Coddling of the American Mind

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

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Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff: Coddling of the American Mind (2019, Penguin Books, Limited)

352 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2019 by Penguin Books, Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-14-198630-2
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4 stars (15 reviews)

"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 …

5 editions

The coddling of the "Kids these days" mind

1 star

Pointless. Juvenoia for the cultured. The "untruths" that this book are based on are pretty much handwaved into existence so they can serve as strawman punchbags for quick and easy counter-arguments.

The authors try to take an enlightened centrist approach, but the result is that conservative AR-15 wielding terrorists are presented as the other side of the same coin as students that send sympathetic letters about worker rights and call for peaceful protests in favor of deplatforming hate speech.

Review of 'The Coddling of the American Mind' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I previously read Lukianoff's "Unlearning Liberty" earlier this year. While I thoroughly enjoyed that work, I was somewhat disappointed by this joint venture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. This is partly because while "Unlearning Liberty" was a searching examination of how higher education in recent years has failed in its central purpose to discover "truth" by prohibiting many forms of offensive speech on campus, this book tries to further that inquiry in some ways by putting together a composite of factors for why "iGen" (those who were born c. 1996) have embraced "safetyism" on college campuses. "Safetyism" is essentially the conflation of being offended with being in physical danger.

The book is divided into three parts. The first unpacks what the authors call the "three great untruths" that iGen embraces: the world is divided between distinctly "good" people and wholly "bad" people; trust your feelings (i.e. emotional reasoning over logic); …

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Subjects

  • Civil rights, united states
  • Ethics
  • Social psychology
  • Polarization (social science)
  • Freedom of speech
  • College students

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