Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Death Of Academia

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This is a few weeks old, but I missed it at the time: a disturbing interview with Jonathan Haidt:

JONATHAN HAIDT: The big thing that really worries me – the reason why I think things are going to get much, much worse – is that one of the causal factors here is the change in child-rearing that happened in America in the 1980s. With the rise in crime, amplified by the rise of cable TV, we saw much more protective, fearful parenting. Children since the 1980s have been raised very differently–protected as fragile. The key psychological idea, which should be mentioned in everything written about this, is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility.

JOHN LEO: What’s the theory?

JONATHAN HAIDT: That children are anti-fragile. Bone is anti-fragile. If you treat it gently, it will get brittle and break. Bone actually needs to get banged around to toughen up. And so do children. I’m not saying they need to be spanked or beaten, but they need to have a lot of unsupervised time, to get in over their heads and get themselves out. And that greatly decreased in the 1980s. Anxiety, fragility and psychological weakness have skyrocketed in the last 15-20 years. So, I think millennials come to college with much thinner skins. And therefore, until that changes, I think we’re going to keep seeing these demands to never hear anything offensive.

They won’t survive the real world.

9 thoughts on “The Death Of Academia”

  1. I think there are two different things taking place. One is that parents that are too protective sometimes but the safe places ideology of what is and isn’t offensive comes from the teachers and the Democrat party. It is kinda BS to blame the top down ideology sweeping teachers, activists, and politicians on the parents.

    1. Another way to look at it: there is physical protection, and intellectual protection. I won’t let my daughter play soccer unless there is a “no heading” rule, and this annoys my wife – she thinks I’m being too physically protective. But I encourage my daughter to tell the other kids that they shouldn’t believe in crazy sounding stories (like Santa Claus, or the divinity of Jesus) if there isn’t sufficient evidence, and my wife thinks I’m not being intellectually protective enough. But c’mon, isn’t having your kid not ruin Christmas for all the other kids just another way to “create a safe space”?

      (I’m kidding.)

      1. You’re being intellectually dishonest with your child if you promote anti Santa Clause stories without having her intellectually examine scientific fallacies, too.

        1. I don’t promote anti-Santa stories, I promote pro-evidence stories. As for your point, I agree. There are only so many minutes in the day, and there is a lot to do (like soccer) but we’re working on learning how to do science as much as we can.

          1. Let her head the ball. And if she ends up taking it in the face, sit your ass back down on the bleachers. The kid isn’t the only one learning.

          3. Actually, that is on-topic. That’s part of how we acquired these special, brittle snowflakes.

            It’s also utter BS. Concussions from heading the ball? Only if you and another player are both going for the ball and head each other instead (and I’ve seen that happen, both guys were on my team and they knocked each other out cold).

            Kids need to fail and skin their knees and get bumps on their head.

  2. I’m not saying they need to be spanked

    While I agree that children need not be beaten, I will say that most successful people I have met can tell a story as a child of being spanked. Back in the 80’s, parents were told that spanking children would mess up there psychological growth, that you had to always be supportive of your children. So we had parents go full tilt in telling little Johnny and Susie that its ok they destroyed someone’s property because they didn’t know right from wrong and wouldn’t do it again. They were good children simply because they were claimed to be so. These children, never spanked, rarely learned diversity or respect for others.

  3. They won’t survive the real world.

    Speaking about the SJWs, for the most part, they don’t want any part of the real world. They want their safe spaces where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. They are so weak intellectually that any idea contrary to their own is considered hate speech and the person guilty of speaking such heresy must be destroyed. They’ve been told by the likes of Michelle Obama that working in the corporate world is wrong and immoral. Instead, they should aspire to the purity of working for non-profits, academia, or holy of holies, government where they can inflict their beliefs on everyone else. If they must lower themselves to work in the corporate world, they’re likely to end up in the HR department.

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