Does the Yale Problem Start in High School?
Can the current college campus crisis be mitigated with better education in high school?
From the Heterodox Academy:
The Yale Problem Begins in High School
A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.
But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.
Comments
Where did it all begin? The chicken or the egg? Blame the liberal elites who have created this victim hood mindset and contaminated education with gov mandates, unions, tenure and social justice garbage. Toss in some affirmative action, race and ethnicity diversity quotas, while suppressing competition from actual achievement and the monster that the elites have created has turned on them. Colleges and universities have a filter to change things. They don’t have to admit the mob and its constant demands. One is either a place of learning or it is a daycare center for the overly emotional, thin-skinned and totally immature. One might want to change the ed major as well. Can’t have great teachers if no one gets trained to do the job properly.
Yes. Too many high school teachers are tuned into what they remember from college. So they are college-professor-wannabees. That includes the political indoctrinating their college professors did. Monkey-see, monkey-do. Anything with college approval is fine with them.
Universities have been corrupted by the progressive-socialists. For the high schools, we need to de-criminalize school truancy.