Week 9: Article Review – The Coddling of the American Mind

In this article the authors tried to address how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Lukianoff and Haidt believed that these issues first started in ancient Greek teachings. They traveled to Misoponos to meet the Oracle of Koalemos. This Oracle presented them with three ideas for their Untruths that were:

• What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain and all bad experiences.

• Always trust your feelings. Never Question them.

• Life is a battle between good and bad people. So much evil comes from evil people that the good must form a coalition and drive them out.

These ideas helped form the 3 Untruths that are rapidly spreading thought our modern culture and across college campuses. These Untruths must meet a set of criteria such as being in contrast to ancient wisdom, must contradict modern psychological research on wellbeing. And it must be harmful to the individuals and communities that emerge in it. Below are listed the below:

• Untruth of Fragility

• Untruth of Emotional Reasoning

• Untruths of Us vs. Them

I agree with the authors that these Untruths are spreading across society, and how they are setting our generation up of failure. This is not good for our society as we don’t provide view point diversity as we overprotect society. This will remove our deliberation and communication skills, as educators this will also limit our ability to discuss issues and topics with students.

This will be an interesting issue to watch play out over the next 20 years as this can affect the content we teach and discuss with students.