Discourage the use of the word “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety. One of Jon’s friends recently forwarded to him an email that a third-grade teacher sent to parents about recess and about children forming “clubs.” (Kids who played together at recess were not allowing “nonmembers” to join in.) Reasonable minds can disagree about the wisdom of compelling kids to be inclusive at recess, but the last line of the email alarmed Jon: “We are thinking about how everyone at recess can feel safe and included.” This is the seed of safetyism. It is painful to feel excluded, and it is good for the teacher to use kids’ exclusion as a basis for discussion to help kids reflect on why inclusion is good. But the pain of occasional exclusion doesn’t make kids unsafe. If we mandate inclusion in everything and teach kids that exclusion puts them in danger—that being excluded should make them feel unsafe—then we are making future experiences of exclusion more painful and giving kids the expectation that an act of exclusion warrants calling in an authority figure to make the exclusion stop.
Have a “no devices” policy. Some parents will want to give their kids smartphones to track them when they begin traveling to school with no adult, or to help with the complex logistics of pickup or after-school activities. The school policy should be that smartphones must be left in a locker or in some other way kept out of easy reach during the school day.29
Here are some ideas for middle schools and high schools:
Protect or expand middle school recess. In middle school the focus becomes more academic, so some middle schools have done away with recess. But the American Academy of Pediatrics notes in a 2013 statement that “cognitive processing and academic performance depend on regular breaks from concentrated classroom work. This applies equally to adolescents and to younger children.”30
Cultivate the intellectual virtues. The intellectual virtues are the qualities necessary to be a critical thinker and an effective learner. They include curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility. The process of developing intellectual virtues must begin long before arriving on a university campus. The Intellectual Virtues Academy, a charter middle school in Long Beach, California, was created in 2013 to do just that.31 The school operates on a foundation of three core values that are antithetical to the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: a culture of thinking (ask questions, seek understanding, and practice the habits of good thinking), self-knowledge (practice ongoing self-reflection and self-awareness), and openness and respect (strive for a strong sense of community marked by collaboration, empowerment, and intentional openness and respect for the thinking of others; this is also an antidote to the Untruth of Us Versus Them). You can learn more about cultivating the intellectual virtues and about how to incorporate them in schools at intellectualvirtues.org and in the writings of Jason Baehr, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and one of the founders of the Intellectual Virtues Academy.32
Teach debate and offer debate club. A great way for students to learn the skills of civil disagreement is by participating in structured, formal debates. It is especially important that students practice arguing for positions that oppose their own views. All students would benefit from learning debating techniques and participating in formal debates. In addition to the obvious benefits of learning how to make a well-supported case, debate helps students distinguish between a critique of ideas and a personal attack. The International Debate Education Association has suggestions for how to create a debate club.33 Students (and their parents and teachers) can also watch Intelligence Squared debates to see skilled debaters in action.34
Assign readings and coursework that promote reasoned discussion. A schoolwide commitment to debate can be supplemented by readings and coursework that teach the habits of good thinking. We suggest that schools offer media literacy classes that teach students the difference between evidence and opinion, and how to evaluate the legitimacy of sources. In addition, Heterodox Academy (an association of professors that Jon co-founded to promote viewpoint diversity) has produced a free, illustrated PDF edition of chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s classic work On Liberty.35 Mill’s book is perhaps the most compelling argument ever made for why we need to interact with people who see things differently from ourselves in order to find the truth. Heterodox Academy has also created OpenMind, a free interactive program that rapidly teaches basic social and moral psychology as a prelude to learning conversational skills for bridging divides.36 Another suggestion is Annie Duke’s 2018 book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Duke draws from her experience as a successful professional poker player and decision-strategy consultant. She delineates practices that can help students see why the habits of good thinking require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning. By examining “tilt” (the term poker players use to describe when someone is too emotional to make good decisions), Duke makes it plain that we can’t always trust our feelings. (Find more suggested resources at TheCoddling.com.)
5. Limit and Refine Device Time
Left to their own devices, as it were, many children would spend most of their free time staring into a screen. According to the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, teens spend on average about nine hours per day on screens, and eight- to twelve-year-olds spend about six hours; that is in addition to whatever they are doing on screens for school.37 A growing body of research indicates that such heavy use is associated with bad social and mental health outcomes. Because this topic is so complicated and the research base for making recommendations is still small, we offer just three general suggestions that we think will strike most parents and many teens as reasonable. (We’ll say more on our website as more research comes in.)
Place clear limits on device time. Two hours a day seems to be a reasonable maximum, as there does not appear to be evidence of negative mental health effects at this level. For younger children, consider banning the use of devices during the school week entirely, in order to delay for as long as possible the incorporation of device-time into daily routines.
Pay as much attention to what children are doing as you do to how much time they spend doing it. In chapter 7, we presented the principle that social network sites and apps should be judged by whether they help or hinder adolescents in their efforts to build and maintain close relationships.38 Talk with your children about the apps that they and their friends use and how they use them. Which ones are essential for their direct communication? Which ones do they experience as triggering FOMO (“fear of missing out”), social comparison, and unrealistically positive presentations of the lives of other kids? Read Twenge’s book iGen (as a family, if you can) and then bring your teenager into the discussion of how to minimize the potential hazards of heavy device use. These devices and apps are extremely appealing and addictive, so it may be difficult for children to self-regulate. You may need to use a parental-restrictions app39 or the parental-restrictions setting on your child’s devices to manage and monitor usage.40 And pay attention to what you are doing, too. Is your device use reducing the quality of your time with your child?41
Protect your child’s sleep. Getting enough sleep will help your child succeed in school, avoid accidents, and stave off depression, among its many other benefits.42 Yet most teens in America aren’t getting enough sleep, and one reason is that so many are staying up late peering at their screens, experiencing painful social comparisons, and disrupting their sleep-wake cycles with light.43 Electronic device use should be discontinued thirty to sixty minutes before bedtime, at which point all devices should be placed in a box or drawer in the kitchen (or somewhere away from the child’s bedroom).
6. Support a New National Norm: Service or Work Before College
As we reported in chapter 7, kids grow up more slowly these days.44 That trend—taking longer to reach adult milestones—has been going on for decades,45 but it has been especially visibl
e with iGen. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with delaying adulthood, but if that’s happening, then shouldn’t we consider delaying the start of college, too? Today’s college students are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety and depression than did the Millennials or any other generation. They are cutting and killing themselves in higher numbers. Many are embracing safetyism and are objecting to books and ideas that gave Millennials little trouble. Whatever we are doing, it is not working.
We propose that Americans consider adopting a new national norm: taking a year off after high school—a “gap year”—as Malia Obama did in 2016. It’s an idea that has been gaining support among high school counselors, experts in adolescent development, and college admissions officers.46 High school graduates can spend a year working and learning away from their parents, exploring their interests, developing interpersonal skills, and generally maturing before arriving on campus. The year after high school is also an ideal time for teens to perform national service as a civic rite of passage.47 Retired General Stanley McChrystal is the chair of Service Year Alliance, an organization that supports recent high school or college graduates in finding full-time, paid opportunities to spend a year working on projects to benefit American communities.48 General McChrystal is at the forefront of an effort to create a national expectation that all Americans spend one year in some kind of service between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. “Through such service,” he says, “young Americans from different income levels, races, ethnicities, political affiliations and religious beliefs could learn to work together to get things done.”49 We agree, and we believe that whether that year involves service or work, it would be good for America’s polarized democracy if that year were spent in a part of the country very different from the one in which the young adult grew up.50
* * *
• • • • •
Robert Zimmer, the president of the University of Chicago, was interviewed in 2018 about the school’s reputation for intellectual excellence and open inquiry. He noted that many students arrive on college campuses unprepared for a culture of free speech:
High schools prepare students to take more advanced mathematics, and they prepare them to write history papers, and so on . . . [but] how are high schools doing in preparing students to be students in a college of open discourse and free argumentation?51
If parents and teachers can raise children who are antifragile; if middle schools and high schools can cultivate the intellectual virtues; if all high school graduates spend a year doing service or paid work away from home, before beginning college at age nineteen or later, we think most students will be ready for anything.
CHAPTER 13
Wiser Universities
Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos”—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife. The telos of a physician is health or healing. A physician who cannot heal is not a good physician. What is the telos of a university?
The most obvious answer is “truth”—the word appears on so many university crests. For example, Veritas (“truth”) appears on Harvard’s crest, and Lux et Veritas (“light and truth”) appears on Yale’s. If we allow the word “knowledge” as a close relative of truth, then we take in many more university mottos, such as the University of Chicago’s, which, translated from Latin, is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” (Even the fictional Faber College in the movie Animal House had the motto “Knowledge is good.”)1
Of course, universities are now complex multiversities that have many departments, centers, stakeholders, and functions. The president’s office has many goals besides pursuing the truth; so does the athletics department and the student health center. So do the students and the faculty. But why are all of these people and offices together in the first place? Why do people see universities as important and, until recently, as trusted institutions,2 worthy of receiving billions of dollars of public subsidy? Because there is widespread public agreement that the discovery and transmission of truth is a noble goal and a public good.
If the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university. If scholars do not advance the frontiers of knowledge within their disciplines, or if they betray the truth to satisfy other goals (such as accumulating wealth or advancing an ideology), then they are not good scholars. If professors do not pass on to their students a richer understanding of the truth, as it has been discovered in their discipline, along with skills and habits that will make them better able to find the truth after they graduate, then they are not good professors.
There are alternative candidates one might propose for the telos of a university. Perhaps the most common alternative is something about progress, change, or making the world a better place. Karl Marx once critiqued the academy with these words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”3 Some students and faculty today seem to think that the purpose of scholarship is to bring about social change, and the purpose of education is to train students to more effectively bring about such change.4
We disagree. The truth is powerful, yet the process by which we arrive at truth is easily corrupted by the desires of the seekers and the social dynamics of the community. If a university is united around a telos of change or social progress, scholars will be motivated to reach conclusions that are consistent with that vision, and the community will impose social costs on those who reach different conclusions—or who merely ask the wrong questions, as we saw in chapters 4 and 5. There will always be inconvenient facts for any political agenda, and you can judge a university, or an academic field, by how it handles its dissenters.
We agree with former Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger, who urges activist students and professors to “Carpe datum” (“Seize the data”).5 In her book Galileo’s Middle Finger, she contends that good scholarship must “put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.” She explains:
Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.6
For those who want to attend, teach at, or lead universities of the sort Dreger imagines, where the telos is truth, we offer advice based on the ideas and research we covered earlier in this book. We organize our suggestions under four general principles that can help universities thrive, even in our age of outrage and polarization. High school students should consider these principles when applying to college, and college counselors should consider these principles when recommending schools to prospective applicants and their parents. We hope that students, professors, alumni, and trustees will discuss these suggestions with the leadership and administration of their schools.
1. Entwine Your Identity With Freedom of Inquiry
Endorse the Chicago Statement. Most colleges and universities, public and private, promise free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry in glowing language.7 But these preexisting commitments to free speech, many of which were written in the early twentieth century, have not stopped professors and students from being punished for what they say. That is why we recommend that every college in the country renew its commitment to free speech by adopting a statement modeled after the one affirmed by the University of Chicago in 2015. That statement, written by a committee chaired by legal scholar Geoffrey Stone, comprises a commitment to free speech and academic freedom updated for our age of disinvitations, speaker shoutdowns, and speech codes. Thus far, it has been adopted by administrations or faculty bodies at forty colleges and universities, including Amherst, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Vanderbilt.8
FIRE has produce
d a modified version of the Chicago Statement that can serve as a template for other schools (see Appendix 2). Here is the key passage:
The [INSTITUTION]’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the [INSTITUTION] community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the [INSTITUTION] community, not for the [INSTITUTION] as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.
Colleges should also review their policies to ensure that they are consistent with the First Amendment. Public colleges are legally required to protect the expressive rights of students and faculty on campus, so making sure policies do not infringe on free speech is not only good for students, it also avoids the possibility of the college being on the losing side of a First Amendment lawsuit. As for the private colleges that promise freedom of speech, academic freedom, and free inquiry, revising (or eliminating) speech codes is a great sign that they are serious. Prospective applicants should take colleges’ speech codes into account when deciding where to apply, and college students should be aware of their own school’s policies.9
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 27