Schools need to foster critical thinking and not enable emotional fragility
It begins by saying "I think that" and not "I feel like" in class discussion.
In recent years I have noticed in my classes during discussions that students begin their comments with “I feel like.” I have been coaching them to say “I think that…”
This framing expression as feelings is epidemic in our culture as well. It may seem like a small semantic difference, but I think—note that I said think—there is a critical difference.
We are people, not animals. We have the capacity for thought and reason, not only emotional response. Emotions have their place, but not as the only consideration in pursuit of truth and understanding.
Unfortunately, our K-12 schools and colleges are to blame for fostering this, and it has led to young people who are intellectually weak, emotionally fragile, and Marxist in behavior.
I am not alone in this assessment. Just as a sampling, a recent article and three books confirmed my suspicion that this is a societal and generational problem.
The article was in the March 8, 2024 Wall Street Journal and was titled “Stop Asking Your Kids How They Feel.” Author Abigail Shrier notes that the trend toward “emotional check-ins” can be destructive and that kids experience positive growth when they learn to manage and even ignore fleeting feelings.
Shrier is the author of the book “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.” She recently gave an overview of the book at a recorded Manhattan Institute event. She said she wrote the book after her son had a doctor visit for a minor physical situation and the staff said she had to leave the room so they could do a mental health screening. She wondered why she had to leave, and asked to see the screening. She said the test was a series of five progressively more disturbing questions about whether the child wants to kill themself and do they think they would they be better off without their parents.
Psychologists told Shrier that being asked about suicide doesn’t cause suicidal tendency. She said that may be true once, but that kids today are getting deluged with suicide questions. It seems to me when hearing this that psychologists should know about the power of suggestion and the cultivation effect, in particular in the minds of impressionable children. In fact, Shrier said, psychologists, health care professionals and educators are flying in the face of ample research that says suicide is contagious, particularly when three conditions are present: 1. valorizing the subject of suicide; 2. presenting suicide as a means of coping; and 3. repeated mention.
Shrier started wondering why the average kid—not those with actual mental health issues—were exhibiting so many mental health problems. She wondered why the kids with the most mental health interventions were in the most distress when in fact they should be more stable.
Consistent with the title of her book, she wondered why kids had no interest in growing up, getting drivers licenses, moving out of their parents’ homes, and getting jobs. The thesis of her book is that growing up is the antidote to this distress
However, there is a lot of bad therapy for kids that prevent them from growing up. They are told to be in touch with feelings. Shrier says this leads to bullies and narcissists. She points out that most of our days are not happy but involve annoyances and challenges. Learning to navigate them is key, not wondering why you’re not happy. Just being asked about your feelings all the time is enough to produce negative responses. It sounds compassionate but it produces the negative reaction. It raises unrealistic expectations, which is a recipe for depression.
I have seen this myself in both an elementary and college setting. When fostering a 7-year-old, we found he gravitated toward a book about expressing feelings, he said he liked living with us because we let him talk about his feelings, and he said they had time at school to think about their feelings. One of my college students talked to me after class to apologize in advance that his work may not be great because some things had happened and his “life was not perfect anymore.” I congratulated him for going two decades in perfection, which must be a record.
Shrier also blames a rush to medication to deal with problems children have when they should be a last resort. Medication when a child is still developing can change their brain chemistry and make them medically dependent for life. Parents would do better to offer rules and structure and punishments and actually parent, as opposed to turning to drugs.
I’ve seen this too in recent years. An alarming number of students miss class because they went off their meds or have a doctor’s appointment to change their medication dosage. I’m always compassionate about this, but I’m concerned about the increase of this phenomenon.
A final point Shrier makes has to do with play. She says kids need the “three Ds”—danger, discovery and dirt. She summarizes, “If you never let a kid test their limits they don’t know what their limits are and they become afraid of things that are not frightening.”
Two other books also address the problem of fragility. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is both a book and a documentary. As the authors note, the book is about wisdom and its opposite. More specifically it is about three great topics and related untruths: 1. Fragility, what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; 2. Emotion, always trust your feelings; 3. Us vs them, life is about good vs evil people.
Similar to Shrier, Lukianoff and Haidt point out that the overprotective instinct in coddling by parents and educators makes people weak, whereas exposure to alternative points of view makes them strong. I like their mention of the concept of “antifragility” from a book of the same name by Nicholas Taleb. Essentially, antifragility means that people actually require opposition and stress to grow strong, and actually without it people get weaker, rigid, and inefficient. This is why the bizarre concept of “safe spaces” on campus is counter-productive to education. It reminds me of what a pilot once told me—planes take off into the wind because without resistance there is no lift.
In the same way, the concept of “microaggression” only considers impact, not intent. In other words, not every thing said that is incorrect or doesn’t align with the hearer’s own view is an aggression. It could be merely an unintended error or a legitimate differing opinion. Teaching that intentions don’t matter fosters an environment of divisiveness and weakness.
Stressing feeling over thinking enables this. Universities used to be about intentionally exposing students to a wide variety of perspectives. Now they vet speakers based on ideology and disinvite those who don’t conform to the views of the authority. That sounds like something far removed from higher education, not to mention democracy. Putting people into groups based on perceived collective identity creates tribalism and a false view of good vs evil. Things are not even this rigid in collectivist cultures. Stressing individuality is the antidote to this false duality. Yet universities persist on creating admissions standards based on category over character and method over merit.
The coddling of the American mind has not yielded independent thinkers or people drawn together by common interest, but instead puts people together by common enemy. This presumes conflict, eschews collaboration, and leads to the phenomenon of political witch hunts, which the authors say have three characteristics: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective identity, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated. The prevalence of witch hunts has led to people who are afraid to defend the accused in an extending spiral of silence and groupthink.
Lukianoff and Haidt have many prescriptions to counter the coddling, but the essence is that rather than this focus on feelings, K-12 schools should teach kids principles of independence and self-reliance, and colleges should entwine a student’s identity with freedom of inquiry.
Lukianoff and another co-author, Rick Schlott, address freedom of inquiry in their book Canceling of the American Mind. They note that cancel culture originated on college campuses, even though higher education should be what they say is “a bulwark against society’s dictates, not subordinate to them.” They note that cancel culture really spread when social media enabled instant outrage mobs, and now both the left and right tend to isolate themselves from opposing views in “rhetorical fortresses,” which seems to me to be both an accelerator and result of cancel culture.
Because I have been the victim of attempted cancellation, I appreciated Lukianoff and Schlott sharing a checklist from Jonathan Rauch in his book “The Constitution of Knowledge” that details what a cancel attempt looks like:
1. “Punitiveness: Are people denouncing you?… Are you being blacklisted?
2. Deplatforming: Are campaigners attempting to prevent you from publishing your work, giving speeches, or attending meetings?
3. Organization: Does criticism appear to be organized or targeted?… Are you being swarmed or brigaded?
4.Secondary Boycotts: Do people who defend you, or criticize the campaign against you, have to fear adverse consequences?
5. Moral Grandstanding: Is the tone of the discourse ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged?
6. Truthiness: Are the things being said about you inaccurate?… Do [people] feel at liberty to distort your words, ignore corrections, and make false accusations?
Lukianoff and Schlott’s summary statement shows that universities and modern elitist journalism have provided just the opposite of what they were designed to offer society:
“Scholarship, science, and democracy itself all rely on a humble realization: that we may all be wrong. Therefore, rather than cancel our opposition, we must listen carefully to what they say. Then we can refute it, accept it, or come to some new position. But cancel culture is an attempt to shrug off that responsibility.”
It used to be that someone would call opinions or perspectives different than their own “interesting.” Encountering these opinions was the whole point of education. Today, however, students are being encouraged to avoid these different ideas, and when they can’t escape them they do not call them interesting but “offensive”.
For years the hallmark of a good education was critical thinking. It seems that is being replaced with an emphasis on emotional feeling. But we feel what we feel because we think what we think. Education needs to get back to the foundation of thought. It is why I ask my students to frame their comments as what they think, not how they feel.