May 13, 2015



Newsflash For "Triggered" College Students: The Adult World Is Not One Big, Extra-Cushy Couch

At Chronicle, in the wake of all the "trigger warnings" everywhere, Todd Gitlin gets it right on what a college education is supposed to be -- disturbing:

No one ever promised that the truth would be comforting. History, Western and otherwise, is (among other things) a slaughterhouse. The record of civilization is a record of murder, rape, and sundry other brutalities. As for the discomfort that may be occasioned by the discovery -- even the shock -- of this record, discomfort is the crucible of learning. The world is disconcerting. The proper way to begin understanding it is to accept the unwritten contract of university education: I am here to be disturbed.

Where did this epidemic of thin-skinnedness come from? Gitlin's not sure.

I suspect it's a collision of feminism and other politically correct isms and helicopter parenting.

We live in America at a time of more physical ease than any other time in history, and what do we do? We use the extra time we have to gnash about how awful everything is.

Gitlin writes:

Intriguing is the annual UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey of freshmen. It's national, and it spans more than 40 years. Last year's survey found that incoming students' "self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7 percent (rating themselves as 'above average' or 'highest 10 percent' compared to people their age), its lowest level ever and 2.3 percentage points lower than the entering cohort of 2013." When HERI first asked students to rate their emotional health, in 1985, the proportion who said either "above average" or "highest 10 percent" was 63.6 percent. Either first-year students are reporting more honestly, or they're feeling more troubled.

Your thoughts?

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