The Quiet Indoctrination of Fragility

Earlier this month, a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, was fatally shot during an incident involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the hours that followed, the language escalated quickly—murder, terrorism, propaganda—each word carrying its own political weight. People began arguing not only about what happened, but about what it meant.

Regardless of where one lands politically, or whether one views the shooting as criminal, tragic, reprehensible, or the grim outcome of years of escalating rhetoric, it is not a justification for suspending the education of tens of thousands of children.

Yet that is precisely what followed.

Minneapolis Public Schools closed for two days in the immediate aftermath. Since then, Minneapolis and several surrounding districts—including Saint Paul, Richfield, Robbinsdale, Fridley, Bloomington, and others—have made in-person attendance optional, offering temporary e-learning through mid-February for students who feel unsafe attending school.

The rationale is framed around safety, care, and emotional well-being.

At my place of work, it was all anyone talked about: emergency meetings, collective processing, public displays of outrage and grief. There was an unspoken assumption that there was a correct emotional response. And that we would perform it together.

I understand grief. I respect fear. But what I witnessed was not discernment.

I choose to send my child to a private Catholic school. I pay for it. I do so knowing it operates outside the public system—different curriculum, different funding, different values. I believed, perhaps naïvely, that this would also mean a different approach to moments of cultural turbulence.

And yet, his school also closed.

What unsettled me was not simply the closure itself, but what it revealed: that even institutions ostensibly grounded in stability now reflexively mirror the emotional volatility of the culture instead of buffering children from it.

Schools emphasize that in-person learning remains available, while attendance has been made optional through temporary remote options.

But we all know that “optional” does not affect all families equally.

For households with flexible schedules, remote work, or multiple caregivers, optional attendance is manageable. For families with single parents, hourly jobs, long shifts, limited supervision, or households where education competes with survival, it is not. When in-person education becomes discretionary, the children who disappear first are those without adult capacity at home to enforce structure, log-ins, or accountability.

Optional learning quickly becomes invisible learning—or no learning at all.

This is not theoretical. It is exactly what COVID revealed, and it is exactly what is happening again.

The message being taught is not: This is sad.

It is not: This is serious.
It is: You cannot handle this.

Stay home. Suspend ordinary life. Step away from routine. The implicit lesson is that exposure to difficulty, even indirectly, is intolerable, and that functioning in the presence of tragedy is somehow inhumane.

This message is everywhere.

Young people are increasingly taught to relate to the world not as something to be engaged with, endured, and navigated, but as something overwhelming that must be managed from a distance. Discomfort is treated as danger. Difficulty is reframed as trauma. Responsibility is displaced outward.

Resilience is no longer modeled. It is treated with suspicion.

This posture extends beyond schools. This week, I was informed that my workplace, a medical clinic, will be closed to honor a nationally promoted “ICE Out” day calling for no work, no school, and no shopping.

Absence is framed as virtue. Withdrawal is framed as care.

But when institutions tasked with education, healthcare, and stability shut down reflexively in response to fear, the cost is borne not by those with the loudest voices, but by children and families with the least margin.

And despite my conviction, I do not feel safe saying that I disagree—a reality I find both unsettling and shameful—in a climate where disagreement is treated as moral failure.

Children need routine. Predictability. Adults who can distinguish between real danger and symbolic panic. They need schools that understand their role is not to amplify the chaos of the news cycle, but to provide refuge from it.

Instead, children are pulled into an abstract emotional theater that has little to do with their actual lives, while their own sources of stability are dismantled in the name of “care.”

This is not compassion. Care without proportion is corrosive.

When institutions retreat in response to fear rather than lead through it, they teach children that the world is perpetually unsafe and that stability is conditional.

At some point, adults must decide whether our institutions exist to educate or to emote.

Children do not need to be shielded from every hard thing. They need adults who believe they are capable of being in the world even when the world is difficult.

When institutions repeatedly tell children that they cannot handle reality, we should not be surprised when they grow into adults who believe it.

This is not empathy.

It is abdication.