The Coddling of the American Mind

This article is extremely important. It's something that a lot of people have been talking about, or realizing over time, and it's just great to see such a well-done article and people pushing for this to be a part of the conversation. Steven pinker tweeted "The infantilization and mind-narrowing of American college students: Important article by Greg Lukianoff & Jon Haidt" and I got excited... this is truly a work of art.


http://ift.tt/1DOKaPY

It's 7000 words long so I've picked out some pieces for you.

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But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

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We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools.

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Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

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Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.

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They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.”

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But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy?

I have been saying this exact sentence for years, I am so happy that this article is getting out there, I really hope the world will change because of it. So, send it to the people that need to read it.

Got any funny stories about the mollycoddling of America? I liked the one where people were asked to use jazz hands so as to not trigger people's anxiety by clapping at a speech.

Tying it into CBT and using that as the answer, there are few ideas in the world that are as good as that one right now.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1HKdZfw