Having taught for 34 years, Professor J. Budziszewski knows more than a thing or two about how things have changed for generations of students. Here’s some observations which reveal the importance of returning standards to their original design…
[Budziszewski] …you can’t avoid questions like whether happiness and pleasure are the same thing, and how marital order and social order are related. I don’t have to bring them up. My students do. Of course the students won’t talk if they think you are calling them immoral. I humbly suggested to one class that my generation had invented the sexual revolution, but I thought theirs was paying the price.
A young man said, “I know what you mean.” He said he longed—his word—to love and marry a woman and be faithful to her forever. My heart soared. But then he said, “but I don’t think it’s possible.” Because his own parents hadn’t been able to manage it—parents whom he obviously loved—he didn’t see how he could.
[Interviewer] Do any of them say, “How come I’m not hearing this anywhere else?”
[Budziszewski] The most poignant such instance was a young man I knew who was trying to work through the guilt of his complicity in his girlfriend’s abortion. He became very angry. “The adults made this legal. They told us it was OK and that’s not true. Why didn’t anybody tell us that it isn’t?”
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