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Community
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October 30 - December 7, 2024
Help your kids find a community of kids in the neighborhood
Send your children to an overnight summer camp in the woods
Encourage your children to engage in a lot of “productive disagreement.”
Grant offers the following four rules for productive disagreement:10 Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict. Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind). Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
Teach children the basics of CBT. CBT stands for “cognitive behavioral therapy,” but in many ways it’s really just “cognitive behavioral techniques,” because the intellectual habits it teaches are good for everyone.
Two apps that are rated highly by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America are CPT Coach (for those who are in active treatment with a therapist)16 and AnxietyCoach.
Teach children mindfulness.
Give people the benefit of the doubt.
Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.
Look very carefully at how your school handles identity politics.
Homework in the early grades should be minimal.
Give more recess with less supervision.
Discourage the use of the word “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety.
Have a “no devices” policy.
Protect or expand middle school recess.
Cultivate the intellectual virtues.
Teach debate and offer debate club.
Assign readings and coursework that promote reasoned discussion.
Limit and Refine Device Time
Place clear limits on device time.
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.
Support a New National Norm: Service or Work Before College
If the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university.
Entwine Your Identity With Freedom of Inquiry
Endorse the Chicago Statement.
we recommend that every college in the country renew its commitment to free speech by adopting a statement modeled after the one affirmed by the University of Chicago in 2015. That statement, written by a committee chaired by legal scholar Geoffrey Stone, comprises a commitment to free speech and academic freedom updated for our age of disinvitations, speaker shoutdowns, and speech codes.
FIRE has produced a modified version of the Chicago Statement that can serve as a template for other schools (see Appendix 2). Here is the key passage: 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
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Establish a practice of not responding to public outrage.
Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.”
Pick the Best Mix of People for the Mission
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.
Orient and Educate for Productive Disagreement
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
Emphasize the importance of critical thinking, and then give students the tools to engage in better critical thinking.
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Draw a Larger Circle Around the Community
Throughout this book, we have emphasized a basic principle of social psychology: the more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.16 Conversely, the more you emphasize common goals or interests, shared fate, and common humanity, the more they will see one another as fellow human beings, treat one another well, and come to appreciate one another’s contributions to the community.
Foster school spirit.
Protect physical safety.
Host civil, cross-partisan events for students.
IDENTIFYING A WISE UNIVERSITY 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
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How might things change?
Social media.
Free play and freedom.
Better identity politics.
Universities committing to truth as a process.
