“Okay guys, genuine question. How long until we’re justified in killing people over this?”¹

Alarmed, I tried to reroute our whole-class discussion. I asked students to refocus on the prompt I’d provided: Choose one of the AI-related issues we’ve discussed this semester and brainstorm a potential policy solution. Consider timelines, barriers, stakeholders, and other decision-making factors. 

When one student reluctantly suggested that local, grassroots action would be the most effective way to make change, I excitedly shared a case study in which local resistance led to a city dropping their Flock contract. But the mood in the classroom continued to spiral.  

“I don’t know about the assassination thing,” someone offered.

“Okay, but they’re already killing us,” a student said. “They’re literally killing us.”

“We need to do what they’re doing in France,” another declared. “They’re not going to school. They’re not going to work. They’re massing in the streets and burning buildings. That’s the only way they’ll listen to us.”

---

During class, a student made this observation: “It feels like all the older generations are panicking about AI, but our generation is just like ‘oh yeah, another apocalyptic catastrophe, okay.’” Their classmates nodded.

This is a generalization, of course, but I believe it’s grounded in a real phenomenon, at least here in the United States. In other countries that have been shaped by different catastrophes, generational divides may look different. Here, I’ve often noticed a difference in political and social affect between those who remember the world before 9/11 and those who don’t, and again, another between those who were adults before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of ChatGPT and those who weren’t. Many of my students were only middle-schoolers in March 2020. They were children in 2016. For my older colleagues, the world is spinning off its axis, but for my students, the world has no axis. There is no stable world to return to, one where we trust authorities and well-resourced institutions. Their world is rotten to the core, and it always has been. 

I’m twenty-five, just a few years older than most of my students. I don’t remember a world before 9/11, though I’m told it was different. I don’t remember a world without the Internet, but I do remember one—barely—where iPhones and social media were wondrous and new. I haven’t allowed myself to feel big, world-changing hope in a long time, and I don’t remember a time when I hoped for something and it happened, or when I trusted an authority figure and they followed through. I can’t imagine what my students must feel like. 

---

After my recent classroom experience, I felt more unsure than ever about my teaching. How can we teach students who feel so cynical and hopeless when we also feel cynical and hopeless? I want to feel something again; I worry about developing apathy, and, most importantly, about my students developing apathy. If a student finishes my course feeling less empowered than they did when they started, I believe I’ve failed as a teacher. I want students to leave my classroom equipped to follow their curiosity, engage in productive civic dialogue, and make change in their communities. But this semester, I’ve consistently heard from students that there’s no point in trying to do any of those things. That nobody will listen and nothing will change, no matter what they do–unless they do something very, very drastic.

To help me think through these issues, I returned to Pedagogy of the Depressed by Christopher Schaberg. Titled in a cheeky reference to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Schaberg’s book reflects on the rapidly-evolving, often depressing state of the college classroom in the early 21st century. “At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed,” he writes. I nodded furiously as I turned the pages. “Or, rather, it wasn’t a certain point at all: it happened ‘gradually and then suddenly,’ to borrow a line from Hemingway. This was depressing. It changed the feel of the classroom, it altered the possibilities of how we could learn together.” (pg. 2) 

Critically, Schaberg gestures towards this particular “depression” as a phenomenon caused by structural forces both inside and outside the academy, rather than an issue of individual students’ and teachers’ mental health. Even if we all had access to amazing therapists and infinite workplace wellness initiatives, the “depression” in question would persist. “The ‘depression’ I am interested in tracking in this book is not so much an individual experience, not located (at least not solely) in the depressed subject,” he writes. “It’s a state of things. It’s a depressed atmosphere, a dispersed feeling of dread that has as much to do with cultural forces and planetary circumstances as it has to do with the intense feeling of solitary helplessness.” (pg. 4) 

And what a state of things! In the same vein, one of my colleagues recently shared this article with me: “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” by Doris A. Santoro. While this article is targeted towards K-12 teachers and administrators, I believe it applies just as well to higher education. Santoro says, “Teachers who experience demoralization believe that the school practices or policy mandates that they are expected to follow are harmful to students or degrading to the profession and that their attempts to alter them have been fruitless. Demoralization is a moral type of dissatisfaction that needs to be understood as a problem of professional ethics.” While this is certainly a problem in higher ed, which Schaberg explores in Pedagogy of the Depressed, I think our students also experience “demoralization” in everyday life. So do we. “Demoralization” captures the dissatisfaction from feeling like it’s impossible to live in accordance with one’s values, that one is forced to live unethically, and there’s nothing one can do about it.

Defined either way, in a broad or narrow sense, “demoralization” is a cause of the malaise Schaberg describes. “Maybe what’s so depressing about all this is that it feels very much like living at the end of something,” he writes. “[. . .] I’m tired of keeping up the charade that we’re working toward real transformation, when it feels more and more like we’re mostly just maintaining a cobbled together machine that’s on the brink of falling to pieces.” (pp. 115-116)

The bulk of Pedagogy of the Depressed reflects on Schaberg’s personal experiences teaching college English. Schaberg contextualizes the need for a “pedagogy of the depressed,” and he raises useful questions around what it might look like. But he stops short of theorizing a clear, distinct “pedagogy of the depressed.”

I’ve been strongly resonating with this term of late, and I’ve also been trying to remind myself that all teaching (and all doing, of anything worth doing) must involve some failure, especially when I’m doing something as tricky as facilitating discussions on current events. Plus, failure invites curiosity and facilitates learning. I want to close by offering some thoughts on what a “pedagogy of the depressed” means to me and inviting you to share what it might mean to you as well. What does it require—from us, of us—to teach these students in this climate, when we often feel the same weight of cynicism as they do? How can we empower our graduates to be lifelong learners who change their world for the better?

• A “pedagogy of the depressed” embraces the whole people who enter our classroom, with all their complexities, life experiences, interests, and frustrations.  
• A “pedagogy of the depressed” means not just accepting, but embracing, the fact that the classroom is an inherently political space. As Freire explains, there can be no democracy without an educated population; education is one of the fundamental pillars of a functioning polis. A classroom that claims to be apolitical is not, in fact, apolitical; it is interested in maintaining the status quo, which is a political choice.
  • What follows from this? A political classroom is a classroom that empowers students to act. This requires them to understand what’s happening around them, why it’s happening, and how they might change it. I don’t think that third element was present enough in my instruction this semester. I could have provided more case studies of successful change-making, like communities resisting data center construction or Flock contracts, and then used those case studies as springboards for conversations about the issues at hand (economic investment in AI, surveillance technology, etc). I still want students to develop their own opinions and solutions; they might want to change the world in ways that I disagree with, and that’s okay. But at the heart of the discussion is a case study that shows them how change is possible, and hope isn’t pointless. As Freire himself writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, “One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicative, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.” (pg. 45) 
• A “pedagogy of the depressed” is based in the politics of refusal. Some might view “refusal” as a give-in or dead-end, but as Carole McGranahan (2016) has suggested, refusal may be a far more generative practice than acquiescence. Practicing refusal allows us to imagine an array of wild, beautiful futures that we may not otherwise consider. “Refusal is insistence on the possible over the probable,” writes McGranahan. “[. . .] Hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations, thus moving away from the probable into the possible.” (pg. 323) In this way, refusal may be a route to addressing demoralization. 
• In order to enable work based in the politics of refusal (refusing AI, for example, or refusing classroom surveillance), unionization is critical. And as my own faculty union says, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” This is true of the working conditions of all library workers, regardless of faculty status. 
• As one of my students shared: “I think it’s still important to stand up for our values, even if we know we’re going to lose.” This is the most important part of a “pedagogy of the depressed.” If nothing else, we must remind ourselves that we are still human, still kicking. Still here.  

Works Cited

• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
• McGranahan, Carole. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48579449.
• Santoro, Doris A. “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” Educational Leadership Magazine, June 1, 2018. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-it-burnout-or-demoralization. 
• Schaberg, Christopher. Pedagogy of the Depressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

---

1. For reasons of privacy, student quotes are approximate and representative, not exact, throughout this post. ↩︎