The Art of Coping

The mood on campus this spring was grim. At Sarah Lawrence College—where I teach classical languages, literature, and history to undergraduates—many students appeared anxious, lonely, and depressed. Tuned in to social media and alarmed by contemporary political turmoil, they complained of insomnia and an inability to concentrate. Some seemed incapacitated by life’s ordinary, inevitable pains—a failed romantic relationship, the loss of a beloved pet, an arduous homework assignment. Some expressed hatred toward themselves and their own bodies. Sad and angry, many despaired of their future and that of the world. Inequities and atrocities both domestic and foreign can evoke an admirable commitment to social justice, but many undergraduates these days do not know how to work toward it. Feeling powerless, frustrated, and angry, they mistake vengeance for justice and venting for virtue. Adversity has left many students feeling helpless. They lack the tools to cope.

The American College Health Association reports that in 2023, 76 percent of college students “experienced moderate to serious psychological distress” and that 99 percent of students facing academic challenges say that pressures in the classroom “affect their mental health.” These are tumultuous times, and adolescence and young adulthood are difficult, stressful life stages. But in the nearly four decades that I have spent teaching, I have never seen anything approaching the current mental health crisis among young people.

We are experiencing a perfect storm. The pandemic cost students valuable in-person learning time and actual (nonvirtual) human contact. A few years later, digital engagement still dominates, as students click tirelessly through images, outsourcing their autonomy and agency to social media. Trained by these platforms to “like” or “dislike,” many young people have become accustomed to viewing Good and Evil as a simple binary. The reality of moral complexity leaves them feeling infuriated and distressed. Education should develop knowledge and understanding—essential coping skills—but elementary and high school instruction has failed to prepare students adequately in these areas, and those of us in higher education struggle to remedy the problem.

College and university administrators have come to see their role as striving to comfort customers rather than to educate young people to confront life’s challenges. Assessing four-year colleges, public and private, U.S. News & World Report detailed increases in funding for “academic support, student services and institutional support” between 2010 and 2021 and decreases in funding for instruction. The role of the humanities in higher education has diminished. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported a 24 percent drop in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities in 2022 as compared with 2012. Prioritizing monetary returns for themselves and their “customers,” administrators hire more administrators, fund STEM programs, and gut humanities programs while scrambling to provide ever more professionals to address the mental health crisis.

As a classicist, I find this situation both tragic and ironic. We are systematically depriving students of the tools developed over centuries for coping with conflict, catastrophe, and existential angst. And then we are surprised at the uptick in anxiety and despair. Of course, young people are anxious and depressed. Human existence is difficult. And tragic. We all suffer. We all die. Political, economic, and environmental disasters threaten. Always. These facts would be incapacitating—if not for the humanities.

Many of today’s undergraduates, as it happens, have little access to the humanities. Though urged relentlessly to focus on their mental health, many students lack the ability to focus at all. They might find respite from anxiety and despair by reading books, but most have not read many and would prefer not to. Intellectual challenges prompt anxiety, even fear. Tasked with reading a lengthy, densely packed work of literature or writing an essay assessing their own reaction to it, many students would, well, rather not. Since sustained, focused reading does not form part of their experience, many undergraduates find literature intimidating, sometimes impenetrable.

In part a consequence of longstanding trends in elementary education, functional illiteracy remains prevalent, even at “elite” colleges and universities like Sarah Lawrence. For several decades, too many elementary schools have taught reading via ineffective and recently discredited approaches. In 2019, journalist Emily Hanford reported on the “three-cueing system,” vigorously promulgated for more than 40 years by Lucy Calkins at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, a respected training program for aspiring educators. First introduced in 1967, this system eventually gained currency in as many as a quarter of American elementary schools. According to Hanford, elementary school teachers decided that “teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.” Instead, readers were encouraged to draw on “semantic/meaning cues” (asking themselves, “Does it make sense?”), “syntactic/sentence structure cues” (asking themselves, “Does it sound right?”), and “graphic/visual cues (letters)” (asking themselves, “Does it look right?”).

Teachers instructed students to identify the first few letters of a word and then guess the rest, or to try to guess at the meanings of words by looking at the pictures. Good readers, however, do not guess. They look at every letter. They just do it quickly. Unable to “sound out” every letter phonetically, failing even to look at all the letters, a student will have difficulty distinguishing expect from expert, irreplaceable from irredeemable. By guessing at the meanings of words, a reader never gets that jolt of satisfaction and pleasure, that “aha!” moment that comes from sounding out a difficult word, putting the letters together, deriving meaning from a sentence.

By 2000, cognitive scientists understood that the three-cueing system contradicted the research on reading. Hanford cites David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland, who explains that the system does not merely cultivate in students the habits of poor readers, it impedes their ability to read at all. And yet, the cueing system pedagogy remained fashionable among educators long after cognitive scientists recognized its folly. Still taught during the pandemic, the system adversely affected not only the current generation of undergraduates but also the next.