Jonah Goldberg on the “Fragilest Generation”:
What’s new is the way kids are being raised.
Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That’s how we learn. But what happens when play is micro-managed? St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy.
Free play –tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at the park, etc. –is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, “we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful, cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts.”
The rise in “helicopter parenting” and the epidemic of “everyone gets a trophy” education are another facet of the same problem. We’re raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.
Once you understand the amygdala, it all seems kind of like listening to retards give you a window into their train of thought, but they are heading in the right direction. Eventually, at some point they will grasp what the differences were between the events which molded the Greatest Generation and the events which have produced the Fragilest Generation. At that point they will probably only be a couple of centuries away from coming to realizing how r/K might be related to those two types of life experiences. Another couple of hundred years, and they may realize r/K is related to politics.
Of course they could just read this site, and get about four hundred years of their own brainpower condensed into just under ten minutes.
I just hope their brains can handle it.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Getting mugged and left for dead at the age of 19 was the best lesson that ever happened to me. It undid 12 years of public school indoctrination in 3.5 minutes. That lesson saved my life 3 more times and I’m ready for the next one, from whatever direction it comes from.
This website should be a required piece of homework for every student.
I won’t go to NRO and read it – Lowry, Goldberg and the rest of the Eskimos can go screw themselves.
However, Goldberg has a very good point about free play, and the consequences of short-circuiting that play.
At 50, I look at young people being unable to function in an environment where there is a free exchange of ideas, and I often think back to when we 8-year olds would agree on the ground rules for any game that we wanted to play.
Since we were of an age when adults were never involved in kids play, we had to devise and agree on rules (rules which had to be flexible and change based upon the number of participants at times – adding extra complexity), and if anyone would not keep to the rules, they would have to be banished from the game – not for life, but to learn that the game is impossible to play without co-operation on the rules, and that they needed to civilize themselves before returning.
On my street there are a few groups of kids constantly playing without adult supervision, and I smile as I observe the negotiation over rules that occurs as they devise their games and adapt them to the number of participants available.
Of course, helicopter parents are the kind of people who don’t understand that their children are not accessories of themselves but the future adults of the society, and the harm that these parents have done by inflicting their pathologies on society is only now beginning to become evident to the clueless.