The Coddling of the American Mind
How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
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'Excellent, their advice is sound... liberal parents, in particular, should read it' Financial Times
The New York Times Bestseller
What doesn't kill you makes you weaker
Always trust your feelings
Life is a battle between good people and evil people
These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. And yet they have become increasingly woven into education, culminating in a stifling culture of 'safetyism' that began on American college campuses and is spreading throughout academic institutions in the English-speaking world.
In this book, free speech campaigner Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt investigate six trends that caused the spread of these untruths, from the decline of unsupervised play to the corporatization of universities and the rise of new ideas about identity and justice.
Lukianoff and Haidt argue that well-intended but misguided attempts to protect young people can hamper their development, with devastating consequences for them, for the educational system and for democracy itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansion of their 2015 piece for the Atlantic, Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the urge to insulate oneself against offensive ideas has had deleterious consequences, making students less resilient, more prone to undesirable "emotional reasoning," less capable of engaging critically with others' viewpoints, and more likely to cultivate an "us-versus-them" mentality. They identify the cause in a growing obsession with protecting college students, rooted in the cult of "safetyism" the idea that all adverse experiences, from falling out of a tree as a child to experiencing a racial microaggression as a college sophomore, are equally dangerous and should be avoided entirely. They condemn these attitudes as likely to foment anguish and leave students ill-prepared for postcollege life, and they endorse the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy as a better approach. At times, the authors' limited perspectives become apparent for instance, their dismissal of microaggressions as simple misunderstandings that should be corrected with good grace is na ve and lacking in compassion, and their use of exaggerated hypothetical dialogues to illustrate the worldviews of those with whom they disagree can seem in bad faith. Yet the path they advocate take on challenges, cultivate resilience, and try to reflect rather than responding based solely on initial emotional responses deserves consideration.
