The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

by Jonathan Haidt

TED Talk titled “On Being Wrong.”

Look very carefully at how your school handles identity politics. Does it look and sound like the common-humanity identity politics we described in chapter 3? Or is it more like common-enemy identity politics, which encourages kids to see one another not as individuals but as exemplars of groups, some of which are good, some bad?

see whether they embrace a common-humanity or a common-enemy approach.

Help Schools to Oppose the Great Untruths

Homework in the early grades should be minimal.

But for elementary school children, the expectation of big improvements in achievement from long assignments is likely to be unmet.26

Give more recess with less supervision. Recess on school property generally provides an ideal and physically safe setting for free play.

A simple way to give kids more unsupervised play time in a physically safe setting is to create an after-school play club by keeping the playground (or a gymnasium) open for a few hours after school each day.28

Discourage the use of the word “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety.

If we mandate inclusion in everything and teach kids that exclusion puts them in danger—that being excluded should make them feel unsafe—then we are making future experiences of exclusion more painful and giving kids the expectation that an act of exclusion warrants calling in an authority figure to make the exclusion stop.

Have a “no devices” policy.

The school policy should be that smartphones must be left in a locker or in some other way kept out of easy reach during the school day.

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.

three core values that are antithetical to the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: a culture of thinking (ask questions, seek understanding, and practice the habits of good thinking), self-knowledge (practice ongoing self-reflection and self-awareness), and openness and respect (strive for a strong sense of community marked by collaboration, empowerment, and intentional openness and respect for the thinking of others; this is also an antidote to the Untruth of Us Versus Them).

Teach debate and offer debate club. A great way for students to learn the skills of civil disagreement is by participating in structured, formal debates.

debate helps students distinguish between a critique of ideas and a personal attack.

Assign readings and coursework that promote reasoned discussion.

We suggest that schools offer media literacy classes that teach students the difference between evidence and opinion, and how to evaluate the legitimacy of sources.

John Stuart Mill’s classic work On Liberty.35 Mill’s book is perhaps the most compelling argument ever made for why we need to interact with people who see things differently from ourselves in order to find the truth.

Annie Duke’s 2018 book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.

Because this topic is so complicated and the research base for making recommendations is still small, we offer just three general suggestions that we think will strike most parents and many teens as reasonable.

Place clear limits on device time. Two hours a day seems to be a reasonable maximum,

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.

We propose that Americans consider adopting a new national norm: taking a year off after high school—a “gap year”—as Malia Obama did in 2016. It’s an idea that has been gaining support among high school counselors, experts in adolescent development, and college admissions officers.46 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.

Some students and faculty today seem to think that the purpose of scholarship is to bring about social change, and the purpose of education is to train students to more effectively bring about such change.4 We disagree. The truth is powerful, yet the process by which we arrive at truth is easily corrupted by the desires of the seekers and the social dynamics of the community. If a university is united around a telos of change or social progress, scholars will be motivated to reach conclusions that are consistent with that vision, and the community will impose social costs on those who reach different conclusions—or who merely ask the wrong questions,

Endorse the Chicago Statement.

The [INSTITUTION]’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the [INSTITUTION] community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the [INSTITUTION] community, not for the [INSTITUTION] as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.

Establish a practice of not responding to public outrage.

A university will find it easier to stand by these principles if the president publicly commits to them at the start of each year, before any controversies break out.

Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.”

Admit more students who are older and can show evidence of their ability to live independently.

If universities stop admitting so many students whose childhoods were devoted to test prep and resume building and start admitting more students who can demonstrate a measure of autonomy, the culture on campus is likely to improve dramatically.

Admit more students who have attended schools that teach the “intellectual virtues.”

Include viewpoint diversity in diversity policies.

Explicitly reject the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. A university devoted to the pursuit of truth must prepare its students for conflict, controversy, and argument.

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.

Foster school spirit.

Protect physical safety.

Host civil, cross-partisan events for students. When

Five questions alumni, parents, college counselors, and prospective students should ask universities: What steps do you take (if any) to teach incoming students about academic freedom and free inquiry before they take their first classes? How would you handle a demand that a professor be fired because of an opinion he or she expressed in an article or interview, which other people found deeply offensive? What would your institution do if a controversial speaker were scheduled to speak, and large protests that included credible threats of violence were planned? How is your institution responding to the increase in students who suffer from anxiety and depression? What does your university do to foster a sense of shared identity? Look for answers that indicate that the institution has a high tolerance for vigorous disagreement but no tolerance for violence or intimidation. Look for answers that indicate a presumption that students are antifragile, combined with the recognition that many students today need support as they work toward emotional growth. Look for answers that indicate that the institution tries to draw an encompassing circle around its members, within which differences can more productively be explored.

Social media. Social media is a major part of the problem, implicated both in rising rates of mental illness and in rising political polarization.

Green shoots: Facebook2 and Twitter are both hiring social psychologists and putting out calls for research on how their platforms can change to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”

In March 2018, Utah became the first state to pass into law a “free-range parenting” bill—and with unanimous bipartisan support.5 As we noted in chapter 8, parents in some localities currently run the risk of arrest for letting their children out without supervision. The Utah law affirms children’s right to some unsupervised time, and parents’ right to not be arrested when they give it to them.

identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy.

What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.11

Universities committing to truth as a process.

The specific details for practicing CBT differ from book to book and therapist to therapist, but the basic process is something like this: When you are feeling anxious, depressed, or otherwise distressed, take a moment to write down what you are feeling. Write down your level of distress. (For example, you could score it on a scale of 1 to 100.) Write down what happened and what your automatic thoughts were when you felt the pang of anxiety or despair. (For example, “Someone I was interested in canceled our date. I said to myself, ‘This always happens. No one will ever want to go out with me. I’m a total loser.’”) Look at the categories of distorted automatic thoughts below, and ask yourself: Is this thought a cognitive distortion? Write down the cognitive distortions you notice. (For example, looking at the automatic thoughts in number 3 above, you might write, “personalizing, overgeneralizing, labeling, and catastrophizing.”) Look at the evidence for and against your thought. Ask yourself what someone might say who disagreed with you. Is there any merit in that opinion? Consider again what happened, and reevaluate the situation without the cognitive distortions. Write down your new thoughts and feelings. (For example, “I am sad and disappointed that a date I was excited about got canceled.”) Write down again, using the same scale as before, how anxious, depressed, or otherwise distressed you feel. Chances are the number will be lower—perhaps a lot lower.