If the medieval period was the age of faith, and the Enlightenment qualifies as the age of reason, what era are we living in now? Princeton’s Robbie George has an answer: the age of feeling. Education is no exception, where instinct, ideology, and emotion increasingly outweigh standards, measurement, and outcomes. It’s an era where, as Seinfeld’s George Costanza once put it, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Conviction has become a substitute for truth, creating a permission structure for policy driven more by narrative, followership, and vibe than evidence.
Consider graduation rates. They have climbed steadily in many states, even as national assessments show students struggling with basic reading and math. Rather than treat that divergence as a warning sign, policymakers often redefine success, dilute standards, or shift attention to less exacting measures. The appeal is not to what students demonstrably know, but to measures that support what feels good.
George frames the dilemma this way:
In the age of feeling, people will identify what’s right and therefore to be done or permissible to do with their wants, desires, feelings… So the truth, how conveniently, lines up with what they want. For figures like Plato and Aristotle, you don’t figure out whether something is worth doing or should be done or even may be done by figuring out whether you want to do it… The whole point of inquiry is to subject one’s feelings to rational scrutiny so that you can determine whether an impulse or a feeling or a passion that you have is one that should be acted on because it’s in line with human flourishing, or ultimately out of whack with it.
That distinction—between aligning truth with desire and subjecting desire to scrutiny—exposes a persistent tension in education: What we feel is right can override what we know is effective. The pattern appears again and again—in how we teach children to read, how we interpret test scores, and how we judge school models that generate strong academic outcomes but defy our assumptions and ideological preferences.
A few years ago, the New Yorker chronicled the rise of “vibes-based literacy,” an approach that emphasizes student interest and guessing at unfamiliar words over systematic phonics instruction:
It’s startling to realize that panels of experts had to argue the case that teaching children to read involves careful attention to the relationships between sounds and letters, or enhancing their vocabulary and knowledge of various subjects. It’s stranger still that, in many school systems and for many years, this was the losing argument.
Decades of research have identified reading models that consistently raise student achievement. Programs such as Direct Instruction and Success for All have produced strong results in rigorous studies, particularly for disadvantaged students. Yet scripted curricula frequently meet resistance because they constrain adult discretion and challenge long-held assumptions about how classrooms should feel. In an age that prizes autonomy and intuition, even a strong record of success can be discounted if it conflicts with what feels right.
If something as foundational as how children learn to read can be guided more by philosophical convictions about “natural” learning and professional orthodoxies than by evidence, it should prompt deeper reflection about the teaching profession itself. Carl Hendrick, a veteran educator and researcher, describes how he spent five years teaching without understanding how learning actually happens—a gap shared by many educators. And yet, as the adage goes, many refuse to let the facts get in the way of their opinions, no matter how wrong those opinions might be.
That same dynamic pollutes the debate around standardized testing. When results disappoint, they are often softened, reframed, or dismissed rather than confronted. Diane Ravitch once remarked, “The most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.” It’s a specious sentiment—superficially appealing but substantively meaningless, offering no data and no insight. To be sure, no exam is perfect, and there are many ways to gauge student learning, but in the age of feeling, the mere belief that a test is unfair or flawed becomes sufficient justification to turn a blind eye to measurable outcomes.
Even when a school model consistently delivers demonstrable results, “feelings”—broadly understood—can still override objectivity. Take Success Academy. In the latest round of state exams, students had pass rates of 92.5 percent in English language arts and 96.2 percent in math—nearly double the proficiency rates of their public school peers. Black and Hispanic students at Success outpaced their city counterparts by similarly wide margins, with proficiency rates exceeding 90 percent, while citywide rates hovered near the mid‑50s. Their students also excel on AP exams and the SAT. Yet the network’s success has not quelled its naysayers, whose objections are often rooted in perception or ideological unease—even when the most cited concern, student selection and attrition, does little to diminish academic outcomes. Success Academy’s planned expansion to Florida has raised these critics’ hackles, underscoring how strongly feeling can override everything else.
There is something seductive about equating what we feel with what is right. But it undermines the pursuit of truth, which, as Robbie George says, must be achieved through scrutiny and inquiry. When a culture normalizes the idea that conviction equals truth, schooling becomes uniquely vulnerable. If education is to serve its purpose, we must recover that commitment to truth because reality, however inconvenient, eventually asserts itself in what students know, what they can do, and the world they must face.
