Key insights from
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
By Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff
Audio available
12 minute read
Published Sep 4, 2018
What you'll learn
There are three Great Untruths that have begun to coalesce into a cult of “safetyism” in the United States. These untruths fly in the face of ancient wisdom and modern research, and have proven harmful to the individuals and groups who have imbibed them. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt team up to illuminate these untruths and their deleterious effects, as well as suggest some remedies.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 More than just resilient, children are “antifragile.”
- 2 The belief that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker has fostered the rise in a paranoid safetyism.
- 3 Warnings about unreliable emotions are as old as humanity itself, so perhaps it’s not a good idea to make them the basis for dialogue in universities.
- 4 The untruth that the world is comprised of good people and evil people is a natural, but polarizing tendency.
- 5 The Great Untruths of Fragility, Emotional Reasoning, and Us Versus Them have flourished in the soil of helicopter parenting, social media, and the decline of child’s play.
- 6 Raising kids with wisdom means responsibly encouraging independence in action and thought.
- 7 Universities can encourage wisdom by putting pursuit of truth before social justice, and by upholding free speech and inquiry as quintessential to the life of the university.
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