Children of today are coddled, they say. They don't know how to handle adversity. They become too defensive and lash out at those who are actually trying to help them.
One author is an admitted liberal. The other is a centrist who occasionally leans leftward.
Their conclusions match the rants of conservatives of previous generations: Our youth is going soft and that's dangerous. It isn't as simple as that. But Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have written a book called The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure. It's worth a good look.
What they're ultimately driving at is a phenomenon that's been developing in our colleges for some time now: The inclination of students to resist and automatically reject speakers with views that aren't considered in their mainstream, sometimes very sensitive to race and gender issues. The students use confrontational strategies, including mockery and screaming of insults, to shout down these speakers. They issue threats that compromise speakers' safety.
All these people want to do is say something in a place where, up until now, not only the right to say it has been protected, but the invitation to do so has been cultivated--where free speech has been freer than ever before. But now, the authors say, students have become too ultra-sensitized to those who themselves mock and attack their worldview. Students have become walled off from that which they do not prefer to the extent where they believe they do not need to hear it--or get anywhere near it.
The result, say the authors, is that the quality of education is diminishing before our very eyes. The very idea of higher education is exposure to information, and with it, the endless but quite meaningful search for truth.
It used to be that such speakers caused more research and conversation, and no doubt some of that remains. It's just that the resistance to these challenging people--in fact, to ignore the challenge because it's just so obvious that they're wrong--flies in the face of the purpose of universities.
The Essence of the Problem and Its Causes
Now, though, say the authors, children are being raised far too often with three concepts in mind:
- What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. It's just the opposite of the famous Nietzsche phrase. If you take things on and lose, it's a setback that you can't get over. Staying safe is paramount. Helicopter parents never let kids out of their sight and guided recess is required at schools.
- Emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings. There's no need to actually pick up a book or have a conversation or listen to someone and test whether their facts lead to decent or acceptable conclusions. If a label isn't what you like, never mind.
- Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good and evil. There are no shades of meaning or degrees of truth. If people are disagreeable, they are to be rejected. Period. Not only that, but there should be somewhere to go if students don't like what's being said so they don't have to hear it.
The results of this are subtle, but rising in evidence (not an exhaustive list):
- A demand for safe spaces and 'trigger warnings' on campus. Instead of welcoming controversy and thought-provoking arguments, students are now demanding to remain safe within their own minds and be warned ahead of time that what's coming may not be something they prefer, kind of like movie ratings.
- A decided lack of conservative professors. Turns out this ongoing, conservative complaint has merit. Instead of responding with an effort to balance the philosophies of faculties, universities have doubled-down on retaining liberal professors to avoid the kinds of confrontations that upset students and create bad public relations. Yours Truly attended a consortium of conservatives while with the National Education Association leadership in 2005, and found a kind of Queen-For-A-Day, who-has-it-worst plaintive cries among conservative students bemoaning their plights of being repressed by liberals. Though some were exaggerated and emotionally bankrupt (for the same kinds of reasons the above-mentioned liberals point out the same thing), these complaints will only find more resonance as we go along.
- A lack of support for those professors who have been attacked by students demanding safety of curricula. It's silent, but devastating. Other professors sure don't want to be confronted, either, so although they will privately admit that much of this is nonsense, they won't take it on themselves only to find that they, too, are on islands without lifeboats. And it certainly applies to college administrators, who are beholding to alumni and donors to deliver consistent levels of student populations yearly. This universal defensiveness directly reflects the defensiveness that too many students now demand.
Bottom line: The university is abrogating its responsibility to its students to provide the widest possible exposure to ideas and their discussion in a genuine search for truth. They are threatening to become a rubber stamp for thoughts and mentalities that students have already come to college with--in which case, why are we bothering if they have no need to change their minds about anything?
Okay: Now What?
The authors boil down their solution to one overriding philosophy, oft repeated but needed as never before: Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. The latter can never be done well enough, though it will always be attempted. Nobody can know the totality of what any child will face before they face it. Beyond common sense efforts, what parents do to overprotect kids will only hurt them in the long run.
Practically speaking, the authors say, this means that, from early childhood and onward (again, not exhaustive):
- Guided recess is a contradiction in terms and does damage to kids' sense of independence. Let kids make up their own games and rules and beyond genuine pain caused by accidents and temper losses, let them figure things out on their own.
- Keep homework to a minimum in early grades. Younger buddies can't handle big assignments.
- Keep student use of social media devices down to two hours a day. As many of us came to say, it will allow them more time to "get a life." They will tend to avoid the inclination to submit to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) of things made priorities when they shouldn't be.
- High school graduates should be given a "gap" year to work or do community service before college. Let them grow up a little and see that the rest of the world isn't especially protected against bad ideas or disagreeable people. Let them watch and then do what others do about it. Some of the things that upset them in college now won't seem like such an impending disaster. In hindsight, Yours Truly would have benefited from such a practice.
- Colleges shouldn't respond to public outrage against controversial speakers. Outside of reinforcing the college's mission to provide intellectual stimulation, as well as the protection of the First Amendment, the college should let things happen (outside of genuine harassment and incitement, which aren't legal anywhere for any reason) as part of what it simply does and should keep doing. But excessive sensitivity narrows the definitions of these phrases so much that, along with knee-jerk administrative reactions, any discomfort falls under some seemingly damaging scenario.
- Inclusion of viewpoint diversity in diversity policies and trainings. Because people sometimes view each other negatively and with disdain if they disagree--the same as they do if they're of a different race, sexual orientation, or religion--dealing with such matters counts as the same inside of a university as well as outside of it. Students have to be ready for that, too.
There were vestiges of these behaviors and reactions as far back as my college days (1969-73), so such incidents can be recalled. The authors, too, utilize very recent stories that go far beyond what those experiences were. To the extent that this has proliferated, the university experience is diminished. It ought not to be so. Learning has more than one dimension. Let the universities get back in touch with all of them. Our intellectual lives, and those of the future of this country, depend on it.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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