Posted on 09/05/2018 9:47:13 AM PDT by reaganaut1
In 2015, Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Jonathan Haidt (professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, the authors argued that students (college but also pre-college) increasingly react to words, books, images, and speakers with fear and anger because they’ve been taught to exaggerate danger, to let their emotions rule, and to engage in binary thinking.
It proved to be one of the most read and discussed articles ever published by the magazine.
Now Lukianoff and Haidt have expanded on that article with a book entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure. Their book has a lot to say about the way our colleges and universities are making a bad situation—the bad mental habits noted above combined with the belief that kids must be kept absolutely safe—much worse.
The root of the problem, argue Lukianoff and Haidt, is that parents, teachers, professors and college administrators have been leading young people to believe Three Great Untruths.
The first of those is, as they call it, the Untruth of Fragility. That is the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and therefore young people must be protected against everything from a stray peanut to hearing any “hateful” ideas. Drawing an analogy to the human immune system, which can’t develop unless it occasionally has something to fight against, the authors say that trying to shield students against stressful ideas results in their weakness and anxiety. And when students haven’t learned to cope with ideological adversity, they’re apt to retreat into “safe spaces” or lash out with anger or even violence.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Three Great Untruths.
The first of those is, as they call it, the Untruth of Fragility. That is the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and therefore young people must be protected against everything from a stray peanut to hearing any “hateful” ideas.
……….
The second great untruth is that you should trust and follow your emotions. Emotions frequently get in the way of sound reasoning, but young people are often told that because they feel that something is true, then it really is true.
……….
And third is the Us Versus Them Untruth—the erroneous view that the world is divided into good people and evil people.
They HAVE to coddle the minds of their students. They spent decades turning them into MUSH.
I heard these guys discussing their book on the radio.
They had some pretty good points.
Found your candidate for 2020 yet?
Couldn't believe what I was hearing.
Sounds like an excellent book.
They call out the coddling that they say started in earnest in the 1990’s in public schools and now extends into universities.
What should college leaders do to reverse course?
First, they should endorse the University of Chicago’s statement regarding free speech on campus.
Second, they must never allow students to wield the “heckler’s veto.”
Third, schools should strive for more viewpoint diversity in their hiring.
Fourth, schools should “educate for productive disagreement.” That is, they should make sure that students see demonstrations of rational disagreement between reasonable people. One way to do that is to set up campus debates
Fifth, explicitly reject the Us Versus Them untruth. How? By “encouraging politeness and empathy without framing issues as microaggressions”
bookmark
bkmk
Great article, and a book I will read.
Thanks for posting.
I took that picture, several months ago, labeled it ‘White Privilege’ and hung it on the wall of my office.
Read this later. FIRE is an excellent org. Let’s hope this book begins a new discourse on the zeitgeist of American culture!
By the summer of 1917 the British were sending 18 year old and above males to the Western Front 12 weeks after induction into the Royal Army. No AIT, no specialized weapons training, three months in uniform and you are off to the Ypers Salient or Arras or some other garden spot. Now male graduate students in their twenties cower in ‘safe spaces’ if someone plays Limbaugh on their radio. Something very, very bad is coming hidden out there in the future.
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