Ideological Purity in K-12 Education Harms Mental Health

The mental health issues outlined in The Coddling of the American Mind are the deformed progeny of thirteen years of intellectual inbreeding of the sort described in The Yale Problem Begins in High School and The Yale Problem Begins in Kindergarten.  Universities that foster, or even allow, this sort of thinking rather than combat it exacerbate the problem and inculcate it even more deeply into the psyches of their students.

K-12 and higher education in America is mostly a Tribal Moral Community (TMC) with near-zero countervailing ideas to challenge the dogma of the status quo, force critical thinking, and promote mental health.  Exceptions to the rule like the University of Chicago and Purdue are rare, and there are far too few of them to stem the tide. 

I would not be surprised if the symptoms exhibited by anti-free speech “safe space” protesters who think like the now infamous Yale girl in the following video fit official clinical criteria for some sort of behavioral disorder or syndrome. Call it “The Yale Problem,” or label it with some other word or phrase that indicates the hazards of growing up immersed in the intellectual incest of a closed epistemic world.

The academic paper Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science, while true, understates the problem.

The full scope of the problem would be addressed more accurately by a paper describing how “Political Diversity Will Improve Mental Health.”