over anyone with a differing perspective? A generation that views every institution as corrupt, every tradition as toxic, and every system as irredeemable? But yet sees itself as morally superior?
Recently I was told by a “morally superior” student on NYU campus, that the sidewalk I was standing on—a public sidewalk in Manhattan where I resided—was “stolen land that I had colonized.” And that because of that my very presence invalidated anything I had to say. She could not listen to a “colonizer.”
When I pressed her saying that her lack of dialogue would not lead to any solutions, her response was chillingly blunt: “There’s only one solution—intifada revolution.” She was not advocating for change, she was advocating for destruction, and a violent one.
It honestly is baffling. Why would privileged students at prestigious, expensive institutions want to tear everything down?
Maybe because they were taught to…
A Tale of Two Classrooms
It didn’t start this way.
Walk into an elementary school classroom, and you’ll find students constructing towers from blocks, cutting paper snowflakes, and plunging hands-first into tables of sand and water. They dress up as bakers, police officers, and astronauts, imagining what it might feel like to inhabit those roles.
This is the constructivist model of education—a method hailed by researchers because it mirrors how our brains make meaning. At its core, constructivism teaches children that learning happens through building.
You build on prior knowledge.
You build through trial and error.
You build on each other’s sentences and ideas.
And when something collapses? You rebuild—better, stronger, smarter.
Now, fast forward to college. The building blocks are gone. So are the costumes, the sensory tables, but also is the spirit of construction. Instead it ops for a different methodology.
Deconstructing the Builders
In academia, the focus isn’t on building. Under the guise of “critical thinking,” students are taught to deconstruct everything. History, art, institutions—nothing is spared. The goal isn’t to create, innovate, or imagine a better world. It’s to dismantle, dissect, and critique the one we have.
Take art, for example. Students aren’t asked to study a painting for inspiration or dream up their own masterpiece. Instead, they’re tasked with reducing it to its parts: brushstrokes, themes, and inevitably, the artist’s privilege or oppression.
This critique doesn’t stop at the canvas. The entire past is put on trial, judged by today’s norms, which makes any past leader/artist/ inventor seem like a racist. The result? A generation trained to see the world not as a place of possibility, but as a series of flaws to be called out—and destroyed.
The very structure of academia only reinforces this through its self-imposed siloing. Departments operate in isolation, presenting the world through narrow, unchallenged lenses. And in the end, this approach produces graduates armed with knowledge anyone can now Google and without mastery of a single marketable skill. They can’t build shit.
The Consequences of Deconstructivist Led Thinking?
A disconnect between what society needs and what our colleges are producing. As British journalist Douglas Murray said in his latest book: “To ‘deconstruct’ something is as significant in academia as ‘constructing’ things in the rest of society.”
Academia, the supposed incubator of progress and the birthplace of tomorrow’s leaders, is churning out professional and angry critics instead. These graduates don’t propel society forward. They see construction as passé—or worse, oppressive. After all, aren’t we just “building on stolen land”?
But here’s the truth: Society isn’t moved forward by people who merely point out its flaws. It’s moved forward by people who dare to build something better.
This isn’t to say critique has no place. Honest, rigorous critique is essential to spark change. But critique alone isn’t enough. When critique becomes the endgame—when “deconstruction” is seen as an achievement in itself—it creates a cultural vacuum, leaving only despair in its wake.
Builders are needed now more than ever.
And maybe, just maybe, the solution lies in our kindergartens.If academia took a page out of their lesson plans—complete with blocks, costumes, and a little imagination—maybe we’d graduate more architects of the future and fewer critics of the past.
At the very least, we’d all have better towers.
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