American education has entered a dark age, Writes William Deresiewicz, the author of Excellent Sheep, on UnHerd.

He’s taught at elite colleges and discovered bright, successful students who didn’t know how to frame an argument or analyze other people’s arguments. “They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know to think.”

Most don’t learn much in college, writes Deresiewicz. Elite kids find new hoops to jump through. The rest focus on sports and beer. Professors “have no incentive to care about their teaching,” and adjuncts don’t have the time.

Wokeism has infected universities with “an already weakened intellectual immune system,” he writes. “Students haven’t learned to think, so they lack the means to spot its inconsistencies, its hypocrisies, its absurdities.”

Wokeism also . . .  provides students with an interpretive framework with which to understand the world. For earlier generations of young adults, that function would have been performed by Marxism or Freudianism or feminism or liberal progressivism or American patriotism. All have long since been discredited except for feminism, which had itself been in abeyance and has now been absorbed by, and subordinated to, the new intersectional identitarianism.

Indeed, after decades of postmodernism, with its assault on the very idea of grand interpretive narratives, wokeism represents a return of the . . . ineluctable human hunger for meaning. For wokeism, like those earlier belief systems, offers a framework that is not only cognitive and historical, but also moral and existential. It tells you not only where you come in, but also who you are and how you are to orient yourself toward others and the world. In other words, it offers purpose and direction.

Careerism leaves students empty, writes Deresiewicz. Wokeism fills that void.

The intellectual frameworks of the past were “competing ideologies,” he writes.

Students couldn’t just believe: they had to debate, had to read the sources, had to know what they were talking about.”

. . . With wokeism, there is no debate. There are no competing ideologies or rival schools. There isn’t even much of any reading, from what I can tell. There is only assent.

Undergraduates “are thirsty for meaning and purpose and magnitude,” writes Mark Bauerlein in Inside Higher Ed. If students interested in humanities find no canon or core, no “metanarrative,” they’ll go elsewhere.

He’s the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.