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Protect or expand middle school recess.
Cultivate the intellectual virtues. The intellectual virtues are the qualities necessary to be a critical thinker and an effective learner. They include curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility.
Assign readings and coursework that promote reasoned discussion.
She delineates practices that can help students see why the habits of good thinking require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning.
Place clear limits on device time. Two hours a day seems to be a reasonable maximum, as there does not appear to be evidence of negative mental health effects at this level.
Pay as much attention to what children are doing as you do to how much time they spend doing it.
Protect your child’s sleep. Getting enough sleep will help your child succeed in school, avoid accidents, and stave off depression, among its many other benefits.
Today’s college students are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety and depression than did the Millennials or any other generation. They are cutting and killing themselves in higher numbers. Many are embracing safetyism and are objecting to books and ideas that gave Millennials little trouble. Whatever we are doing, it is not working.
High school graduates can spend a year working and learning away from their parents, exploring their interests, developing interpersonal skills, and generally maturing before arriving on campus. The year after high school is also an ideal time for teens to perform national service as a civic rite of passage.
Robert Zimmer, the president of the University of Chicago, was interviewed in 2018 about the school’s reputation for intellectual excellence and open inquiry. He noted that many students arrive on college campuses unprepared for a culture of free speech: High schools prepare students to take more advanced mathematics, and they prepare them to write history papers, and so on . . . [but] how are high schools doing in preparing students to be students in a college of open discourse and free argumentation?51
Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos”—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife. The telos of a physician is health or healing. A physician who cannot heal is not a good physician. What is the telos of a university?
Why do people see universities as important and, until recently, as trusted institutions,2 worthy of receiving billions of dollars of public subsidy? Because there is widespread public agreement that the discovery and transmission of truth is a noble goal and a public good.
In her book Galileo’s Middle Finger, she contends that good scholarship must “put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.” She explains: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.
Endorse the Chicago Statement. Most colleges and universities, public and private, promise free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry in glowing language.
Establish a practice of not responding to public outrage. Strong and clear policies on free speech and academic freedom are useless if the people at the top aren’t willing to stand by them when the going gets tough and the leadership faces a pressure campaign—whether from on or off campus.
Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.” University presidents must make it clear that nobody has the right to prevent a fellow member of the community from attending or hearing a lecture.
Prospective students should avoid attending colleges that allow hecklers to disrupt events with no penalty.
Admit more students who are older and can show evidence of their ability to live independently.
Admit more students who have attended schools that teach the “intellectual virtues.”
Include viewpoint diversity in diversity policies. Diversity confers benefits on a community in large part because it brings together people who approach questions from different points of view.
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Students must also learn to make well-reasoned arguments while avoiding ad hominem arguments, which criticize people rather than ideas.
Explain that classrooms and public lectures at your university are not intellectual “safe spaces.”
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Look closely at how identity politics is introduced to first-year students, especially in summer readings and orientation materials.
Try instead to use a more charitable frame, such as members of a family giving one another the benefit of the doubt; when problems arise, they try to resolve things privately and informally.
There are many organizations that can help bring interesting and ideologically diverse speakers to campus who can demonstrate the value of exposure to political diversity.
the changes in this chapter can strengthen a university’s ability to pursue the telos of truth.
Pinker notes that there are many psychological reasons why people are—and have always been—prone to catastrophizing about the future. For example, some of the problems we discuss in this book are examples of the “problems of progress” that we described in the Introduction. As we make progress in such areas as safety, comfort, and inclusion, we raise our expectations. The progress is real, but as we adapt to our improved conditions, we often fail to notice it.
We certainly don’t want to fall prey to catastrophizing, so we should look for contrary evidence and contrary ways to appraise our present circumstances.
2. Free play and freedom. The adolescent mental health crisis has finally caught the attention of the public. As more parents and educators come to see that overprotection is harming children, and as we move further and further away from the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, more parents will try harder to let their kids play outside, with one another, and without adult supervision.
Better identity politics. With the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism since 2016, more scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multiracial society. It has become increasingly clear that identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy.
Psychological research shows that tribalism can be countered and overcome by teamwork: by projects that join individuals in a common task on an equal footing. One such task, it turns out, can be to reduce tribalism. In other words, with conscious effort, humans can break the tribal spiral, and many are trying. “You’d never know it from cable news or social media,” Chua writes, “but all over the country there are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes.”
Universities committing to truth as a process. The University of Chicago has long been an outlier in the intensity of its academic culture. (It proudly embraces the unofficial motto “Where fun goes to die.”12)
This will mean less test prep, less overprotection, more free play, and more independence. Entire towns and school districts will organize themselves to enable and encourage more free-range parenting. They will do this not primarily to help their students get into college but to reverse the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide that is afflicting our children.
