Another book recommended to me by my son Joe – he'd also recommended this one 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos and both books come to some similar conclusions. This is despite the very different backgrounds of the two co-authors of this book and the author of 12 Rules, Jordan Peterson.
The subtitle of this book is "How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure." The book grew out of an essay the two authors wrote in The Atlantic, September, 2015 issue and which you can find here – The Coddling of the American Mind: How Trigger warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus. The authors are Greg Lukianoff a constitutional lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents the book describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. In a section on "social justice" on page 216 they state "Neither of us has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the Presidency" (just wanted to get that little fact out of the way, since it's important to some people). If you can have people as diverse as Cornel West and Robert P. George writing blurbs on the back dust cover, you can figure the book has wide appeal.
The first part of the book is a discussion of what they call the Three Great Untruths: (1) What does not kill you makes you weaker (2) Always trust your feelings and (3) Life is a battle between good people and evil people. The first third of the book investigates the social trends that spread these untruths.
Part II is titled "Bad Ideas in Action" and discusses intimidation, violence and witch hunts on college campuses. Part III is "How Did We Get Here" with thought provoking commentary on current child rearing, pre-college education and the dramatic shift in society with the rise of iPads and smart phones -how they are changing the culture dramatically for young people. Part IV is titled "Wising Up" – how do we reverse these trends.
The book is really excellent and only 260 pages. It makes many of the same points Jordan Peterson makes in his above-mentioned book. The link above is to my posting about Peterson's book – and also linked here. These books should be must -reads for educators, therapists, or anyone with children under 25 years old. In fact for anyone either and both books should lead to self-criticism and self-examination; always a good thing. If you type in either author's name on youtube you can find plenty of interviews with them.
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