Mackenzi Kimball
Professor Cripps
English Composition 110
February 5th, 2021
Fixed Mindset in Educational Spaces
You’re too sensitive! You’ll never survive in the real world with that attitude! This is what many young adults have heard throughout the years from the 90’s to today. But are we actually sensitive, or has the meaning of the word sensitive changed? An article by the name of The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explores their ideas of why they believe college students are being held back by their own sensitivity. The authors express that college students are oversensitive towards too many words and phrases which promotes the usage trigger warnings. Lukianoff and Haidt dive deeper into their beliefs about the “overuse” of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and many more throughout their article. Conversely, a public speaker named Carol Dweck performed a TED Talk called The Power of Believing That You Can Improve, where she speaks about the importance of teaching a growth mindset. She expresses how damaging a fixed mindset can be to students when confronting a new challenge, and explains how a growth mindset is significantly better for preparing students for their future. The Coddling and Dweck seemingly discuss very different issues when speaking on how to properly educate students. But given Dweck’s definitions of fixed mindsets and growth mindsets, The Coddling authors present ideas based around a fixed mindset throughout almost their whole article. The fixed mindset is not found within the students though, it is found in the authors themselves.
A fixed mindset can be applied anywhere in life, even in interpersonal relationships and speech. In Dweck’s TED talk presentation, she discussed why growth mindsets were better for preparing children for the future, and why fixed mindsets were so detrimental to our perceived idea of intelligence. In her experiments, elementary students were given slightly hard math problems to solve and Dweck observed that students with fixed mindsets usually reacted in a negative way. The students that she determined to have a fixed mindset viewed their task as “tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed” (Dweck, 00:36). These children were presented with a task that was supposed to be hard and their minds told them that their skills were not enough to figure the math problems out. The fixed mindsets of these kids made them believe they were incapable and therefore unintelligent. A fixed mindset can sometimes solely rely on our emotions leading us to believe we are truly unintelligent. Yet, when thinking critically our fixed mindset can change. In The Coddling, Lukianoff and Haidt perceive critical thinking as “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 original hypothesis” (para. 19). Critical thinking is a skill that can be improved upon with a growth mindset. This skill can allow those with fixed mindsets to rationalize the problem at hand and work through it. If we rely solely on our emotions the true solution to a given problem might never be found. Given this idea, a growth mindset allows us to truly think critically while having our emotions in mind without them being our main focus when confronting a conflict.
Growth mindsets can be used to enact useful change in the world and how we understand one another. Dweck explains how she observed which children possessed a growth mindset when observing the same students she studied in her experiment mentioned before. Compared to the fixed mindset students, she saw some individuals “[react] in a shockingly positive way . . . They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset ” (00:36). These students did not think about the fact that their skills might not be enough to solve the problems, they just dove right into them. They were excited by the idea of trying something new, which is pivotal for having a growth mindset. Understanding the fact that your critical thinking abilities can be developed is a huge factor in developing a growth mindset as well. Keeping the idea of critical thinking in mind, it is discussed in the “What Can We Do Now?” section of The Coddling that “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” (Lukianoff and Haidt, para. 59). Lukianoff and Haidt believe that colleges need to extensively prepare their students for encountering triggering words out in the “real world” environment. I agree that students should be knowledgeable of the fact that these triggering words will pop up, but I feel like Lukianoff and Haidt still don’t understand the reason why trigger warnings are more frequently used in the first place. Students should be mentally prepared to have run-ins with triggering words, but trigger warnings are more commonly used now to try and stop the use of such triggering words and phrases. Lukianoff and Haidt think that colleges are trying to shield their students from such words, but students are trying to create a change throughout society and the world so people understand why those words and phrases can be such a problem. Having a growth mindset allows a person to think critically about the problem or situation in front of them, and figure out a way to confront it without fear. Applying a growth mindset when discussing personal issues or world wide problems will help everyone in the long run to become more understanding of one another.
But the slight glimmer of a growth mindset seen in The Coddling does not overshadow the fact that the article itself is totally against change. Lukianoff and Haidt push the idea that trigger warnings are stunting students’ learning abilities and restricting professors in what they can teach. But when reading the article, it seems like Lukianoff and Haidt are just upset that their comfortable way of living and speaking is being challenged to change. One paragraph of the article is used to compare the political correctness movement of the 80’s and 90’s to what’s happening in the present day saying “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” (para. 5). In short, Lukianoff and Haidt believe that the two movements have completely different goals. But they completely miss the fact that the use of trigger warnings widens the perspective even more. The current movement is extremely similar to the past movement. Younger generations are building off the movement from the 80s and 90s to include even more diverse narratives. We are trying to include more and more marginalized groups that were either never talked about, or considered taboo to speak on such as mental illness, domestic violence, and sexual assault to name a few. Trigger warnings acknowledge the fact that not just hate speech can be hurtful, they target sensitive topics while also allowing those personally affected to avoid being presented with information they can’t deal with at the moment. To me, trigger warnings upset Lukianoff and Haidt because they are so comfortable living in the past where they feel they can speak on such topics freely. Society is changing around us to specifically be more considerate of others and their personal experiences. This shift is much needed so that individuals, such as Lukianoff and Haidt, can learn what they’ve done wrong in the past and be inclined to change themselves for the better.
Lukianoff and Haidt show their fixed mindset when trying to stick to older ways of speaking to students. They discuss that being sensitive to the students is not teaching them to be prepared for professional life, but in reality this sensitivity towards others teaches students to be open to seeing and acknowledging other individuals’ backgrounds. When you acknowledge individuals in this way, you have more of an appreciation for certain qualities of life. We can learn from each other rather than further separate ourselves by lacking the initiative, or growth mindset, to listen to other’s stories. Humans thrive when we know we aren’t alone, so why silence each other’s experiences for the gain of others? The use of trigger warnings especially help when deciphering whether or not an individual is ready to dive into a discussion with peers or wait for another day if/when they feel ready. So when Lukianoff and Haidt speak about “oversensitivity” they are actually referencing their own insensitivity.
Works Cited
Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic, September 2015, How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus – The Atlantic, 5 Feb. 2021.
Dweck, Carol. “The Power of Believing that You Can Improve” TED Talks, November 2014, Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve | TED Talk, 5 Feb. 2021.
