Every education reformer has a passage in their biography that's like, "That September, the mill burned down and I was transferred to the Edutorium for Waifs and Insane Horses. My pedagogue was Mister Percival, who assigned for me to write a journal. For the first time, I was allowed to write in the FIRST-PERSON about MY OWN IDEAS! and I WAS FREE!"
And then education reformers in 2023 try to apply this stuff to zoomer students who are addicted to the most extreme memetic infoweapons imaginable.
There was one concept of the "self" that people arrived at as a consequence of a post-Romantic Classical education in rhetoric. This is the concept of the self that was celebrated by, say, the Abolitionist movement and the first Utilitarians.
The concept of "self" held by contemporary students in higher ed has much more to do with algorithms, surveillance capitalism, a crushing retaliatory state, and economic atomization.
