My students, from what I see, don’t have much of a coherent worldview. They’re more instinctively curious than I would expect – when they see or hear something different, like the man in Red Square proclaiming the world to be flat, they wonder why that person thinks that. I assume that person is seeking attention, they don’t tend to make as many judgments or assumptions as I’m prone to do.

In their writing, they tend to be focused on cultural issues like memes, music, fitness, and film/television. They reference many different cultural totems from the modern era, such as iPhones, FitBits, and social media apps in nearly every piece of writing. I can’t begin to describe the many ways in which they have debated the value of Instagram vs. Snapchat in their conversations during workshops.

Politics is more like a third rail to them than it is even to my own classmates. My students fear appearing divisive. I haven’t heard anybody so much as mention the word Trump in my class, yet it is on the lips of everybody I communicate with outside the classroom. To the extent that they have a political worldview, they all want to get along with each other, and they fear that mentioning politics will weaken that cause.

They are interested in learning more about the world around them, but to say that they hold any kind of worldview would probably be false. In many ways, they are half-formed creatures finding their way, and they have yet to coherently articulate what that way might look like. They are living the opening chapters of their own bildungsroman – still idealistic, still curious, still seeing things with the wonder of a child rather than an adult’s cynicism.