The times, they sure are a-changin’. To keep up, we have resorted to creating new words. Words like “safetyism.”
The term gained prominence in “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” published by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in 2018. The authors critique the belief that people, especially those in a school or university, must be shielded and protected from anything that might cause physical or emotional harm.
I have seen this term taken up by critics who believe any attention to safety is an overreaction by those who believe we must all be insulated from any pain. I’ve seen mocking critiques of padded children’s playground equipment, excessive school crossing guards and other means of minimizing — perhaps eliminating — pain.
These critiques have been extended to other areas of school and society. Lukianoff and Haidt themselves single out trigger warnings and safe spaces in universities as forms of protection that cultivate weakness. But I’ve also seen criticisms of the COVID era as illustrations of safetyism. Requiring vaccines for COVID-19 or measles makes us all snowflakes. Grade inflation makes lazy kids feel accomplished. I’m not sure if including anti-shooter personnel and secure doorways in schools would be regarded by these same critics as safetyist efforts to build a soft society.
Credit: Peter Smagorinsky
Credit: Peter Smagorinsky
These examples speak to physical security. They carry an emotional dimension as well. The confusion over how to respond to the pandemic surely caused a lot of fear and anxiety throughout schools. And schools, whether they have been sites for mass violence or not, have taken great measures to prevent a shooter from terrorizing their personnel and students. These new barriers are designed both to maintain safety and reduce apprehension. Are they therefore safetyist, and thus a factor in the decline of civilization?
In my own work I contend that, without obstacles to overcome, human development can’t proceed very far. In a recent AJC essay I illustrated this point with the fictional example in H.G. Wells’ novel “The Time Machine” of the Eloi, The coddled race who, far into the future, have no means of defending themselves. No pain, no gain; and maybe, down the road, lots of pain.
As a younger man I played and coached a lot of basketball, and lost a lot of games and got outplayed by better players and outcoached by better coaches. I felt the defeats forced me to learn and improve. Too much opposition, and development might stand still. But challenges of the right sort benefited my growth tremendously.
Another sort of safetyism has become a political battle: the issue of what books are appropriate for libraries and classrooms, all the way from kindergarten to graduate studies. The recent “anti-woke” movement has sought to eliminate books that include “divisive concepts” from curricula and classrooms, with teachers punished or fired for such violations as recommending, reading or referring favorably to books with LGBTQ+ characters, along with positive images of people of color and immigrants.
The term “homophobia” refers to not just the hatred of LGBTQ+ people, but also the fear of them. How do we protect children and youth from learning about human sexuality and gender identification, especially from outside the male-female binary? Ban the books, and maybe burn them, because we need to create a safe space that insulates them from learning about life trajectories that parents don’t want them to hear about.
The current administration’s insistence on a “patriotic” rather than “woke” curriculum is designed to protect K-12 students from unpleasant facts and unwelcome perspectives. A patriotic curriculum downplays or glosses over painful histories like the slave trade, the genocidal campaign against indigenous societies, violations of other governments’ rights to self-determination, and other painful episodes. This curriculum represents safetyist efforts to make us all feel good about being Americans.
It’s not just young kids who must be protected from dangerous ideas. On campuses, “divisive concepts” are now subject to political interventions and student protests. Speakers who violate orthodoxies of both liberals and conservatives must be prevented from speaking, or heckled if they make it to the podium. If we don’t like their ideas, they must be prevented from expressing them, lest we feel bad.
Accusations of safetyism tend to point the finger at the concerns of those we disagree with, while overlooking our own fragility in engaging with ideas that seem threatening to us. When we allow polarization to demean and oppose anything that doesn’t make us feel good, we stunt our own growth.
To me, that’s dangerous stuff.
Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at the University of Georgia, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame and a former co-editor of “Research in the Teaching of English.”
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