Seen, Read, Heard: The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is an important book. Our faculty and staff had it as one of their summer reading choices this past summer. It accomplishes a favorite goal of mine in a read about education: it provokes.

The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, assert that “adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects.”(13) That’s actually a pretty tame thesis, especially with the word “might” in it. But the greater premise is more powerful: We adults are disabling our children from being able to handle challenges, including the challenge of listening to someone with whom they do not agree.

They dive deeply into three “untruths”: 

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. (14)

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. (14)

• They express concern about what they see as a “shift from ‘intent’ to ‘impact’” (43), looking for ill will, focusing on a perceived intention and an impact.
• They cite a University of Chicago President: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.” (Hannah Holborn Gray) (50)

The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. (14)

• The result of this either-or thinking, the authors argue, is people are either “demonized or lionized;” (54) they are put into one box or another: “victim” or “oppressor.” (57)
• “‘So many teens have lost the ability to tolerate distress and uncertainty, and a big reason for that is the way we parent [educate] them.” Kevin Ashworth as quoted in Lukianoff (163).
• “Citizens of democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday.” (191)
• Supreme Court Justice John Roberts’ counsel to his son's fourth grade class “to see the message in your misfortune” is astounding. (193)
• Noting a preponderance of undeserved fears about kidnapping and the like, they charge parents (and educators) to, “Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month.” (237)