Before going into what could be useful to consider from The Coddling of the American Mind (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018), it’s important to acknowledge three important issues that I would assert are shortcomings of the book. First, nothing about privilege and whose voices are typically heard in academic and public life is addressed. Second, cognitive behavioral therapy is advocated as a lens through which to understand contemporary students; broad application of a therapeutic method to students in general is likely to lead to faulty assumptions and flawed implementation. Third, the authors characterized youth from diverse cultural/experiential backgrounds and first generation students as less prepared for the realities of the world. They implied that this lack of preparedness was similar to the fragility of students from sheltered and privileged middle and upper class backgrounds, a pejorative assumption that defies logic. These three points are problematic and must be recognized if other points made in the book are to be seriously considered.
The major premise of the book is that the iGen (internet generation) cohort (those born after 1995) has been sheltered from life experiences and therefore coddled in ways that has slowed their progress toward maturity and self-sufficiency. The authors assert that three “Great Untruths” (p. 4) have been fostered in young peoples’ thinking:
1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
The authors recommend examining these untruths through the lens of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a type of therapy used with counseling clients exhibiting anxiety and depression. CBT trains clients to challenge cognitive distortions (i.e. catastrophizing) and limit or control the tendency toward negative filtering (paying more attention to negative rather than balanced or positive feedback). The authors believe that parents, early school encounters, and the growing “safetyism” of school and university environments are perpetuating belief in the untruths, causing young people to be more fragile in ways that will not serve them as fully functioning adults.
The “safetyism” that the authors assert is prevalent in families, schools, social organizations, and universities includes the characteristics of; overprotectionism, lower interpersonal skills resulting from the decline of free play with peers, the rise of social media isolation, and concern for physical safety expanding to emotional spaces as well. The authors assert that responding to these conditions by creating safer physical and emotional environments does little more than deny young people the chance to learn to cope as well as possibly engendering “feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness” (p. 46).
The particular problem that we now face as a country (and select other countries as well) is that increased partisanship, sharpness of rhetoric, and an emerging “call out” culture set the stage for very contentious interactions in media, at school and on campus, and in public discourse. The tendency has been to protect against this rise in adversarialism by avoiding controversial speakers and attempting to control hateful acts through policy positions and discipline. The attempts to protect have fired up the opposition, which in turn has increased the number of incidents (hate crimes have soared since 2015), and have ultimately made it nearly impossible to achieve the safety that most communities hope to offer. Instead of helping prepare young people for the reality of the world they will face, overprotection has not cultivated the resilience necessary to cope with these difficult circumstances.
The failure of attempts to create physically and emotionally safe environments coupled with adversarial political and class dynamics is complicated by a significant rise in university students experiencing anxiety and depression. Striving to provide support and safety is then complicated for educational administrators who try to assist their students with counseling, all the time fighting the pervasive use of smart-phones that create unrealistic expectations of life – beautiful people with no problems and whose posts on FACEBOOK receive hundreds of likes within hours.
As I indicated at the beginning of this review, the authors of The Coddling of the American Mind missed important points in their analyses – most notably the impact of privilege and acknowledgement of strengths in the cultural backgrounds of young people from diverse socioeconomic and other backgrounds. Chapter 12 (pp. 235-251) offers a number of general recommendations (each with finer points) that are worth considering with a more critical eye:
1. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child
2. Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded
3. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being
4. Help schools to oppose the great untruths
5. Limit and refine device time
6. Support a new national norm: service or work before college (the unacknowledged privilege of middle and upper class students is particularly evident here)
Chapter 13 (pp. 253-262) offers recommendations to universities:
1. Entwine your identify with freedom of inquiry
2. Pick the best mix of people for the mission
3. Orient and educate for productive disagreement
4. Draw a larger circle around the community
Other reviews call out the link between the authors and conservative writers who have protested identity politics that has emerged on U.S. campuses. I have previously reviewed Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and found it insightful; indeed, it proposed ways for people of liberal and conservative political perspectives to relate to one another. Haidt’s collaboration with Lukianoff has a different focus than The Righteous Mind but the context of his previous writing should be considered.
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