“What is new today is the premise that students are fragile,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” “Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.” The debate narrows as everyone censors others as well as themselves. Members of what psychologist Jean Twenge calls “iGen” (born after 1995) moved from challenging controversial speakers to hounding even very liberal members of their own communities who wrote or said something that was deemed offensive. They lobbied for “safe spaces” where they could avoid being exposed to uncomfortable ideas. Some demanded that anything “triggering” be removed entirely from the curriculum so that no one might feel traumatized. I do love this books apolitical approach to dissecting how the American political climate has become so tense and polarized. Students began demanding “trigger warnings” for certain material in their classes. But something changed about five years ago. In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the authors make the case that our culture has embraced three Great Untruths in the past ten years or so: The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. For most of the past few decades, college students have been proponents of free speech, despite occasional bouts of protest and indignation.
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