TRY
ChrisLee
a.docxBrian Wagner
The social climate of the world is ever changing. It is dynamic and explosive and it takes one with a certain kind of mental fortitude to understand and comprehend all opinions with little bias. Colleges are places that allow us to earn that ability to put ourselves into a crucible and emerge as people capable of understanding the arguments of others no matter how heinous and different from our own opinions they are. Yet, we live in an era where those who feel a certain opinion is too offensive, that people should be shielded from it, even in intellectual institutions.
Therefore, they created safe spaces in colleges, universities, and schools. The use of safe spaces in places of higher education directly inhibits students from learning. We are here to look for the truth, as adults we should be able to handle uncomfortable information no matter if we agree or disagree with it, and we should not place an expectation on the institution to deal with sensitive topics since it is our personal duty to know what we are comfortable with and push ourselves accordingly. In this essay I’ll portray why these safe spaces really do inhibit our education.
The Truth is a difficult thing to understand as it is an all-encompassing concept. In the early advents of education, men like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates used their methods to determine the truth of the world. The truth in its most basic sense for the purpose of this essay help answer the big questions such as “Who are we?”, “Where are we going?”, “What happens after death?” and etc. We use this methods now and while our knowledge has divulged as a species and we have learned so many new things we haven’t stopped looking for the Truth. A very important part of finding the Truth is debate and argument as this refines our knowledge and opens us up to new opinions regarding all kinds of world views and ideas. The construction of safe spaces though takes students put of those debates and hides them behind shields political correctness and kind words.
Students should not need to be coddled on their quest for the Truth as they should have known what risks should come with having a higher education. In an article written by Kristi Smith, a LEARN Fellow working on teaching support, stated “Just because your students trust you doesn’t mean they are going to trust anyone else in your classroom. And to truly grow, they are going to need to take emotional and intellectual risks in front that group.” And while you can see that she does agree with the use of safe spaces, isn’t there an inherent problem with that thought? Students should see the necessity of taking emotional and intellectual risks in college. Those risks are what pushes us closer to the Truth. Students shouldn’t be given the free pass to avoid that interaction. It only slows their individual education, and our search as a species for the truth as a whole.
College students are treated as adults, we can drive, we can vote and we can be drafted into the military. Therefore we should act like adults. Being able to handle tough information is an incredibly useful skill that as college students we must foster and grow. Life is not easy, there aren’t happy events and sometimes we need to talk about the hard things so that we can learn and grow. Adulthood is a new time, where we must accept the shortcomings of the world. As a child we learned to be kind to others, not to prejudge, and love one another. Yet, that simply isn’t the case in our world. Life isn’t that simple. People have their own agenda, people can be cruel, people can do awful things, and people can believe in awful things. We as adults must move above and beyond the dogma of childhood as while innocent, it is not the true world. There will be those who seek to oppose what you believe and those who go against the common morals you might have been taught.
We as college students have the special position of having an infinite amount of information at our disposal, as well as some of the most incredible academics of the world teaching our courses. As adults we must use what we have been given, we have the opportunity and it is an insult to the world to not use it. Most of us live in a world where we can speak our minds and not fear the repercussions, where we can love who we want and not fear the hate, or where we can believe what we want and not fear others. That kind of privilege gives us an opportunity as adults that we must use to the greatest advantage. By using these safe spaces it throws down that opportunity and tarnishes it as those who utilize them in most cases are actively trying to run away from the real problems of the world that you have been given the opportunity to have the power to dispel.
With all this opportunity to begin with we should not put the expectations of handling what is good to be said in a college classroom setting on the professors and their leaders. Their job is to educate us to the best of their ability. Not to decide what is right and wrong for us to learn and/or speak about. We go to these masters of their own respective arts and seek tutelage and guidance, not rules on what is good concerning speaking topics and not to insult others with our academic quandaries. In the case of University of Chicago, they decided to tell their incoming freshmen that safe spaces will not be used, along with trigger warnings. In an article on The Atlantic website written by Oliver Bateman, he references what has been going on with the announcement by the University of Chicago. He talks about how this could be linked to certain political climates in the area along with the possible biases of donors to the school looking for a more conservative approach to learning. Yet these all are more or less pings for a society that is very heavy on political views do to the coming election. What is important about this article is a statement about what the college is able to do in regards to the education of their students. Bateman quotes a Professor Nathan Zimmerman in saying “The students I teach pay tuition to the university so that I can provide a specific service—coding skills—and in the context of my class, there’s a financial imperative for them to acquire these valuable skills that perhaps diminishes the sort of conflict you’d see in humanities courses.” While yes, in these science courses one isn’t necessarily looking for the solace of safe spaces as often but differing views are always on the way. Who isn’t to say that the growing use of safe spaces is not just for the deep issues of humanities courses such as philosophy and theology, but it expands into the fact based ideas of science courses where just because one feels that a theory they believe is threatened, they feel the need for a safe space to run from the possible eventuality. The University of Chicago has the right idea when it comes to how they treat, respect, and push their students to overcome the world political climate at this time. Safe Spaces aren’t really safe they are just an imaginary world were one can feel safe and deny what is really going on, and in college and higher learning there is no place for that.
