Sticks and Stones…: Embracing Discomfort to Enhance Learning

Abstract

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Lukianoff and Haidt contend that an atmosphere of “safetyism” threatens the university’s ability to serve as an arena for free speech and academic freedom. In this paper, we examine their thinking through one professor’s uncomfortable experience with graduate students over the question of using gendered personal pronouns in scholarly writing. How the students responded to the professor’s apparent insensitivity provides the grist for a larger conversation about how best to create a welcoming and trusting environment for engaging in provocative conversations in the college classroom. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of the “principle of charity,” encouraging students and professors alike to seek out challenges to their long-held views, freeing themselves from their confirmation biases, and looking for nuance rather than seeing the world through a simplistic us-versus-them mentality.

Keywords:

• Call out culture
• critical thinking
• free speech
• polticial correctness

View responses to this article:

…But Words Can and Do Hurt: A Rejoinder to “Sticks and Stones…”