...
Then again, I also largely (but not totally) see trigger warnings as unhelpful, safe spaces as unhelpful, etc...
Whilst these things are clearly done with good intentions, their long term impact doesn't seem healthy at a macro level to me.
Okay, I can answer that.
Now remember this. This is neither true nor false. I am playing with different cognitive/mental/social models of good and bad.
There are several factors.
The first one is the doxa of a common folk belief, namely that other people are bad, think/have bad beliefs and do bad behavior.
Read Lawrence Kohlberg's cognitive model of morality as related to morality.
So here is what can happen as per healthy versus unhealthy.
And I will use myself.
I have an unreflected model of good/bad and I will make it simple. Poor people are bad, because in the end they are lazy and it is their own fault, because they don't pull themselves together.
Now I change sub-culture and replaces it with another model. Poor people are always repressed as the only factor and if the evil, rich people were removed, all our problems would be gone.
Both those models are unhealthy, because they are over-reductive or cases of greedy reductionism, likely a case of special pleading and likely involves the nirvana fallacy.
So what is it, that is the ideal of education? Well, I will use myself as an example. I am supposed to have a lot of theories/models/tools for any context, for which I as a former civil servant in an auxiliary role as a "fixer" in an education institution for the "opposite" of the "bright" students had to know the basics for the law as relevant, the formal side of education, the social side of education, the psychology of learning and a **** load of other theories/models for which to account for the following.
What relevant macro factors are at play for the objective, the intersubjective and the individual subjective?
What local culture/institutional factors are at play for the same 3 factors?
What is at the micro level the factors as for me and the other human/humans for the same 3 factors.
What is that for the words for factors of time and other physical resources at play, the social factors of authority, privilege, norms as both formal and informal, power relations as both equal and asymmetrical?
What is both in me and the other human/humans the actual abilities as formal intelligence, social intelligence and the relevant schemata?
That is the ideal of education for a fixer like me. And here is the conditioning of someone like me for the ideal of being a local fixer, i.e. a cog in the machinery in the world in a local culture as a local fixer.
For any sufficiently complex plan and that is the human condition at certain *UBAR moments, the plan breaks down as it get in contact with the rest of reality, for which if I am involved as a "fixer/grunt in both military or civilian sense", I had the duty if I survived and was still functional to take stock of the local situation and act.
There is even more to being a fixer, but here it is for trigger words, safe zones and culture and to much education.
In culture if not in too much stress, that culture is a safe zone for the most of the time for most of the normal people. I.e. they are sufficiently adapted for nature and nurture to function without being triggered for their norms.
So here it is for the normal versus my kind. Some of them trigger me sometimes because in effect they are normal and I am not for which I am irrelevant and I am not allowed to unmask and challenge their safe zone of normal.
But they are allowed to trigger me, because I am not normal and I am not allowed to have a safe zone, because I am not relevant as not normal.
Yeah, that is the joke of safe zones for a non-normal like me. Some people as normal don't know that they are lucky in that they are in their safe zone, but they will point out that I am not allowed to challenge that, because they are normal and I am not.
The joke is that they have no evidence for that with objective reason, logic and evidence, but I am not supposed to trigger them and challenge their safe zone of normal.
And here is the joke for education. Since I am a bright student I have learned to learn on my own, because that is what bright students do.
I always check the books/Internet for relevant academic explanation and in general I am bright enough that I get the patterns of the local part of reality.
My biggest disorder is that I seek patterns for regular and variations, for which normal people adapt to them and function good enough.
So again for your words.
"Then again, I also largely (but not totally) see trigger warnings as unhelpful, safe spaces as unhelpful, etc...
Whilst these things are clearly done with good intentions, their long term impact doesn't seem healthy at a macro level to me."
Well, it depends if that safe zone is healthy or not, but that depends on the educational understanding of normal. And that applies to all of us, including you and I.
