Browsing around online the other day, I came across this particular example of something commonly encountered there: A young woman on a college campus who was enraged about things she does not understand by the shameless people responsible for educating her.

This poor young woman illustrates the general skill level of young Americans in political discussion. She is not exceptionally incapable. She is roughly the norm, maybe even somewhere on the right side of the intellectual ability distribution.

That is to say, she is incapable of going to a conversation about politics with the humility required by her evident lack of understanding and seeking to learn something. She has adapted a mentally vacuous moralizing stance that allows her to characterize her interlocutors as evil in advance and so she assumes the only appropriate attitude is arrogant moral self-righteousness. Accuse the opponent of supporting legislation that is terrible, then, when asked to be specific about the legislation in question, respond with a victimized “This is what you do! You take people and you put them under the spotlight!”

As Charlie Kirk indicates, she had chosen to come up to the mic all on her own, but this is irrelevant in her mind. It’s someone else’s fault—someone “weird” and evil—when she comes off as a know-nothing, which is what she is.

But of course, young people can be expected not to know a lot of things. That’s normal. They can even be expected to be self-righteous and cocksure about things they patently know nothing about, at least sometimes. None of that is particularly new or distressing.

The depressing part is that she is being fed in her empty-headed moralizing by adults on her school’s faculty, and other adults in the broader cultural and political institutions of the country.

How can we expect to get young people to take seriously the project of trying to move out of ignorance if so many of their purported teachers reward them for saying stupid things with a self-confident smile?

I am in full agreement with one point this misguided young person makes, although she clearly does not understand the logical implication of it. She bemoans the fact that a 30-year-old would come to campus to debate students a decade younger. (Her recognition of the fact that she does not know enough to engage in meaningful debate with the 30-year-old contradicts, of course, her sense of self-righteous superiority, but let’s not look for logical consistency here). She is straightforwardly admitting that the typical college student is too ignorant of serious matters to debate them seriously in real-life situations that matter with serious adults.

I agree fully.

I have several decades under my belt of observing students like this young woman, and I know she is right. My profession involves trying to help young people like her to develop intellectually so that they do become capable, if not immediately upon graduation at least within a reasonable time thereafter, of engaging in the public sphere with serious stakes.

The classroom setting is an artificial facsimile of such debate wherein there really are no stakes. Most of the debates there take place between students who are more or less equally matched in their level of knowledge, and when I occasionally step in to point out particularly egregious errors, it is a pedagogic function alone that I exercise. I am not endeavoring to “win.” The point is to teach them something.

The professor does not and should not seek to demolish students argumentatively. Assuming the professor is competent (not always a safe assumption today), this would be a game akin to an NBA player seriously engaging to show a 10-year-old how to play basketball by giving him the ball and then vigorously playing against him. Even the worst NBA player is going to destroy that 10-year-old, and even the least competent faculty member should be able to best even the most talented college students.

But again, this is not the job. The job is to take basically incompetent people and to slowly, painstakingly, teach them competence.

In a sane culture, there would be no possibility of discerning any insult in that activity. Of course, college students cannot yet seriously talk about serious matters. They are there to learn how to do that. And that’s what we should be doing with young people like this woman.

The problem is that she won’t have it, and the culture agrees that it is offensive to try to teach her. Teaching implies a lack, in this view, an inferiority that needs to be corrected. After all, I do not need to be taught Spanish if I already speak the language. I need to be taught Spanish if I haven’t yet learned it.

This woman does not know much of substance about politics. Her parents are paying money for her to be taught that substance, among other things. But she does not want to learn it, and the school does not want to teach it. She wants to assert her will and she wants to feel self-righteously superior to those people whom her corrupt “teachers” have instructed her to despise.

I would be quite happy to agree with the gist of her statement about her own comparative lack of knowledge and then add some logical implications.

By all means, let’s keep 30-year-old non-college students off campus and away from debate situations with college students. As she admits, it’s not fair. And we need as much time as possible to teach her.

But the implication is that she and others in her position must utterly renounce any speech with serious stakes in the public sphere on these matters. Why on earth would we want people like her to vote, for example, as she has admitted that she cannot even hold her own in a political discussion with a 30-year-old YouTuber who dropped out of community college?

After the Empire fell and Bonaparte was deposed, the French revolutionary regime collapsed. The Bourbon Restoration recognized—and the mass of the French citizenry agreed—that the revolution had gone much too far, and a good deal of it would have to be undone. Among the things the new monarchy did was to restrict the franchise to those with a serious stake in the political life of the nation.

This young woman cannot have it both ways. Either she is fully competent to participate in the public sphere, including voting, in which case she must give up the victimized whining when the 30-year-old YouTuber who dropped out of community college destroys her in political discussion. Or else she must admit her incompetence, and the YouTuber must leave campus. If the latter is the case, then she must leave the polling place and other situations of serious political consequences until she has achieved the needed competence.