Recently, my friend and colleague Stefanie Chappell, National Field Director for Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, recommended the book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure ($4.99 for the Kindle edition on Amazon). Stefanie recommended the book after reading the first 70 pages. She told me, “I’m blown away by how accurately it describes the mindset of the students I see on the university campus. I would love to see every pastor and youth pastor engage with the material.”
Three Bad Ideas
Some of the mindset my friend Stefanie observes on today’s college campuses is characterized by what the authors call “Great Untruths”:
- 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.
Authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain that for an idea to be classified as a “Great Untruth” it must meet all of the following criteria:
- It contradicts ancient wisdom.
- It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being.
- It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.
Bad Ideas In Action
Lukianoff and Haidt use the next section of their book to illustrate how today’s “call out culture” has justified violent student protests against speakers, faculty, and administration officials whenever words or ideas are felt to be harmful to “vulnerable members of the community.” In fact, the authors reference a Berkeley essay that argues, “physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are ‘not acts of violence’ but, rather, ‘acts of self defense.’”
How Did We Get Here?
As I observe today’s American culture, I’m sure I am not alone in asking “How DID we get here?” Lukianoff and Haidt offer the following “six explanatory threads.”
- Polarization. “The left and the right (are) locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage.” Quoting Steven Kevitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s New York Times article, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”
- The Rise in Adolescent Anxiety and Depression. “iGen (also known as Generation Z) has far higher rates of anxiety and depression . . . rising hospital admission rates of self-harm and . . . rising suicide rates. . . . the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.”
- Paranoid Parenting. The authors insist that kids are “naturally anti-fragile” and that we damage them if we “ . . . overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.”
- The Decline of Free Play. “Compared with Millennials, iGen spends less time going out with friends, more time interacting with parents, and much more time interacting with screens . . . Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent—physically and socially—as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders.”
- Bureaucratic Safetyism. “Some of the regulations promulgated by (school) administrators restrict freedom of speech . . . These rules contribute to an attitude on campus that chills speech, in part by suggesting that freedom of speech can or should be restricted because of some students’ emotional discomfort.”
- The Misapplication of Social Justice. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the authors lay their political “cards on the table.” Lukianoff describes himself as a “liberal” while Haidt calls himself “a centrist who sides with the Democratic Party on the great majority of issues.” However both men believe that an approach to social justice that insists on “equal outcomes” rather than “equal opportunity” is misguided.
What Can We Do To Fix The Situation?
In chapter 12 the authors summarize the content of the book and finally pose the all-important question, “What Can We Do?”
Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the growth of call-out culture, in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech, including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and bad for universities. What can we do to change course?
In a nutshell, they believe the answer is found in developing wiser kids, wiser universities, and wiser societies.
Here are their ideas for wiser kids:
- Prepare the Child for the Road, Not the Road for the Child. The authors insist this is their “most important single piece of advice.” They explain, “. . . give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults. . . . Kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict.”
- Your Worst Enemy Cannot Harm You as Much as Your Own Thoughts, Unguarded. “Children (like adults) are prone to emotional reasoning. They need to learn cognitive and social skills that will temper emotional reasoning and guide them to respond more productively to life’s provocations.”
- The Line Dividing Good and Evil Cuts Through the Heart of Every Human Being. Therefore the authors suggest we teach our children to “Give people the benefit of the doubt . . . (and) interpret other people’s statements in their best or most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.”
- Help Schools to Oppose the Great Untruths. Here, suggestions include less homework in the early grades, more recess with less supervision, the teaching of reasonable debate and discussion, and a “no devices” policy banning smartphones from the classroom.
- Limit and Refine Device Time. “Left to their own devices . . . many children would spend most of their free time staring into a screen.” Therefore Lukianoff and Haidt advise, “Place clear limits on device time. Two hours a day seems to be a reasonable maximum.”
- Support a New National Norm: Service or Work Before College. This final suggestion entails spending “a year working and learning away from their parents, exploring their interests, developing interpersonal skills, and generally maturing before arriving on campus.” Their rationale is based on the observation that today’s youth are more sheltered and therefore, maturing later. Social psychologist Jean Twenge says, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds.” Therefore, the authors suggest, “Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations.”
An Insightful but Troubling Picture
Over all, the book paints an insightful, but extremely troubling picture of American youth, education, politics, and culture. Therefore, when Lukianoff and Haidt optimistically “predict that things will improve, and change may happen quite suddenly in the next few years,” I find such a conclusion unwarranted and highly unlikely – especially in view of the alarming case they have painstakingly built and the troubling trends they document in this volume.
The book claims to be about “education and wisdom.” However, true wisdom starts with God. Therefore, our only hope is a return to God and another spiritual “great awakening.” In the words of Scripture:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. For through wisdom your days will be many, and years will be added to your life (Proverbs 9:10-11 NIV).