Friday, November 27, 2015

Must read! Chilling!-----The Yale Problem Begins in High School

The Yale Problem Begins in High School | HeterodoxAcademy.org:
"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.
After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. 
I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk.
But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.
After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer.
And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand.
 Not a single girl came up to me afterward.
...And then… they go off to college and learn new ways to gain status by expressing collective anger at those who disagree. 
They curse professors and spit on visiting speakers at Yale. 
They shut down newspapers at Wesleyan. They torment a dean who was trying to help them at Claremont McKenna. 
They threaten and torment fellow students at Dartmouth. 
And in all cases, they demand that adults in power DO SOMETHING to punish those whose words and views offend them. 
Their high schools have thoroughly socialized them into what sociologists call victimhood culture, which weakens students by turning them into “moral dependents” who cannot deal with problems on their own. 
They must get adult authorities to validate their victim status..."
VERY scary! Read it all!

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