The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
Introduction: The Search for Wisdom
“A compelling and timely argument against attitudes and practices that, however well intended, are damaging our universities, harming our children, and leaving an entire generation intellectually and emotionally ill-prepared for an ever more fraught and complex world.”
-harming students an damaging their prospects for creating fulfilling lives
-we are making students less wise
-wisdom is beneficial for teenagers, young adults, parents, and educators
-we need to lead young people to develop wisdom over the course of their lives
“This is the first truth,” he said: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain, avoid discomfort, avoid all potentially bad experiences.”
-you can’t avoid ever everything that makes you uncomfortable even with bad experiences are terrible, but you gain wisdom through working through those bad experiences
-you can’t gain wisdom when you are only thinking about the aches and pains of life
The second truth, is that young people are being taught to “always trust your feelings” and others are required to never question them
The third truth is that “Life is a battle between good people and evil people”
-You can’t achieve mental health until you learn to question them and free yourself from some common distortions of reality
-these untruths are rarely taught explicitly; rather, they are conveyed to young people by the rules practices, and norms that are imposed on them, often with the best of intentions
Truth:
The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people
“These three Great Untruths–and the policies and political movements that draw on them–are causing problems for young people, universities, and, more generally, liberal democracies.”
Problems:
-teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years
-culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability for scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers
-extremists have proliferated on the far right and the far left, provoking one another to ever deeper levels of hatred
-social media has channeled partisan passions into the creation of a “callout culture”
-anyone can be publicly shamed for saying something well-intentioned that someone else interprets uncharitably
-citizens have retreated into self-confirmatory bubbles
-their worst fears about the evils of the other side can be confirmed and amplified by extremists and cyber trolls intent on sowing discord and division
-the three Great Untruths have flowered on many college campuses
-their roots are in earlier education and childhood experiences
-they now extend from the campus into the corporate world and in the public square, including national politics
-campus censorship used to just come from administers
-Today, students censor each other, including increasing violence on campuses
-there is an intensified push from students for school administrators to disinvite speakers whose ideas the students found offensive
-if speakers were not disinvited, students “heckled” and protested in ways that prevent other students from attending the events
-administrators are expected to create campus speech codes that are deemed to be racist or sexist speech
“The rationale for the speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech-and even the content of some books and courses–interferred with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by ‘triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
Ex. Columbia University
-core curriculum included “Masterpieces of Western Literature”
-readings included works by Ovid, Homer, Dante, Augustine, Montaigne, and Woolf
-In 2015, students wrote in the University newspaper arguing that students “need to feel safe in the classroom” but “many texts in Western canon” are “wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression” and contain “triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.”
***some students said that these texts are so emotionally challenging to read and discuss that professors should issue “trigger warnings’ and provide support for triggered students
(trigger warnings are verbal or written notifications provided by a professor to alert students that they are about to encounter potentially distressing material)
What is happening?:
-the newspaper post points about diversifying the literacy canon
-But, is safety versus danger a helpful framework for discussing reactions to literature
“Might that framework itself alter a student’s reaction to ancient texts, creating a feeling of threat and a stress response to what otherwise would have been experienced merely as discomfort or dislike?”
-student activism is nothing new; students have been actively trying to shape their learning environment for decades, such as when they joined professors during the “canon wars” of the 1990s
-students wanted to block people they thought were espousing evil ideas
To do:
-we need to fight for academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus
-we need to defend liberty, freedom of speech, due process, and academic freedom on our country’s college campuses
-we cannot ask that professors and administrators take a more protective attitude toward them by shielding them from the presence of certain people
-we cannot keep the premise that students are fragile
-students depression is best treated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) not avoidance
-CBT teaches you to notice your various “cognitive distortions” such as “catastrophizing”
Ex. If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job…)
Ex. “negative filtering” is only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well
-these distorted and irrational thought patterns are hallmarks of depression and anxiety disorders
“Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.”
-there is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label "triggering"
Problems:
-”what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”
“Students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely than previous generations to engage in thought patterns that make those problems seem more threatening, which makes the harder to solve.”
-college campuses are exhibiting the exact same distortions
-Where are students learning these bad mental habits?
-we cannot prioritize protecting students from speakers, books, and ideas that might offend them
-stop promoting that the playing field is not level; life is not fair
***college is possible the best environment on earth in which to come face-to-face with people and ideas that are potentially offensive or even downright hostile
-it is the ultimate mental gymnasium, full of advanced equipment, skilled trainers, and therapists standing by, just in case
-if students came to see themselves as fragile, they would stay away from that gym
-students can’t avoid these opportunities because well-meaning people convinced them that they'd be harmed by training
***their beliefs about their own and others’ fragility in the face of ideas they dislike would become self-fulfilling prophecies
-students have come to believe that they can’t handle such things, but if they acted on that belief and avoided exposure
-students succeeded in creating bubbles of intellectual “safety” in college, they would set themselves up for even greater anxiety and conflict after graduation
-students are now demanding protection from speech because they unwittingly learned to employ the very cognitive distortions that CBT tries to correct
“Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”
The new “fragile student model”:
-moral culture networks linking like minds together
-”the matrix” and referred to it as “a consensual hallucination”
-the moral matrix as individuals interact with one another, and then they act in ways that may be unintelligible to outsiders
-a new moral matrix was forming in some pockets of universities and was destined to grow
(social media is perfectly designed to help “consensual hallucinations” spread within connected communities at warp speed–on and off campuses on the left and right)
Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions:
“Many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.”
“Students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions.”
-thought patterns directly harmed students’ mental health and interfered with their intellectual development
-schools = a culture of defensive self-censorship
-students are quick to “call out” or shame others for small things that they deemed to be insensitive
***this is a pattern called vindictive protectiveness
(stops students from having open discussions where they could practice the essential skills of critical thinking and civil disagreement)
-even President Obama praised the value of viewpoint diversity and said that students should not be “coddled and protected from different points of view”
Tumultuous Years: 2015-2017
-a powerful movement for racial justice had already been launched and was gaining strength with each horrific cell phone video of police killing unarmed black men
-protests over issues of racial justice erupted at dozens of campuses around the country
-it was a level of activism not seen on campus in decades
-mass killings filled the news-terrorists carried out in large-scale all over the world
-ISIS inspired shooting in California Ex. ISIS-inspired attack, on a gay nightclub
-millions turned out across the country to protest his inauguration, cross-partisan hatred surged
-campus protests in the spring of 2017
-self described “anti-fascists” caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to the campus and the town, injuring students and others
-neo-Nazis and KluKlux Klansmen marched with torches across the grounds of the University of Virginia
-a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters
-the #MeToo movement, as many women began to publicly share their stories of sexual misconduct and assault
-this environment on a political spectrum could make the case for being anxious, depressed, or outraged
-there isn’t enough sufficient explanation for the unrest and new demands for “safety” on campus
“Coddling” Means “Overprotecting”:
-implication that children today are pampered, spoiled, and lazy, because that is not accurate
-all teens face new forms of harassment, insult, and social competition from social media
-their economic prospects are uncertain in an economy being reshaped by globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence, and characterized by wage stagnation for most workers
-adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects
“Dictionary definitions of “coddle” emphasize this overprotection; for example, “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.”
-The fault lies with adults and with institutional practices, hence our subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”
-this is well-intentioned overprotection
Ex. peanut bans in elementary schools through speech codes on college campuses–may end up doing more harm than good
”Overprotection is just one part of a larger trend that we call problems in progress.”
-the term refers to bad consequences produced by otherwise good social changes
-comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs too
-we adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count is intolerable levels of discomfort and risk
***by the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled
What to do:
-students face problems and they may be major life changing circumstances, but it is what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them (teach how to move through difficulties not just sit in them and never move forward)
-whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed if you focus on pursuing your own goals
-seek challenges rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”
-free yourself from cognitive distortions rather than always trusting your initial feelings
-take in a generous view of other people, and look for nuance rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us vs. them morality
This book will:
Part: I
-social science: a confluence of social trends and forces
-help you to recognize the the three Great Untruths
-explain how CBT improves critical thinking skills while counteracting the effects of the Great Untruths
-help you to make sense of the new culture of “safety” that has swept across many college campuses since 2013
Part II:
-show you the Great Untruths in action
-examine the “showdowns,” intimidation, and occasional violence that are making it most difficult for universities to fulfill their core missions of education and research
-explore the newly popular idea that speech is violence and show why this thinking way is bad for students’ mental health
Part III:
-Answer the question “Why did things change so rapidly on many campuses between 2013-2017?
-Identify six exploratory threads:
1-the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus
2-the rising levels of teen anxiety and depression which have made many students more desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths
3-changes in parenting practices which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe
4-with the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults
5-the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission
6-an increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires
***these 6 trends did not influence everyone equally, but began to intersect and interact on college campuses in the last few years
Part IV:
-we suggest specific actions that will help parents and teachers to raise wiser, stronger, more independent children
-we suggest ways professors, administrators, and college students can improve their universities and adapt them for life in our age of technology-enhanced outrage