Coddling in Higher Ed vs Classical Education

So glad Mike posted Ross Douthat's provocative piece on the university earlier today. The Atlantic published an equally insightful article in September entitled, "The Coddling of the American Mind." In it, constitutional lawyer and President/CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist and NYU professor, Jonathan Haidt, look beyond the myriad ways in which "trigger warnings" and the like are short-circuiting the university's authentic mission to teach college students to search for truth among competing ideas. Instead they focus on the consequences of this new ethic to the students' emotional well-being, concluding that this sort of "vindictive protectiveness" is simply bad for mental health. 

Here is the list of "cognitive distortions" they analyze throughout the article, offering plentiful examples from universities across the country. (This list is included at the end of the piece.)

1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”

2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”

3. Catastrophizing.You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”

4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”

5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”

6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”

7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”

8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”

9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”

10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”

11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”

12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”

The authors offer a few solutions, one of which is to educate incoming students in methods of cognitive behavioral therapy. Those with a Catholic imagination who are teaching in and leading Catholic universities would, I think, be able to come up with far better.

But the formation in mind and character that college students need to respectfully engage and evaluate competing ideas must start much earlier. Classical schools today--Catholic and Protestant, primary and secondary--are taking this effort very seriously. Here's the aspirational list we offer in our Academic Vision at St. Benedict's, a K-6 Catholic classical school I helped to found in South Natick, MA. 

So, what might children educated in the Catholic classical tradition look like?

They are able to discern beauty—in writing, in art, in music.

They are captivated by great books and the engaging characters and stories therein, rather than feel the need always to be entertained by electronic stimuli.

They can engage and take interest in ideas and principles, and the lifelong search for truth, rather than being consumed only by the acquisition of things.

They have an understanding of the historical context in which they live, instead of a bias toward the present and a false idea that moral progress is inevitable.

They can stand up and articulate the bedrock principles of Western civilization and of the American experiment in ordered liberty, rather than believing that assertion of feeling constitutes authentic argument.

They understand how characters are formed and good leaders borne, rather than being pulled by cultural trends and what’s popular.

They can disagree with others without being disagreeable.  

In a word, classical (or “liberal”) education helps one become free to pursue the truth and so become the person God intends them to be.

If schools like St. Benedict's can really do this--indeed, they are springing up across the country and showing excellent results--we will be offering to the Western world the building blocks of a cultural renaissance.  It is one that is much needed.