DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At Psychology Today, Pamela Paresky of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spots “Rebels Without a Clue — Some students blame Chelsea Clinton for NZ. Others demand fabric softener.”
Repeatedly pointing her finger inches from Chelsea Clinton’s chest, a young woman at NYU (sporting what appears to be a Bernie Sanders campaign tee shirt) lambastes the pregnant Clinton. “Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric that you put out there,” the young woman rages, referring, one assumes, to Clinton’s condemnation of antisemitic rhetoric. Onlookers snap their fingers. Clinton was on campus because she had been invited to participate in a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand massacre.
Twenty miles away at Sarah Lawrence College, students calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” staged a sit-in, claiming they planned to continue to occupy an administrative building “until an agreement is made with — and signed by — senior members of the Sarah Lawrence administration.”1 They have a twitter account (@TheDiaCoalition) and an Instagram account (@thediasporacoalition), and asked for donations “for food and resources.” Among the top three demands, “All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty and staff.2
Yes, that sounds ridiculous. But more concerning than their need for fabric softener is the fact that it is now de rigueur for students to make “demands” of college administrations, and for administrators to comply.
So how are SJW snowflakes created? By what the New York Times dubs “snowplow parents,” naturally enough: “How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. Today’s ‘snowplow parents’ keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries:”
Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.
Taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children in to elite colleges — and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.
Those are among the allegations in the recent college bribery scandal, in which 50 people were charged in a wide-ranging fraud to secure students admissions to colleges.
The text in bold is a pretty amazing moment, even for the New York Times:
In her practice, Dr. Levine said, she regularly sees college freshmen who “have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don’t have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college.”
One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room. Some didn’t like their roommates. Others said it was too much work, and they had never learned independent study skills. One didn’t like to eat food with sauce. Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce, calling friends before going to their houses for dinner. At college, she didn’t know how to cope with the cafeteria options — covered in sauce.
“Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they’re not,” Dr. Levine said.
Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from toddlers to avoid temper tantrums or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.
If children have never faced an obstacle, what happens when they get into the real world?
They become leftwing journalists and/or publishers? (QED: Sulzberger, Pinch.) Flashback: “The coddling of American journalism — The snowflakes aren’t melting as they get older and wiser. They now have jobs in publishing and media and are marching through the institutions they work for.”