Food for Thought: Coddling of the American Mind

 

Dear all,

Hope you are having a good weekend. Thanks to all of you attended the Primary and Secondary Meet the Homeroom, Specialists and Advisory teachers as you have helped to set the scene for the parents and received plenty of positive comments.

This week’s Food for Thought is something that all is a concern for us all and links very much to “grit”, resilience, and mindset. It is something that I began to become more and more aware of after my move to Asia in 2000. For the last 25 years there has been a growing movement of ‘helicopter parenting’ involving parents becoming overbearingly protective of their daughter’s and son’s lives, both in and out of school. Of course this has created a generation of students who have not only lacked independence but also resilience and the need to fight their own battles. I have read many article about this phenomena and witnessed it countless times in discussion with 21^st century parents; however I’d rarely considered the longer term impact of this behavior on students, colleges and universities as they aged and graduated from high school. Although this article is about a new concept called “micro aggression” and the psychological well-being of modern university students,  it makes me wonder if the psychological fragility that is emerging in students has far deeper causes that go back to home, school and childhood. This is a long article so I will cease my thoughts now and leave it up to you to draw you r own conclusions, but it does raises questions about whether we should be sending our creative and free thinking students who enjoy intellectual provocations to study in an increasingly constrained environment in the USA.

Have a good afternoon,

Yours

Adrian

 

The Coddling of the American Mind

 

”Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/