Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt "The Coddling of the American Mind" (Essay Sample)
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt believe that oversensitivity to issues of race, gender, and sexuality on college campuses hurts learning and critical thinking.
Prompt: Write a paper in which you propose the best compromise between the goals of learning and the goals of diversity, inclusion, and respect. For support, you will use evidence from the Lukianoff and Haidt article and from your choice of one other article that we have read this semester.
Questions to consider
Use these questions to help you approach the prompt’s task. They are intended to help you begin to think about the topics of the prompt and the reading in more complex ways. They are not a list of questions that you are required to address in your paper.
• How can we balance the goals of a safe, inclusive and diverse atmosphere from education and a rigorous emphasis on critical thinking and free speech?
• How can we balance civil liberties like free speech with protection from harms like hate speech on college campuses?
• What is critical thinking? What role does it play in college? What role does it play beyond college?
• According to the authors, who is responsible for resolving the issues taking place on college campuses? How do you respond to their proposed solutions?
• What do you determine to be the proper goals of an education? What role should sensitivity to others play? What about critical thinking?
• Does Ma’s emphasis on empathy negate these authors’ desire for critical thinking? How might we combine these to create a new model for education?
• How do authors like Coates deal with trauma?
• Do you think the authors’ solutions might offer an alternative to trigger warnings?
• How can we use necessary edges to reach a compromise?
Formatting and Requirements
• Copy and paste your essay directly in Achieve. I strongly encourage you to write your essay in another platform (Microsoft Word or Google Docs)
• Your essay should be approximately 3-5 pages in length (around 900-1500 words)
• Include your name, my name, class and date in the upper left corner of the 1st page
• Format your essay according to MLA guidelines (see Documenting Sources: MLA Style in Achieve)
• Include a Works Cited page listing all sources you used or consulted
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Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt "The Coddling of the American Mind"
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in "The Coddling of the American Mind" views the college campuses notion of gender, oversensitivity to race issues and sexuality tends to hurt the factors of learning and critical thinking. They describe the possible effects of these attitudes and how they lead to injury and discrimination. The two scholars also say that it is "impossible to fully understand the roots of these problems without first examining the way we raise and educate our children." Lukianoff and Haidt, along with Andrew Klick that they wrote about in "The Coddling of the American Mind", examines that college students today are more politically liberal than ever before, which was often once a marker for the "college-educated" person. According to Lukianoff & Haidt, political correctness is a tool used by groups who have power or who fear other groups.
The balance for the goals of a safe, inclusive and diverse atmosphere from education as emphasized by Lukianoff and Haidt can be achieved through the rigorous need of having critical thinking and free speech especially at colleges. It is the aspiration of this article to understand what the negative impacts of suppressing free speech are, and how it can be connected to educational goals. The suppression of free speech especially among college students has been known to have negative effects for example hindering rational thinking, being overly sensitive toward offensive words, not being able to engage in rational dialogue with people who have different beliefs, being unable to debate because of fear for speaking out loud, and much more (Lukianoff and Haidt 8). These negative effects are very harmful especially for college students who will be part of the workforce soon. The workplace is known for its competitive nature which will require workers to think rationally about situations and move forward with critical thinking (Harrison 278).
Thus, Lukianoff and Haidt views that balance of civil liberties in college campuses can protect free speech through ensuring it is not harmed. The debate raised by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) about free speech on college campuses. They argue that colleges should find balance between protecting students from harms like hate speech and protecting civil liberties such as free speech (Lukianoff and Haidt 12). It also includes links to some notable quotes on this topic, as well as links to some helpful websites that discuss this issue further. Hence, critical thinking is a perspective that allows to analyze facts, which will form the judgment. The authors highlight that cognitive thinking allows teaching the importance of this approach in one's life.
Lukianoff and Haidt highlights that resolving the issues that takes place on college campuses is the responsibility of students, faculty members, and administrators. They believe that the attitude of universities should be to make campuses safe for intellectual diversity. Also, there are some of the widespread trends in education on college campuses, including trigger warnings and speech codes (Welbaum 188). This is not an exhaustive list of the many topics addressed in this book; it is instead a starting point for conversations about what can be done to foster a welcoming environment on college campuses. And critical thinking will allow to make an individual judgment on any important issue, to assess the situation rationally and make a wise decision especially while at college.
Critical thinking has been emphasized by Ma, which negates the empathy of these authors. Thus, children should be taught to interrogate and criticize, not to accept and acceptation without critique, or to use empathy at the expense of critical thinking. A new model for education be created based on Lukianoff and Haidt through a series of essays that detail the higher education bubble along with the various issues that plague the entire system (Lukianoff and Haidt 14). The Right may be able to use the increased understanding and increased potential and national pushback to address many issues and implement solutions if we can get a majority of the states to understand this. A new model for education be created based on Lukianoff and Haidt through a series of essays that detail the higher education bubble along with the various issues that plague the entire system. The Right may be able to use the increased understanding and increased potential and national pushback to address many issues and implement solutions if we can get a majority of the states to understand the situation.
Authors like Coates deal with trauma on a daily personal basis. This is why their creation of these epic stories is so inspiring. These stories act as inspirations to us all, not just because they are vivid, but because they inspire us to take on the problems of the world. They define the problems of the world out of existence, and they define how we can help to solve them. The truth of the matter is that Coates's descriptions of life on the blocks is not unique (Harrison 278). Lukianoff and Haidt solutions will offer an alternative to trigger warnings as it is the appropriate approach. Trigger warnings have been a hotly debated topic among educators and their students. Designed to warn people about the content in a text, many believe they give students the opportunity to decide if they want to engage with certain material. But as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out in their article “The Coddling of American Minds,” trigger warnings may be doing more harm than good (Lukianoff and Haidt 5). Their proposed solutions will offer an al
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