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The Coddling of the American Mind
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The Coddling of the American Mind

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Press, 2018
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8

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  • Controversial
  • Innovative
  • Well Structured

Recommendation

Academicians Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that parents and schools overprotect kids by trying to shield them from emotional distress. They find that colleges institutionalize intolerance by penalizing students, staff and faculty for speech someone deems offensive, even if the offense is inadvertent. The internet generation of students dominates today’s colleges, and the media sums them up as victims of overprotection and depression. These essays (written pre-pandemic) draw intriguing – if controversial – conclusions about stifling speech on campus and the hazards of overprotecting upcoming generations.

Summary

Parents weaken kids by overprotecting them, and now colleges coddle them, too.

Parents can weaken children by overprotecting them. This coddling has spread to colleges where “safety” has a new meaning. Since the start of the 21st century, the concept of on-campus safety includes “emotional” security. The meaning of “trauma” now includes emotionally painful experiences. 

Safety-seeking college students believe “speech is violence” in some circumstances. Student disruptions of on-campus speaking events, their efforts to intimidate political foes and their periodic acts of violence became more common at American colleges from 2014 to 2017. College students’ demands for emotional safety from disturbing statements spread in 2013, when kids born after 1995 enrolled in US universities. The cohort iGen – “i” for internet – replaced the millennial generation.

The causes of rising intolerance among college students include: overprotective parents; increasing teen depression and anxiety; expanding college bureaucracies; limits on children’s play without adult ...

About the Authors

Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He also wrote Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom from Speech. Jonathan Haidt is Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Sloan School of Business. He also wrote The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.

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