Books: The Coddling of the American Mind and Roland Fryer
Posted By RichC on April 2, 2022
The longer I live, the more I ask the question: “What is wrong with people?”
While reading “The Coddling of the American Mind” last week, just before chatting with my son Taylor, the synopsis of the book came to mind. We were discussing a variety of current issues and ties to history (behavior, greed, crime, war, etc), but 
somehow we drifted to the First Amendment as it relates to the United States compared to other democratic socialist and communist countries. My concern was that different points-of-view are not being debated in today in schools or our partisan media. Insidious or blatant censorship is the norm all too often nowadays (as well as purposeful misinforming). On college campuses and on social media, opposing thoughts and intellectual debate is silenced and the divide between progressives and conservatives political ideology grows wider and more hateful as flames are fanned and minds are brainwashed by propagandist and ideologues.
In this 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haldt, they discuss “what has been going wrong” when it comes to our society. Speaking openly or debating issues respectfully is getting rarer in colleges or forums where openminded discussions were once encouraged. It far more common that we’ll see the shouting down of speakers or the boiling into anger leading to physical assaults or even riots. The fact that college campuses are no longer places where students will hear, discuss or debate different views is concerning. We’re regularly seeing voices silenced and intellectual debate squelched no matter the issue. Check out the video from TheCoddling.com.
…new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism — interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
This book was on my mind when a couple new stories appeared this past week. First was the reaction by progressive Democrats to a Parental Rights in Education bill in Florida “prohibiting a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels“ and protecting the right of parents to have those discussions with their children. In today’s “woke” America, leftist progressives have learned from past success, the way to change society is to take over the education system and feed the next generation their ideology … and only their ideology … from pre-school through college.
AND because I just saw this video (below), progressive ideologues are making sure those who stray from teaching or presenting anything other than their views are purged.
Video Description:
Roland Fryer was an unlikely Harvard superstar. Abandoned by his mom at birth and raised by an alcoholic dad, Fryer became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard and won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, the prize for the best economist under 40 in the world.
Fryer’s research routinely upended the woke orthodoxies dominating academia. But not on purpose; Fryer isn’t partisan. He’s only interested in digging up truth, no matter what it is. Truth, he says, is the key tool for improving the lives of black boys and girls. Then, in 2018, Fryer’s career was suddenly cut short.
Harvard had an official line on why: he’d sexually harassed his staff. Fryer was banned from campus and his multi-million dollar lab was shut down. The few legacy media outlets that did cover the case, such as the New York Times, dutifully repeated the university’s narrative: this punishment was overdue MeToo justice. No, it wasn’t.
Drawing on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of Fryer’s friends and colleagues, we reveal his cancellation for what it was: an ideological purge.
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