Guest Post by Karl Denninger
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.
If you’re fragile enough that being called a “bitch” or there’s a mouse in your apartment and this led you to call the cops, you’re not ready for college — or, for that matter, in any other way to be an adult. What the hell are you doing driving a car, renting a hotel room or even ordering food at a restaurant or drive-through?
I’ve noticed this incidentally; there’s a real issue among young people generally in that they’re seriously fragile in some very disturbing ways. This is a relatively-new thing as well; 20 years ago it was rare, today it’s common.
It would be nice to pretend that we can somehow cater to this but the real world doesn’t work that way and turning a college into an extension of a pre-school is going to do a lot of harm rather than help.
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