How coddling and cocooning today's youths can lead to violence
The thugs were egged on by government indifference. That’s all they needed to have a holiday of riot.
They smashed windows. They burned. They attacked opponents and sent bystanders scurrying in fear. And the police stood by. And the authorities that had the power to discipline them quailed in their offices.
That happened in Berlin, Germany in 1937, right? Similar things, yes, but this particular travesty happened at UC Berkeley in 2017.
For almost a thousand years, western universities have been where free speech and ideas have flourished, and occasionally went to hide.
Now, however, leading universities — Berkeley, Yale, UCLA and others — have bent the knee to groups who are a small percentage of student bodies and allowed them to trash free speech, the most sacred precept of higher education.
What has so transformed today’s students that this could happen? The question is given to Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., professor of psychology at San Diego State University who has studied this ugliness.
"iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us.”
Using the term of perhaps an earlier day, today’s youths are pampered, and Twenge said research shows it’s happening across all races, ethnicities and regions.
“Over the last 5 to 10 years, administrators and faculty have come to realize that students come to campus with less experience and less independence, so the umbilical cord isn’t cut when they go away to college. It just gets longer.
“Students insist on not just physical safety, but also on something that they call “emotional safety” from ideas that differ from their protected childhoods, or from classroom lectures that don’t steer clear of ‘unwanted’ ideas.”
Twenge says adolescence is not about risk as much as it used to be. “iGen thinks that risk is dangerous, that it might be dangerous to their futures, that it might be dangerous to their emotions, that it might be dangerous to their bodies. They are very, very risk-averse.”
It seems strange that a sheltered childhood could lead to shouting down speakers. However, if a minority of students believe some intellectual outsider is challenging their safe and sound ideas, and the university is willing to stand back and allow them to run amok, then it becomes a short step to rioting or bullying in the name of “right ideas” against those who would destroy those ideas.
When the adults in charge of the school step aside and do nothing, predisposed students see that as permission to tear things up with no consequences.
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