“Is there a problem with saying ‘personal responsibility’?” my friend asked.

“What do you mean?” I replied.

He’s a Romney-type conservative who’s deeply involved in bipartisan efforts to address chronic absenteeism. “I keep saying it’s a big part of getting kids to school, but I’ve been surprised by the pushback. Some people seem to think it’s offensive or even racist! Should I stop saying it?”

I sighed. The question sparked some ugly flashbacks. Thankfully, we’re past the worst of the craziness.

What do I mean? I’m thinking of the “Equity Collaborative” teaching educators that “independence” and “individual thinking” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism”. I’m thinking of the KIPP charter schools ditching the mantra “Work Hard, Be Nice” as a legacy of white supremacy culture. I’m thinking of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History debuting an online guide for “Talking about Race” that tagged “hard work” and “self-reliance” as troubling “assumptions” of “white culture.” In each of these cases (and so many others), “forward-thinking” reformers insisted that longstanding, widely shared values were suddenly wrongthink that needed to be abandoned.

One mundane but revealing instance of how toxic things got occurred in 2021, when the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education invited financial self-help guru Suze Orman to keynote their annual conference, only to freak out when she urged the audience to take charge of their financial futures. Scandalized by this advice, the organization apologized for Orman making remarks “offensive” to the audience’s “lived experiences” and declared:

We cannot discuss financial literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.

Fortunately, you can tell a lot of the most toxic stuff is behind us because so many who had endorsed or remained mum about it are now happy to let it fizzle out, while insisting no one ever really meant it all that seriously. It’s nice to see common sense reasserting itself. But it’s not like the aversion to timeworn values arose out of the blue, and it certainly hasn’t gone away. In fact, even as anti-responsibility sentiment has started to recede on the left, it appears to be gaining steam on the populist right among prominent influencers who regard self-centered, performative “toughness” as a good thing and self-restraint as a sign of weakness.

Perhaps the first time I fully appreciated the backlash against traditional notions of responsibility came back in 2017 when I was giving a talk at Columbia University. I’d expressed concern that too many schools had gotten squeamish about teaching foundational values. An audience member asked what I had in mind, and I cited respect, personal responsibility, and timeliness as examples. The audience member responded that she found the phrase “personal responsibility” offensive, saying, “It sounds like you want to blame students if they don’t succeed.”

It became clear she had plenty of company. Over the past decade, many in education have come to view “responsibility” as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. While those who decry it generally shy away from a nihilistic implication that no one should ever be held responsible for their actions, they come pretty darn close. This has bled into debates on everything from school discipline to student loans.

To retreat from the principle of responsibility is to abandon any serious commitment to teaching or learning. After all, schooling is inevitably a handshake between students and teachers, between families and schools. As I observed back in 2019, “It’s hard not to notice that—when it comes to parenting and preschool, to communities and colleges, or to churches and child care—pretty much everything rests on the expectation that each person will do their part.” If we’re unwilling to embrace that principle, then students, parents, and teachers can only be asked to do what they happen to feel like doing on a given day. This has grave consequences for those trying to tackle real, roll-up-your-sleeves problems, like chronic absenteeism.

Arguing that we can’t expect certain students or parents to be responsible for their actions is the rankest kind of prejudice. It suggests that they are nothing more than passive victims of circumstance, incapable of participating in the democratic social compact. It denies them agency and strips them of dignity. Yet public officials today are loathe to challenge families on this count, fearing they’ll appear insensitive or tone-deaf.

This reticence is as unnecessary as it is destructive. After all, one can endorse personal responsibility without denying that we’ve too often done wrong by students, or that schools have their own responsibilities (ones that, for instance, they conspicuously failed to honor during the pandemic). In fact, the more one insists that students and families must be part of the solution, the more credibly one can hold everyone else to that same standard.

Are some people offended by the phrase “personal responsibility”? Yep. Should we stop saying it out of deference to their sensibilities? Nope. Students need to be in school and schools need to make sure it’s worthwhile to them. That’s the starting point. Now, my friend should try to speak precisely and address reasonable concerns. But combating the biggest challenges in schooling, like chronic absenteeism and learning loss, begins not with apps or new tutoring models. It begins with a culture of responsibility on the part of students, parents, and educators. Leaders need to say that.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”