Your In-Class Bluebook Exam for 5-4-16:
From Writing #5 in Acting Out Culture, page 295:
For hooks, there is a complicated relationship between education and desire. Write an essay in which you analyze how this relationship works, according to hooks. Describe the particular role imposed on hooks as a black working-class student, and assess the particular ways this role seems designed to set boundaries around the educational designs and desires she was allowed to have.
Read the essay "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class."
Essay 5, Your Final Research Paper Worth 150 Points: Chapter 4 “How We Learn” from Acting Out Culture (Choose One Below)
First Option
In a 5-page essay, not including Works Cited page, support, refute, or complicate the argument that the assigned selections from Chapter 4 evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Easy to convert into a Thesis
The selected essays in Chapter 4 make a convincing case that education is less about empowering students and more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control.
Second Option
In a 5-page essay, not including Works Cited page, support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s argument from “Degrading to De-grading” that the American grading system is a travesty of education that kills learning, compromises teaching, and entails other kinds of abuses.
Sample Thesis
Kohn's argument to end grading as we know it is a cheap piece of propaganda evidenced by his pandering to upper class Americans who are less interested in teaching their children real life skills but wish to shelter them with touchy-feely, pseudo-liberal ideas of "inclusiveness," "equality," and "friendship," qualities that, in the context of education, are a mishmash of worthless New Age Speak.
Third Option
Kohn writes about the need to move a school “from a grade orientation to a learning orientation” (pp. 239, 243). What do you think he means? How, according to Kohn, does grading make it harder to focus on learning? Write an essay in which you discuss the characteristics of these two orientations. Do you think it’s possible to have an educational system that emphasizes both?
Sample Thesis
Kohn's over simplistic proposition that we can either grade our children or educate them is a fallacy that informs all the other nonsense of his argument evidenced by ______________, ______________, _______________, and __________________.
Fourth Option
According to Rizga (252), the primary factor responsible for designating a school as "failing" is our current reliance upon standardized tests. Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity or usefulness of using standardized tests to rank the performance of schools. Do such tests offer a fair, accurate, or helpful measure of a school's performance or not? How? If you were charged with revamping the system for evaluating school performance, what kind of standardized test (if any) would you utilize? Why?
Sample Thesis
As Rizga's essay and John Oliver's video show, standardized grading is a scandal that has abandoned school's commitment to children while re-focusing its efforts on lining the pockets of the standardized test publishers and their corrupt minions.
Fifth Option
In "Against School" John Gatto accuses American public schools of not teaching critical thinking skills and instead mindless consumerism. Should schools teach critical thinking that would teach us values and consumer habits based on those values as evidenced in the John Verdant essay "The Ables Vs. The Binges"? Does such "value teaching," as evidenced in the Verdant essay, contain an implicit political point of view that makes "value teaching" inappropriate? Why or why not? Explain in a research paper.
Sample Thesis
The stark contrast of the intelligent Ables and the dysfunctional Binges complements Gatto's assertion that public schools have abandoned their mission to teach critical thinking and real-life skills to children in favor of social control and exploitation.
Sixth Option
Read "The Coddling of the American Mind" and argue if an educational institution that protects students from microaggressions is either creating an optimum learning environment or is transforming young people into overly fragile narcissists.
Sample Thesis
Not all microaggressions are alike. Some are stupid and trivial. Others are racist and ignorant. If there is to be value in the teaching of microaggressions, then we need to develop a Hierarchy of Offense that establishes what is superficial nonsense and what is truly offensive. While phony microaggressions are characterized by __________, __________, and ____________, authentic racist aggressions are evidenced by ________________, ________________, _____________, and __________________.
Seventh Option
Writing Prompt from Page 295
Race and class, hooks argues, are the unspoken norms that structure everyday college life, the invisible scripts that set the boundaries around what different types of students are encouraged or allowed to expect from school. Write an essay in which you analyze how hooks makes this argument. How does she present her own experience as a student as an example? What unspoken (or spoken) scripts about schooling, education, race, or class does hooks expose in her writing?
Breaking down the assignment:
What are the “unspoken norms” or “invisible scripts” of race and class that pervade college life?
The unspoken belief system, if you will, is that people of white privilege, evidenced by their high-earning power and emulation of an upper class code, enjoy a world of entitlement. On the other hand, it’s also scripted that people of the lower classes are loathsome and only deserving of contempt and society’s spoiled leftovers, not the fresh fruit enjoyed by the rich.
Write an essay in which you show how Hooks makes the argument that invisible scripts set boundaries for students.
Hooks shows that professors teach their students how to enjoy the upper-class club, to deny their lower-class family roots because those roots are contemptuous and shameful.
Hooks further explains how college education is not just a specialization in a certain field; it’s an indoctrination into the superiority of the educated, privileged class and how working class and more modest backgrounds are not even worthy of consideration; therefore, these modest backgrounds should be shunned; in other words, we should become dead to our poor past.
Hooks argues becoming dead to our past is immoral because we become indoctrinated into the worldview of the privileged vs. the non-privileged, the haves vs. the have-nots and such an indoctrination in Hook’s view is immoral and antithetical to the true humanitarian teachings that should be part of college life.
Hooks shows how students of modest means who don’t aspire to be uppity are disregarded and dismissed as invisible.
You need to drink the privileged class Kool-Aid if you want to succeed in college and in the work world, Hooks is arguing.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Eighth Option
In a 1,500-word essay with a minimum of 5 sources, support, defend, or complicate the notion that Hooks, Kozol, Rose, and Gatto make a convincing case that education is class biased in a way that is harmful to the working class and reinforces class inequality. You might consult Dana Goldstein's YouTube presentation.
How to cite a YouTube video and other electronic sources on Purdue Owl.
Ninth Option
For hooks, there is a complicated relationship between education and desire. One of her essay's major ideas is that students from a working-class background have a more difficult struggle than privileged students because the relationship between desire and education is more conflicted. How convincing is her claim? Develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes or complicates the claim that working-class students must navigate across a thornier field of conflict regarding their desires and their education.
Read the essay "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class."
Desire Conflict Points in "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class"
One. Desire makes hooks a burden on the family vs. America says in our democratic, equal society we are all entitled to the comforts of life (287).
Two. Expressing her desires is an expression of her stupidity and results in her parents admonishing her vs. rich girls taking their desires and their expectations for a good life for granted (287).
Three. Desire disrupts hooks' "inner life" and she learns to suppress her ideas in order to be more peaceful (287).
Four. When hooks was too young to understand social class, she felt free to desire whatever she wanted, and then when she grew into an awareness of class, she let go of her "stupid and wrong" desires so she could focus "on survival, on making do" (288).
Five. Her desire for higher education conflicted with the knowledge that the cost burdened her parents, so that, unlike the privileged students, there was guilt attached to hooks' education (287).
Six. At her first college, she learned she didn't fit in because of her race and class, and she learned the painful lesson that college happily accommodated rich white girls but made poor black girls feel like misfits living on the margins. A poor black girl like bell hooks had to be apologetic about her presence at such a college (288).
Seven. At college as hooks read poetry on the "perfect grass," she realized the rich can desire and expect their desires to be easily fulfilled whereas the poor must not desire because desire breeds hope, and experience has taught hooks that hope leads to disappointment and crushed dreams. It's better to not have the dreams in the first place (288).
Eight. When hooks met a poor white girl, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, at college, she observed that this white girl was diseased by "a hard edge of contempt, anger, and envy," which reinforced hooks' religious belief that desire is sinful and idolatrous (289).
Nine. The prospect of going to Stanford awakened a desire that hooks was comfortable with, a desire that was free of contamination, a desire that came from a deep place within her soul: "The lure for me was the promise of journeying and arriving at a destination where I would be accepted and understood." In a cruel ironic twist, she found she was not accepted and understood at Stanford except as a token (290).
Ten. Just as hooks burned with desire to attend the costly Stanford, she had to contend with her mother's conflicting relationship with desire: "All the barely articulated understandings of class privilege that I had learned my first year of college had not hipped me to the reality of class shame. It still had not dawned on me that my parents, especially mama, resolutely refused to acknowledge any difficulties with money because her sense of shame around class was deep and intense. And when this shame was coupled with her need to feel that she had risen above the low-class backwoods culture of her family, it was impossible for her to talk in a straightforward manner about the strains it would put on the family for me to attend Stanford" (290).
Eleven. As she desired to climb the education ladder, hooks saw that her parents associated such an education with worldliness, urbane sophistication, and cosmopolitan secularism, and these values are sinful and antithetical to her small-town religiosity (290). By embracing higher education, she was haunted by the notion that she was abandoning her parents, losing her religion and replacing that religion with privilege.
Twelve. At Stanford, hooks roomed with a beautiful white girl from Orange County whose blind ambition made her capitulate to a rich abusive boyfriend, cheating, and stealing. Thus, hooks saw that desire can unbridle us from our morality and result in moral debauchery (292).
Thirteen. At Stanford, a college that ostensibly celebrated diversity, hooks observed that poor students had their work cut out for them when she wrote: "I learned how deeply individuals with class privilege feared and hated the working classes. Hearing classmates express contempt and hatred toward people who did not come from the right backgrounds shocked me" (293). The fear and hatred of the working classes encourages the poorer students to assimilate into privilege: to renounce their working-class past and conform to the codes of privilege. Thus, a working-class student's desire to "get ahead" is accompanied by the guilt and shame of being a "sell-out."
Fourteen. The conflict of desires is so intense, bell hooks observes, that many working-class students go crazy: "Students from nonprivileged backgrounds who did not want to forget [their past] often had nervous breakdowns. They could not bear the weight of all the contradictions they had to confront. They were crushed. More often than not, they dropped out with no trace of their inner anguish recorded, no institutional record of the myriad ways their take on the world was assaulted by an elite vision of class and privilege" (294).
Fifteen. Even with a doctorate, hooks remains conflicted. Part of her is ashamed for holding all her degrees. She writes: "When I finished my doctorate, I felt too much uncertainty about who I had become. Uncertain about whether I had managed to make it through without giving up the best of myself, the best of the values I had bee raised to believe in--hard work, honesty, and respect for everyone no matter their class--I finished my education with my allegiance to the working class intact. Even so, I had planted my feet on the path leading in the direction of class privilege. There would always be contradictions to face. There would always be confrontations around the issue of class. I would always have to reexamine where I stand" (294).
Ninth Option
For hooks, there is a complicated relationship between education and desire. One of her essay's major ideas is that students from a working-class background have a more difficult struggle than privileged students because the relationship between desire and education is more conflicted. How convincing is her claim? Develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes or complicates the claim that working-class students must navigate across a thornier field of conflict regarding their desires and their education.
Sample Introduction and Thesis for Writing Option 9
Most of us, myself included, are guilty of bullshitting our way through life. We distract ourselves from our emptiness by gossiping, consuming, worrying, tweeting, whining, and dreaming. We seek ways to reduce our suffering and to enhance our comforts and pleasures, yet deep down we are essentially miserable and overcome with a deep sense of the futility of our existence. This sense of futility makes us feel helpless, and helplessness cannot exist without a deep sense of fear. The antidote to this type of fear is feeling empowered, but we find that bullshitting our way through life is a false form of empowerment.
This sense of emptiness and fear associated with the futility of our existence can be kept at bay with a variety of coping mechanisms. One of the most common ways to cope with our existential emptiness is to keep busy. By keeping busy, I am referring, generally speaking, to fulfilling our family and societal responsibilities, which serves three purposes.
One, our responsibilities keep us busy around the clock so that we don’t have the time and luxury to fret about our depression and emptiness. We may complain about how busy we are, but we're full of crap. We make ourselves busy because on some level we’ve calculated that it's easier to be too busy than to have time to examine our life and fearfully stare into the abyss.
We stay busy for a second reason: Fulfilling all our responsibilities maintains good status with our family and our tribe, and thus we acquire a sense of belonging and acceptance that consoles us from the pit of emptiness that gnaws at us day and night.
In addition to conforming to our tribe to get a sense of belonging, we keep our emptiness and despair at bay by believing that the future holds some amazing, meaningful experience that will cure us of our emptiness, our anxieties, and our despair. We all believe that someday we will be treated to a larger-than-life meaningful experience that will make up for all the confusion and suffering we’ve had to endure. This Amazing Thing is just around the corner. “Don’t worry,” we tell ourselves, “one of these days, we’ll find the purpose we need to get off our empty path. We’ll find a higher purpose, but not just yet because it’s fun bullshitting our way through life and living as if we’re never going to die.”
As an example of The Amazing Thing Around the Corner delusion, I have been teaching Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning to college composition students for over ten years. At the start of my first Viktor Frankl lecture, I ask the students if they believe in meaning, and the overwhelming majority raise their hands to affirm with certainty that meaning exists. However, my next question is “Have you found meaning yet?” And the overwhelming majority says they haven’t. However, my students are confident that someday they will find it. For now, though, they are too busy going to college and struggling to survive to have found meaning. Once they get a job, settle down, and enter the next phase of their existence, their thinking goes, they are confident they will have grasped the meaning of their existence. Of course, this is a hopeful delusion, but perhaps a necessary one. Without this delusion, would people have the spark that motivates them to get out of bed in the morning and embark on the struggles of their daily existence? I doubt it.
The third purpose of keeping busy and working our butts off is the American Myth of Hakuna Matata, the idea that if we work hard enough, we can find a paradise where all our worries disappear forever. Most of us are too smart to really believe in the Hakuna Matata Myth, but we embrace this lie because it makes us feel good about our future. Like the Amazing Thing Around the Corner delusion, the Hakuna Matata Myth motivates us to get out of bed in the morning and jump over a series of hurdles society presents to us with the promise that our efforts will be rewarded somehow.
Most of us are smart enough to know deep down that jumping over all these hurdles leads to nothing, that society’s promise of Meaning and Hakuna Matata is all bullshit, a ploy designed to control us and compel us to conform to the status quo. In the absence of a compelling Alternative Plan B, however, we stick to society’s Plan A. The price we pay for this is the knowledge deep down that our bargain to conform is based on bullshit. We play the game anyway because, as I said, most of us don’t see any viable alternatives.
But then we reach an age where the bullshit doesn’t work anymore. We reach an age where our awareness of our death and the life we’ve created is so acute that we can no longer delude ourselves. It’s like the Bullshit Light Switch turns off.
My switch shut off at 54. I found myself with a wife and six-year-old twin daughters, a mortgage, life insurance, a house in the suburbs, a gardener, subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now, a Costco membership, piano lessons for my kids, swimming lessons, school field trips, taking the girls to the doctor when they’re sick, going to my daughters’ school’s fundraisers, taking my girls to birthday parties, helping them with their homework, negotiating my work schedule with my wife so that one of us is always with them—the whole shebang. I fulfilled all my desires, and now I spend much of my time trying to figure out what's real and what's bullshit.
Professor bell hooks is in the same boat as I am, but the difference is she could smell the lies of desire long before middle age. In her masterful essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class," hooks makes a convincing case that desire is essential for climbing the economic ladder of privilege while at the same time deceiving us and challenging our moral integrity in several ways, which include ______________, _______________, ________________, and _________________.
Review of the Growing Pains of Working-Class Students Becoming College Educated
- We learn a new language that alienates us from our past relationships and forges bonds with a new social circle. Our new language consists of new words we never entertained before: appropriate, microaggression, co-opt, efficacy, cosmopolitan, tribalism, provincial, hegemony, patriarchy, disruptive, heuristic, epiphany, misogynistic, misanthropic, sycophantic, obsequious, elitist, incandescent, resplendent, perspicacious, trope, meme, etc.
- As we learn this new language and use it more and more, our old friends will look at us as if we are aliens from a different planet. On one hand, we will feel rejected by our old associates. On the other hand, we will swell with pride and think, "Something is happening to me. I'm changing. My old friends on the other hand are stagnant, stuck at the bottom of the bucket with the other crabs. I need to stay on track with this journey and leave my old friends in the dust."
- We reach a point where we say to ourselves, "Education is my higher calling, my life purpose. It is changing me, and will help my family's legacy as college-educated parents increase the chance of their children, nieces, and nephews graduating college. In contrast, my old friends have no purpose. They are stagnant and content with their stagnation. Therefore, I must distance myself from them. Otherwise, they will suck me into their stagnant hell."
- We isolate ourselves in order to submerge ourselves in the inner life of the mind, the intellect, reading, writing. Plummeting into this internal landscape of the mind coupled with our new associates who share our new language reinforces our separating from our old ties.
- Our continued separation from our old ties eventually results in the death of our old self.
- As we acclimate to college life and develop an "educated persona" that is better molded for professional life, our separation from our old ties is reinforced by economic separation.
- Our professional status further separates us from our old ties accompanied by a sense of guilt and betrayal. Some of us are haunted by the nagging feeling that we "sold out."
- As we acclimate to our new educated social and professional circles, the old self scoffs at us and accuses us of being haughty, pretentious, and phony while the new self defends its position, saying, "You want go to back to the working-class mud flats, loser? Shut your mouth, then. I'm making you money. I'm paying your bills. I'm granting you this new status and privilege, so keep your trap shut."
- Like Bell Hooks, we now have a divided self, the new educated persona at constant conflict with the residual working class self.
- Like survivors of war, we have ambivalent feelings: On one hand, we're grateful that we rose out of the mire of poverty. On the other hand, we feel guilty because we see the throng of people who didn't make it languishing beneath us. This guilt is increased when we consider that a lot of people that didn't make it are smarter than we are but weren't so lucky.
- Even as we climb the social and economic ladder, we will find that from time to time we will be afflicted with Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that we are phonies, actors, putting up a facade to fit in an environment that really doesn't suit us.
- As time goes on, some of us will acclimate to our material pleasures and enhanced status and bury our insecurity and guilt by developing a knee-jerk hostility to the working class, accusing them of being lazy, dumb, and shiftless.
- Those of us who are thoughtful, like Bell Hooks, will realize that too much of our higher education is centered on domination of others and ambition and that basic human values need to be cultivated out of the morass of our spiritually bankrupt education.
- Those of us who are thoughtful, like Bell Hooks, try to redefine higher education by being an "intellectual dissenter."
“Preparing Minds for Markets” by Jonathan Kozol (301)
One. Why are all the high school practice jobs manager positions in the service industry like being a cashier or manager at Walmart or Sears or Home Depot or Pet Smart?
It appears the teachers have low expectations for their poor students who they feel are either going to prison or, as their salvation, getting a mediocre job in the service industry.
Perhaps the teachers have good intentions. Perhaps not. But in any case, they have prescribed a narrow role for their students. As one principal says, “I’m in the business of developing minds to meet a market demand.”
Many would argue this isn’t the role of education. Education should expose students to as many opportunities as possible. Would you want your children trained exclusively for service industry jobs at school as if to say, “This is all you can do”?
Part of the problem is financial. A lot of poor schools don’t have computers, so they can’t teach computer literacy, or beyond that, computer code. Some schools don't even have books.
Two. What is the psychological devastation that results from treating students like they’re on the road to prison or a service-industry job?
Demoralization, a crushed spirit, disconnection from the teacher, hatred of education are all results of the system described in Kozol’s essay.
I know an English professor and published author who grew up in the inner city of Detroit, and he said his teachers were scared of him, in part because he’s six feet six inches and weighs 300 pounds. One day in high school he blew up and said to a teacher, “If you keep treating me like a gangster, I’m going to become one just because you're making me very upset!”
The conditions Kozol and others describe is a scandal that underscores how the disparity between the haves and the have-nots contradicts notions we have about American freedom, American democracy, and the American Dream.
We watch Shark Tank and say, “See, everyone, the American Dream is still alive!” But only a minuscule percentage of the show’s aspiring entrepreneurs come from a school in which they were trained to be service workers and managers in department stores.
Writing and Essay Based on a Variation of Option #1
From very different perspectives, Kozol and Mike Rose invite readers to take a closer look at the way cultural stereotypes about different jobs can influence how we define legitimate or valid intelligence. Write an essay in which you identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare. How does each understand the connection between work and learning? What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Key words and passages
Identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare.
How does each understand the connection between work and learning?
What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Sample Thesis Responses That Address the Key Points in Essay Option #1
Support of the Authors
Rose, Gatto and Kozol are allies in the battle against economic class warfare, which perpetuates the divisions between the lower and upper classes evidenced by _____________, ________________, ________________, and __________________.
Refutation of the Authors
Rose and Kozol are shrill liberals whose attempts to bridge the gap between the poorer working classes and the more affluent classes prove misguided when we consider that Rose is guilty of glorifying blue-collar work and making it attractive to those who should aspire to greater career goals; Kozol is guilty of dismissing vocational training in low-income schools that are giving students options that they otherwise would not have; both are guilty of intrusive and unrealistic social engineering and economic redistribution.
Sixth Option: "The Coddling of the American Mind"
Read "The Coddling of the American Mind" and argue if an educational institution that protects students from microaggressions is either creating an optimum learning environment or is transforming young people into overly fragile, irrational narcissists.
Sample Thesis
Not all microaggressions are alike. Some are stupid and trivial. Others are racist and ignorant. If there is to be value in the teaching of microaggressions, then we need to develop a Hierarchy of Offense that establishes what is superficial nonsense and what is truly offensive. While phony microaggressions are characterized by __________, __________, and ____________, authentic racist aggressions are evidenced by ________________, ________________, _____________, and __________________.
Excerpts from "The Coddling of the American Mind"
Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance.Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”
The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later). But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.
We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.
For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.
The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.
The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?
Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.
What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?
Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.
Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.
The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.
Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.
Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.
Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty—would further serve that goal.
Common Cognitive Distortions
A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’sTreatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).
1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
3. Catastrophizing.You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”
11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”
Sixth Option: "The Coddling of the American Mind"
Read "The Coddling of the American Mind" and argue if an educational institution that protects students from microaggressions is either creating an optimum learning environment or is transforming young people into overly fragile, irrational narcissists.
Sample Thesis
The authors persuasively and cogently show that students are being treated like fragile children whose emotions, not objective reality, are allowed to define what an offense is and that this false power granted to the students, ironically enough, robs the students of their power, making them irrational, hysterical, paranoid, and maladapted to the rigors and conflicts of the real world.
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Sentence Fragments
No main verb
Fragment
An essay with a clear thesis and organization.
Corrected
An essay with a clear thesis and organization has a stronger probability of succeeding.
Fragment
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests
Corrected
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests will inevitably discriminate against non-native speakers.
No main subject
Fragment
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students
Corrected
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students, No Child Left Behind remains a form of discrimination.
Fragment
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese
Correct
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese, they fell apart upon the first bite.
Fragment
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos
Correct
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos, your tacos will fall apart.
Link to Sentence Fragments
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
McMahon Grammar Exercises: Pronoun Errors
Confusing subject with object
Please give the chocolate to Randy and (I, me).
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
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