Cullen Hunt

Professor Cripps 

ENG 110B

11 September 2019

Project 1 Draft 1

College’s across the United States are making efforts to make their campuses’ and learning environments more friendly and accepting to all. These efforts are aimed towards making it so students are more willing to learn the material and grow off of what they learn in order to apply it to other aspects of their lives. However, a higher education where students are encouraged to grow is hard to achieve due to the efforts being imposed and the unwillingness of people to adapt to change. Lukianoff and Haidt, and Carol Dweck are all concerned with the improvement of education which engages everybody equally. In Carol Dweck’s’ TED talk “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve”, she addresses having different mentalities when trying to do work and what teachers can do to ‘help’. The main two concepts that Dweck introduces in her TED talk are a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. She means students will have a more positive attitude toward challenges and learning with a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset and giving up in the face of failure. Lukianoff and Haidt’s article “The Coddling of the American Mind”, both argue different perspectives on what truly is the best for achieving great academic skills and readiness for the professional world. Dweck, Haidt, and Lukianoff are all concerned with free speech and academic betterness, along with their own personal opinions about schools and campuses becoming too comforting to its’ students to a point in which academics are being affected. In response to the article and TED talk, I believe that a growth mindset is the solution to academic success in higher education.

What exactly is a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”? A fixed mindset is when a person is under too much stress that they tend to get frustrated and give up, they then make the situation worse by not applying and growing with their learning. As Carol Dweck says, “Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.” What she means by “yet” is her viewpoint of the way students should approach difficulties, instead of getting mad and quitting, thinking to himself/herself that eventually, or soon, or “not yet”, encourages them to keep going. Furthermore, when a student gets so frustrated they give up, they most likely think they feel like they don’t have to learn more because they already know enough or don’t need to know the information. A growth mindset is one in which a student could be working on a difficult assignment and think to themselves that they can do it and challenge themselves and push to do more and try harder. 

 Some of these issues consist of microaggressions and trigger warnings. Carol Dweck talks about two different mentalities students should have in school, and in many cases transfer these mentalities to real-life situations. As Lukianoff and Haidt say in their article, “Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless.” “The Coddling of American Mind” is about academic protectiveness. In this article, there are many different ways for teachers to improve their teaching and ways to make information learned in school more “appropriate” or “suitable” for those who are affected. According to Carol Dweck, there are two different mentalities when working, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and Lukianoff and Haidt’s article regarding trigger warnings and microaggressions all aim at a greater higher education. 

This is also seen in “The Coddling”, trigger warnings are alerts that educators are expected to change their curriculum and their style of teaching, that has worked for over 20 years, because the students are starting to get “triggered” over issues that shouldn’t be hidden from the public eye.” Trigger warnings are intended to warn people that sensitive content is coming. These terms are a very sensitive topic. Some people also feel as if trigger warnings were imposed everywhere then generations of weaker individuals will be raised into adulthood, being taught that everybody is going to be really friendly and respectful. The reality check when they are exposed to real-life would be detrimental to their mental state.

A very controversial subject, trigger warnings, have been increasingly becoming more of something that is a requirement and less of something that professors/presentations would portray if the content was offensive to the majority of the students. Leaving trigger warnings to the choice of the professor is a productive approach to learning in higher education because it focuses on the majority, and idolizes the sole purpose of being present, the education gained from the lesson. Regardless of the material, I feel as if everybody should be aware of the issues of this world. How will the issues be prevented if the issues cannot be mentioned because they are considered to be offensive? As Lukianoff and Haidt say in their article, “Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress.” Rape is a worldwide problem that affects millions of people per year. If this cannot be addressed in education than it will only become more of a problem.

A growth mindset is the solution to academic success in higher education. Attempting challenges with an open mind, growth mindset, and thinking that the task is doable will ensure better results. If students go into difficult situations with a fixed mindset telling themselves they “can’t do it”, then they will not perform to the best of their ability. Trigger warning and fixed mindsets are similar. If students expect instructors to protect them by shielding them from sensitive content than they are already doubting themselves. If more universities utilized the growth mindset, students would be more well-rounded and better prepared for future life and adulthood.