This article is from the WeChat public account: Cultural aspect (whzh_21bcr) < / span> , author: Tian Lei, Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Children of the new middle class-reading “The Secret American Mind”

“Therefore, the heaven will descend to the people of Sri Lanka, and they must first suffer their minds, strain their bones, starve their skin, empty their bodies, and disturb their actions, so they must be patient, and Zeng Yiqi cannot. . “This summer, when translating a new American book in 2018, I encountered this long-lost famous quote by Master Mencius.

This book is called “The Spoiled American Mind”, which was published at Penguin Press last September. Popular English best-selling books often have a routine when they are named. After the main title is pretending to be amazing, it is often There will be a long subtitle, and this book is no exception. Its subtitle is literally translated as “good intentions and misunderstandings are creating a failed generation.” Such a Chinese expression is too heavy and inspired by meditation. Now, I now translate it as: “Why isn’t ‘steel’ made?”

From beginning to end, the entire book focuses on the current elite young people in the United States, and constantly asks them what happened. Why did the arrogant sons in the famous Ivy League schools become the “broken down” generation? How did you get here today? Is there still tomorrow? But in the introduction of the first chapter of the book, Mencius’s ancient training more than two thousand years ago was shocked.

What’s even more amazing is that this passage in the Warring States Period, “Happy years are hard for life, and fierce years can’t help but die.” The finishing touch. This shows that the life experience of “born in sorrow and died in peace” is not outdated, but we must advance with the timesIn the context of the new era, seek new ideas of the ancient teachings, understand our current situation from the classics, and smash the door of the classics to evoke ourselves behind the door.

The birth of a book has a story behind it. “The Spoiled American Mind” is a co-author of two authors. The first author is Lukinov, an expert on free speech. He mentioned that he was a patient with severe depression and was on the verge of suicide several times. Heidi, a professor of psychology at New York University, has authored a number of books on American socio-political psychology, and has a large number of readers in Chinese and Chinese. This 2018 book was born out of the co-authored article of the two in 2015 and was published in the Atlantic Monthly in August of that year. After the article went live, it became a hit on social media and ranked among the top five most-read history in the Atlantic Monthly website. A few weeks later, President Barack Obama also mentioned this article in his speech, saying that young college students should not be “coddled, Be protected from different perspectives. ”

“The Secret American Mind” authors Lukinov and Heidi

After publication, the observations and judgments in the article have also been verified by the historical process. The so-called “good, bad, bad spirit”, the decline of American campuses is even faster, worse, More thoroughly. In 2016, Trump was elected as President under the eyes of the world, making the author sigh that this is a year of vision in political history; through social media mobilization, identity and political storms have risen, and social protests have come one after another; on the campus, the anger of young students was immediately triggered and smashed Become commonplace, the school blindly indulged, the size of ivy, could not accommodate a quiet desk, so the two authors continued to work together, from Wen Chengshu, launched in the fall of 2018 when the school began Spoiled American Mind.

From this book, we can cut into the anxiety and anger of the new generation of American elite youths, open their spiritual scrolls, understand the current state of mind of all classes in American society, and track the spiritual changes in the course of history.

New young people come to the Ivy Campus

U.S. law school criminal law professors are no longer able to teach rape in class, because students are always protesting, and even complaining through the teaching evaluation system, on the grounds that course materials about sexual assault can trigger uneasiness and even evoke certain The childhood trauma of some classmates. “In teaching the law on rape, organizing students to discuss, challenge, and challenge dissenting opinions has become difficult.” In 2014, Professor Gesen of Harvard Law School wrote in The New Yorker. In this article entitled “The Trouble of Teaching Rape,” the first Asian female tenured professor in Harvard Law School history wrote: “Imagine a medical student who will become a surgeon in the future. But when he was studying, he was worried that he would become depressed by seeing or encountering blood. What should his instructor do at this time? Criminal law professors are now facing similar problems, and law school students are afraid to learn rape. “

Another, in 2015, four undergraduates from Columbia University wrote in the school newspaper, aiming at a compulsory general course “Western Literature and Philosophical Classics” in the school. The article claims that Western traditional classics are “full of history and narratives with themes of exclusion and oppression.” Many students are psychologically traumatized after reading course materials, which “will lead to the marginalization of certain student identities in the classroom.” In order to protect these vulnerable young people, the “trigger warning” mechanism came into being: as the name suggests, as long as the course materials are likely to “trigger” the students’ emotions, the professor is obliged to give advance warning to remind children that there is danger ahead .

What happened to the youth of the elite universities in the United States, why is it always a weak look, can no longer be the sun or the future master at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, but has become a “discarded youth” or a “giant baby” who is easily injured “? This is a question that the Pampered American Mind asks and tries to answer. Lukinov was a public-minded public who was committed to free speech on campus, but he couldn’t understand this youth. Throughout American history, college students have always fought for freedom of speech and are progressive young people. However, in recent years, they have frequently requested the school to cancel the speech arrangement on the grounds of emotional safety. Consumers are always right, and the result is always the school Concessions and protests against students dismissing ideas they disagree from the campus are inaudible.

Heidi has made great achievements in the field of social psychology, especially good at professional public writing. As a university professor, he also sees that students are more delicate every year, even showing A “Vulnerable Student” model. Originally thought that it was only two or three new things in the sun, but in just three or five years, whether this year’s young people have transformed the model into a failed generation has become a serious question.

Simplified problem solvingIs also a summary of the content of the entire book: The so-called “pampering” of the mind is, in the author’s opinion, the consequence of the “overprotection” of parents, schools, and society. The bad thing is that because they mistakenly believe that their lives are fragile, and they believe that the dangers are everywhere on the road to growth, the way of parenting is to protect the children from airtightness. Especially for middle-class and above American families, parents who have attended college will naturally follow a carefully cultivated education route. In a highly competitive unequal society, performance-based resource allocation models occupy almost all social areas and stock their children. I dare not think about it.

After quoting Mencius’s ancient training, the author immediately told a story about peanut allergies: In order to protect children and keep them away from allergens, American kindergartens banned nut foods from entering campus, but after a generation, they suffered from The proportion of children with peanut allergies has increased significantly. The reason is very simple. The human body’s immune system needs to be stimulated with a small amount of dose to get exercise. It is easier to be allergic to peanuts because it has not been exposed to peanuts since childhood. Peanut allergy is just one example, it demonstrates the author’s “problems caused by progress” in the book, why progress can cause problems. Here may wish to brain supplement Yuan Longping’s emoticon pack that is popular in the Chinese Internet world: “The biggest mistake in my life is to make you eat too full.” Of course, fullness is the biggest improvement, but it also makes us lose our “hungry body” Skin “exercise opportunities.

Protection is necessary, but everything must not be overdone. Human beings have not lived long enough, and being born in Anle may have deprived us of opportunities to develop certain abilities. In the age of worry-free food and clothing, the careful cultivation of middle-class parents can easily become overprotective, forgetting that children are anti-fragile in their nature. Faced with the wind and waves in life, are the children a candle that blows out as soon as the wind blows, or a flame that takes advantage of the wind? The attitude of the “anti-fragile” doctrine is very clear. We cannot turn our children into candles. “You want to be the fire, longing for the wind.”

In the past, children ’s classic books were all kinds of “adventures”: get rid of adult care, make friends on the wandering alone, solve problems, grow knowledge, and upgrade monsters. In this childhood culture, “danger” is to “explore” or “calendar”, and after exercise is to grow. Now it’s securityism, and the book mentions “Facebook” (Facebook) , such as “Children should be damned in the 70s “Eight Reasons for Light” is to use the title party to ridicule today’s parenting of children.

The university also counseled. Hannah Holborn Gray, President of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993 (I have also been the Dean of Yale University before, and briefly acted as the principal) , is the first female principal of both male and female universities in American history. When it comes to education, she has a famous saying: “Education, in its original meaning, is not to make students feel comfortable; it is meant to teach students how to think.” Learning is never trivial. The expression of happy education itself is Containing irreconcilable contradictions is difficult to establish. But now it is a company run a university, the capitalist model manages scientific research, and the logic of administrative management must first be exempt from responsibility. As a consumer of higher education, students are always right. Hedonistic learning has become the trend of the times.

The book points out that in recent years, American universities ’spending on living facilities has greatly increased, far exceeding the increase in investment in research and teaching. Many schools are no longer academic monasteries, but have become luxurious “country clubs”. Securityism comes into play. Some professors have even invented and continuously promoted the concept of “micro-aggression”, interpreted the inevitable friction or collision in daily life as the violation of others, and instigated young students to speculate on the people and things around them with the greatest malicious intent. The problem is that when you put on the “micro-aggression” glasses, you will find that this kind of violation follows, and securityism is a self-fulfilling prophecy in this sense.

It was precisely because the campus was in danger, that the school began to build a “safe house” with great fanfare, specially set up a space, equipped with professionals, painted the walls pink, put desserts and toys inside, and played soothing music … … From the author’s point of view, these recent new tricks are not the progress of education at all, but the degradation of the university. The author quotes a quote from the American progressive celebrity Van Jones to the youth, which is very exciting:

I don’t want you to be ideologically smooth, and I don’t wish you emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I will not pave the way for you, paving the way. Get ready to learn how to deal with adversity. When you are tempered, I’m never prepared to bear all of your load; that’s what the training ground is all about. This is the training ground.

Growing up in the age of social media

With “JiaoAs the material, can we profile the contemporary youth’s life silhouettes, merge their generations’ resumes from their common growth experience, and trace back to the common historical processes of individual growth and overlap with each other? Further reflection: Is this generation of young people the first generation of “pampering”? Since then, pampering has been the normal operation. Instead, we use “pampering” to label the younger generation here. What about reflective ageing bias? Furthermore, the author is concerned about American youth, but in their background of growth, can we distinguish which are unique to the United States and which are common in the West, and whether we can use the American stories in the book to look at ourselves ?

Trump took office in 2017. In the same year, millennial babies born in 2000 began entering college. How to give this American college student a place in social structure and intergenerational genealogy? According to Putnam’s research in “Our Children,” American elite higher education, as a scarce social resource, cannot be used as a channel for social mobility, but instead becomes a society. Layering and even identity solidification tools. Therefore, the young Americans who attended college this year, although they had children in the cold, were mostly middle-class children. They are often not the first generation of college students in the family, their parents and even their ancestors have received higher education, and middle-class parents follow a carefully cultivated parenting approach. Under the supervision of Tiger Mom and Dad, as pointed out in the book, most of them have a “test-ready childhood”. They joined the ranks of “recruitment arms race” early, and stood out among their peers. And become “excellent sheep.”

The elite higher education in the United States is strengthening the solidification of social classes

Ms. Julie Hems, who has been the dean of Stanford Freshman College for many years, has published “How to Make Children Adults and Adults?” “This best-selling book in the United States. When talking with the author of the book, she said, “Suppose this is a math class. If a child can’t get an ‘A’ in a sixth-grade math class, it means that they are left behind and cannot enter after middle school. The first square of mathematics, and that means they ca n’t get inStanford University. “

The book mentioned New York female writer Lenor Skanaz multiple times and was awarded the title of “Most Vicious Mother in the United States” for promoting the “Stocking of Children” campaign. She also told the author that American parents “experience With two fears, one is that their children will be kidnapped, and the other is that they will not be able to enter Harvard. “” If something is not 100% safe, it is completely dangerous. ”

From the perspective, Professor Cai Meier used the “Tiger Mom” ​​theory to provoke the dispute between Chinese and Western cultures in a way that blurred the focus of the problem and the difference in parenting methods. Although the factors of cultural heritage are unavoidable, but In the final analysis lies in the distinction of parental status. Recently, there have been multiple country comparative studies that include long-term history. When a society is in the historical cycle of increasing inequality, elite parents will choose to increase their investment in children’s education in order to respond to a highly competitive A market society and an uncertain future.

Sociologists define 1995 as the starting point of the Internet generation. According to this stage, today’s college students belong to the “Internet generation”. They are born of the Internet and are the aborigines of the Internet world. They can put the Internet in their adolescence in.

Assuming John was born in 1995, and in 2006, when he was 11 years old, Facebook made a major change: Previously, registrants had to prove that they were college students, and now, any Children who claim to be 13 years or older can sign up for social networking sites. Another year later, when John was 12 years old, the iPhone came out. Five years after that, smartphones and social media sprung up: “Twitter” (Twitter, 2006) ,” Tombole “ (Tumblr, 2007) ,” Photo Wall “ (Instagram, 2010) , “Salad” (Snapchat, 2011) . In 2013, 18-year-old John entered the university. By the fall of 2016, when Trump won the presidential election, the four-year university in the United States had just completed the intergenerational rotation, which was composed of children of the Internet generation.

The author points out in the book that almost the same period, accurately speaking the time of 2011At the inflection point, the psychological condition of American college students, with anxiety, depression, and suicide as indicators, experienced a large-scale deterioration, and securityism suddenly came to campus. In other words, from the generation of the Internet to the university, to the upsurge of campus politics, the relevance is clear at a glance. Is there a causal mechanism behind it? Specifically, does the Internet, smartphones and social media cause, catalyze, or aggravate youth Psychological problems? The author quotes a lot of social science research in the book and gives a positive answer.

The author briefly repeats it here. The first is that big data makes it possible to tailor information, and social media has been designed to follow the social habits of people. Young people think that surfing the Internet is free, but this “freedom” is everywhere in the “information cocoon” or “filter bubbles”. The network information seems to be a lot of chaos and one-click access, but it is difficult to escape the “invisible hand” of the algorithm. Since you can’t access the opinions and positions that may sting yourself, you will believe that you are always correct. . The cultural civil war is not only the growth background of this generation of children, but also constitutes their daily but unconscious lifestyle, so political polarization, “exposing culture”, and “micro-aggression” came into being.

Secondly, social media has transformed the “three views” of teenage users, and it is not limited to psychological ways, and even deeper at the physiological level. As the author puts it, “The emergence of social media is arguably the greatest weapon for interpersonal relationship violations since humans invented the language.” From the beginning, social media has been changing the social relationships around us all the time. Projected on the Internet platform, our “life” has beauty and filters. Although in some ways we strengthen our contacts, social media also often makes us more lonely, always worried about being out of group, or afraid of “missing” What researchers call the “forgotten fear” has always plagued us. Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to injuries due to hidden isolation and social comparisons on social networking sites. “After smartphones and social media are at your fingertips, injured people only need to move their fingers, but injured people are often difficult to fly”, we can also see the horrors in the cyber abuse incidents in recent years.

In terms of business and social media, the design of social media, as stated by the first CEO of Facebook, is to “maximize the time and attention of users” and “must give you a little dopamine stimulation from time to time” Use likes and comments to induce a more glamorous life show, “essentially a feedback loop of social confirmation”, “only God knows what this will cause to our children’s brain.” In a nutshell, the conclusion is that the longer the screen is used as a child, the more likely it is that adolescents will suffer from psychological problems.

The freedom to surf the web is everywhere in the “information cocoon” or “filter bubbles”

In the process of translating this book and writing this article, I have been thinking about a question, this book about the United States, what can give us inspiration or warning. Can the youth problem and its context in the United States constitute a mirror of our own, and what can we see in this “mirror”? Whether the United States is a case study of the past, thus exposing the possible damage to youth growth of a highly developed individualist and capitalist society, let us find problems earlier, stimulate discussion, build consensus, and contribute before it is too late Program?

Answering these questions is neither what this article can do nor the translator’s internal affairs. However, the original purpose of translating this book was to respond to my own anxiety and confusion. As a teacher for children of the same age in and outside the classroom, I am also a parent. I can especially feel the problems of education in the daily life. The burden of carrying not only consumes the economic resources of middle-class families, but also gathers the attention of the entire society at any time. China and the United States have different national conditions, but there are many specific similarities: the anxiety of parents, the marketization of school running, the prevalence of the so-called quality education concept, the full appropriation of social media, including the spread of inequality and the social life falling into some class isolation. .

I hope that the “Spiritual American Mind” can arouse our attention to youth issues in another way. Not only are they the masters of the future, but for the moment, understanding the young people in a society is also a recognition of this social order A key to composition and the changing times.

This article is from the WeChat public account: cultural aspect (whzh_21bcr) , Author: Tian Lei