The Coddling of the American Mind
"Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn't kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths--and the resulting culture of safetyism--is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade.
Stats for nerds
51recommend
151mentions
109people
2016–2026years
48% recommend43% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Bringing Up Bebe, The Danish Way Of Parenting, The Coddling of the American Mind. These are pretty similar to Soviet style, but perhaps a bit less structured.
We are basically raising our daughter Soviet-style to the extent that we can; so far so good. It's difficult in a culture where ADHD American style of child raising is prevalent.
- The term is helicopter parenting. Studies have shown children born after 1995 are significantly more stunted (they grow up more “slowly”) due to this. There are interesting consequences like, for example, the condition of college campuses and identity politics. There are also laws that punish parents for allowing their children unstructured, safe, adult-free time (the expansion of the definition of “neglect”). A great book called “The Coddling of the American Mind” covers this and more in great detail. These days, we have more than ever replaced the physical helicopter parent with devices.
- > I like the use of the word discomfort here.
It really is spot on. I've been reading "The Coddling of the American Mind" [0] by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The book's precipice feeds directly into this idea and has been a fun read thus far. It seems that LLMs will feed negatively into that "coddling", described in the book, in a very negative way as they are providing discomfort avoidance.
- > The school system is more of an industrial childcare operation for working parents, than an actual education system for the kids
Bingo. And, as the spouse of a teacher, there's not a lot of hope of that changing any time soon. The pay would have to change... the people currently working would have to be dismissed or, for those introspective and motivated, retrained... never going to happen.
And generally focused on creating followers not thinkers. I really enjoyed "The Coddling of the American Mind"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
- Haidt is also co-author of the extremely relevant, data-rich, and well-researched book "The Coddling of the American Mind", which is definitely worth every modern human's time/money/attention. In the book he and co-author Greg Lukianoff discuss and provide numerous examples of how modern universities are promoting "three great untruths", namely:
1.You must strive to avoid bad experiences at all costs.
2.You must always trust your emotions over reason.
3.The world is a black-and-white battle between good people and bad people; there is no middle ground.
The content of that book made me feel some very visceral contempt (which I realize is not good for ME) tfor the administrators/university bureaucrats that are basically poisoning/corrupting tens of millions of minds every year*.
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-coddling...
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coddling-of-the-American-Mind...
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*I wasn't sure how many people are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions around the world so I asked chatGPT and it's response was:
me: approximately how many humans are enrolled in college or university in any given year
chatGPT: As of recent data, there are typically over 19 million students enrolled in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States alone. Globally, the number of students enrolled in colleges and universities is much larger, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. These numbers can vary slightly from year to year due to factors like population growth, economic conditions, and educational policies.
- > Choosing to not care is much harder as we have all had years of education conditioning us that we need to achieve more and to be the best.
Very much so. I enjoyed reading Coddling of the American Mind as well. Not 1:1 but related to the conditioning, lack of maturity, and in some cases, learned helplessness.
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