In The Coddling of the American Mind (Random House, 2018), authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt make a forceful critique of the way Americans today go about raising and educating their children. Their point isn’t complicated: parents and teachers, in general, overprotect children from the challenges and rigor of everyday life. As a result of such coddling, the majority of youth today are soft and fragile students, easily perturbed, anxious, and intimidated.
The key to raising strong, independent young people, the authors argue, is not to shield boys and girls from these challenges, but instead to allow for situations in which these experiences occur. This strategic approach, of course, takes courage and discretion. When a child you love is facing a hardship that causes them emotional discomfort, the temptation to swoop in and save the day is hard to resist. But parents and teachers need to see the bigger picture: When challenges are embraced as opportunities for growth, they refine, sharpen, and mold young people to be strong and resilient.
In this blog, I want to reflect on how teachers can go about providing an education in resilience for their students. If you’re familiar with our writings here at EdRen you know that by “education” I don’t mean the mere transfer of information. I mean passing on a way of life. In this way, an education in resilience has intellectual implications, to be sure, but also moral, social, and spiritual. The result of such an education is not a person who has detached herself from the sorrows of the world, on the one hand, or become a victim of such hardships on the other. Instead, it is someone who acknowledges all the challenges and difficulty that life throws at her for what they are, while staying faithful to God’s call.
The Great Untruths
To begin my investigation into an education for resilience, I want to explore what the authors of The Coddling of the American Mind have to say about the contemporary problem of coddling America’s youth. Lukianoff, an attorney, and Haidt, a sociologist, introduce the topic of their book by identifying three “untruths” that are plaguing college campuses, and in turn, American culture today. While these untruths are most obvious in higher education, they invade the life of a student far before college, and live on long after. The authors write,
“The three Great Untruths have flowered on many college campuses today, but they have their roots in earlier education and childhood experiences, and they now extend from the campus into the corporate world and the public square, including national politics” (5).
Indeed, the coddling of a person through the perpetuation of these untruths occurs over a lifetime, even, and perhaps especially, in schools and classrooms across the country.
Untruth #1: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
The first is the untruth of fragility. This is the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. In other words, the challenges and difficulties one faces are slowly chipping away at one’s shot at a happy, comfortable life. Parents who imbibe this truth are, to put it ironically, relentless in their efforts to shield their children from all setbacks and experiences of disappointment.
The resulting home culture of such parenting is “safetyism,” which the authors denounce:
“When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay ‘emotionally safe’ while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient” (30).
The authors are apt to point out that what makes this untruth particularly insidious is that it perpetuates a vicious cycle. When a parent overprotects her child, the child grows more and more fragile, leading the parent to increasingly overprotect. To prevent such a home culture from developing, parents need to cultivate an atmosphere of support in their home that simultaneously permits the challenges of everyday life to impact their children as they normally would. British educator Charlotte Mason, whom we love to read here at EdRen, deems this ‘a natural home atmosphere.’
To illustrate her point, Mason cites the discoveries of a biologist making observations about a plant stored under glass. This plant may appear healthy and strong, but due to the insulating protection of the glass, its immune system atrophies over time. The biologist concludes his research, asking, “Is it not the shocks of adversity and not cotton wool protection that evolve true manhood?” (vol 6, p. 53).
We are doing no good for our students by shielding them from the challenges of everyday life. It is precisely these challenges that will make them stronger. Connecting this insight to education, Mason writes,
“But teaching may be so watered down and sweetened, teachers may be so suave and condescending, as to bring about a condition of intellectual feebleness and moral softness which it is not easy for a child to overcome” (53).
Teachers ‘condescend’ their students in a number of ways. For example, they might break up an argument prematurely if they sense it is getting heated for the sake of keeping the peace. Or they may feel the need to bathe a child in false praise if he is not doing well in a particular subject. As one final example, they may over-monitor recess time, eliminating the possibility for children to work out their conflicts themselves.
While it is tempting to intervene as the adult in order to protect the child from hardship, in reality, these are all great opportunities for educating in resilience. Through permitting with ‘masterly inactivity’ (as Charlotte Mason would put it) moments of temporary discomfort and conflict, teachers can stoke the embers of resilience in their students.
Untruth #2: Always Trust Your Feelings
The second great untruth of our age, suggest Lukianoff and Haidt, is emotional reasoning. This form of reasoning elevates our feelings to the role of ultimate guide of our interpretation of reality (38). In other words, if I am experiencing negative emotions about a particular situation, then the situation must necessarily be bad. I have no cognitive choice in the matter.
In American culture today, we are bombarded with the so-called wisdom to trust our feelings. No doubt, the core of this message is rooted in expressive individualism, the reigning cultural paradigm, which conceives of human identity in terms of the quest for personal happiness. If human identity and purpose finds its fulfillment in an emotional state, then our feelings are necessarily the ultimate litmus test.
The problem with purely emotional reasoning, of course, is that our feelings do not give us the full picture of reality. Nor they do provide infallible guidance for how to act or what to think. This isn’t their purpose. Emotions are intended to accompany people through the highs and lows of life, helping us experience reality in an appropriate and psychologically healthy way. But they aren’t intended to serve as the arbiters for the truth of a matter.
On this point, the stoic philosopher Epictetus writes, “What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance” (Enchiridion, Epictetus & Lebell, p. 7). What Epictetus is pointing out here is that it is our frame of mind, not the actual situation, that triggers our emotions. Two people can respond very differently to the exact same situation because of how they approach it.
There are a couple ways we can help our students not fall into the trap of overtrusting their feelings. First, we should encourage them to believe the best in a given situation. This another way of saying we should train our students to positively interpret situations around them. While this may be difficult for some students (“I’m a natural pessimist”), like most behaviors, mindset is largely a matter of habit (download Patrick’s eBook on habit training here). Through training one’s students to respond positively in difficult situations, you are educating them in resilience. You are subtly teaching them that life, though challenging, is manageable. It won’t destroy them even if it feels in the moment like it will.
Second, we should train our students to always seek the truth of the matter. This is why courses in logic are so important in secondary school education. Students need to be equipped with the skills to discern truth from falsehood and logical from emotional appeals. They need to be able to interpret situations in context and consider all the different perspectives on complex issues. Through logical analysis and critical thinking, students can avoid the untruth of “Always trust your feelings.”
From a biblical perspective, when I think of a resilient mindset in difficult situations, I cannot help but recall the words of the apostle Paul. In Philippians 4, he writes “…I have learned the secret to being content in every situation.” And in 2 Corinthians 4, he writes, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” For a person like Paul, who is locked up in a Roman prison, to make these confessions is nothing short of astounding. He displayed resilience because he trusts in the strength of the Lord inside him. He is able to faithfully interpret his challenging circumstances with hope because he knew that God’s plan in Christ will not be stopped. His outlook is grounded in faith and guided by reason, not his feelings.
Untruth #3: Life is a Battle of Us vs Them
The third great untruth is the “Us versus Them” mentality. The authors explain this false idea to be that life is ultimately a battle between good people and evil people. We find the people who are like us or believe the same things we do–our tribe–and band together against other tribes.
Now, on the one hand, it is completely natural and perfectly harmless for people to bond together over shared interests and even identities. As an alumnus of Harry D. Jacobs High School (located in the golden city of Algonquin, Illinois), I feel an affinity for the school’s constituents by virtue of our shared identity. Moreover, I wish no harm upon on the poor souls who can’t claim this superior heritage as their own. This tribe, I would argue, is a good one, promoting tangible goods of friendship, service, and gratitude.
But on the hand, history is full of examples in which communities devolve into tribes who are then mobilized to attack other tribes and vilify the individuals that make them up. The most infamous example is Adolph Hitler’s vilification of Jews to achieve his plans for a German empire. Today the most common and infamous manifestation of this is identity politics. Identity politics has become a contentious term that refers to “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest” (59).
The authors suggest that not all identity politics are bad. Positive examples of identity-driven political causes include women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. The world is a better place because brave leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., mobilized historically marginalized African-Americans to stand up for their civil and political rights.
But all too often identity politics is actually common-enemy politics. They write:
“Identity can be mobilized…in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy” (60).
Common-enemy identity politics is bad for students because they create what the authors call a “call-out culture.” A call-out culture is one which people are always on the look out to publicly shame people who offend or aggravate their tribe. The net result is a culture in which people are afraid to speak their mind or try out new ideas lest they be publicly scrutinized.
The solution, the authors suggest, is “an appeal to common humanity, rather than common enemy, for the sake of facilitating real conversation geared toward free inquiry, dissent, evidence-based argument, and intellectual honesty” (77).
For open and honest conversation to happen in classrooms, teachers must resist the temptation of promoting tribalist thinking. As Christians, it can be be tempting to think of life as us against the world and to a certain extent we are correct. St. Augustine himself drew a line in the sand between the City of God and the City of Man. But at the same time, as Christians, God has not called us to make enemies of all those who do not claim to be Christians. Nor does God call us to raise our swords against those who disagree with us theologically, morally, or politically. Instead, we are called to live peaceable in the city and seek its well being (Jeremiah 29, 1 Timothy 2).
In our classrooms, then, we can cultivate a culture of common humanity through sincere inquiry to understand alternative viewpoints. We can train students in the intellectual virtues of charity, humility, and mutual respect. This isn’t to suggest we should downplay the truth or avoid argumentation. On the contrary, when the right ground rules are set, the best debates occur.
Conclusion
Educating for resilience requires a rejection of the three great untruths: Fragility, Emotional Reasoning, and Us Versus Them. If we can train our students in the opposite of these untruths, they will emerge as independent, reasonable, and unifying young men and women. This sort of education takes significant patience and wisdom. It is not easy to know in a given situation when a student needs grace and support or when they need to be challenged. But through careful study, deliberate practice, and the grace of God, we can train our students to face a challenging world with courage, prudence, and resilience. I would take this approach over coddling any day.
For more insights on how teachers can hone the craft of teaching from a classical perspective, while preparing their students for the modern world, you can download my free eBook “The Craft of Teaching.”