Coddled or Engaged? Teaching Political Tolerance to Generation Z Students

Abstract

Critics like to call students in Generation Z (those born in 1995 onward) “coddled” and resistant to ideas that they disagree with. A series of high profile protests at universities have led to the impression that Generation Z is political intolerant of those who they disagree with. At the same time, Generation Z is a more diverse, more educated, and more active political generation. Given political polarization, teaching Generation Z students about political tolerance presents challenges. This paper presents an approach to teach political tolerance in an Introduction to Politics course. Grounded conceptually in the cognitive and neurosciences, the course helps students understand the limitations of rational decision-making in politics and the centrality of emotion and identity. The paper presents a day-by-day recount of an approach to teaching political tolerance including an original survey that measures student political tolerance. The survey indicates that only 30% to 34% of the 69 Generation Z students completing the survey were politically intolerant using a variation of the “least preferred” approach. Additionally, the students were more tolerant of progressive speech, books, and teachers. The paper draws conclusions about teaching political tolerance to Generation Z students and includes suggestions for future research.

Keywords:

• Political tolerance
• Generation Z
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Elizabeth Olaoye for her excellent copyediting and thank you to the editors and anonymous reviewers. The data file for this research is available upon request.

Notes

1 The research was ruled exempt by the IRB at Idaho State University (proposal #IRBFY2021-25).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark K. McBeth

Mark K. McBeth is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Idaho State University. He conducts research on public policy theory, public administration, and public administration and political science pedagogy.