My summer psychology course is discussing the following prompt from the teacher:
"A survey among college students indicated that 80% of male assailants and 70% of female victims were drinking before sexual assaults. In another survey of almost 90,000 students, researchers learned that alcohol or drugs were involved in 79% of unwanted sexual intercourse experiences. The fact is that most college students don't believe they have an alcohol problem, but they, on average, drink more alcohol than their non-student peers and many meet the criteria for alcohol abuse. What are three to five ideas you would propose for conducting a specific alcohol education program that would impact the college student and stop alcohol abuse?"
I responded as such:
An Impaired Worldview, Nursing It Today, Healing It Tomorrow
There needs to be a three-pronged focus here. We need to first understand the mentality that is going on when college students everywhere allow themselves to succumb to this depressant, then we need to deal with this situation as it is, and finally we need to deal with the future of this situation. We needs to implement certain tricks and rules that will help tend to the wounds of alcoholism in colleges today while simultaneously driving home a future oriented call for discernment and wisdom.
1. To deal with this situation as a whole, we need to understand the mentality behind it. I believe a quote from Dane Cook says something like, "Enjoy it now because after college it's called alcoholism." There is this idea floating around that we as students have to "live it up." We have to be outrageous and we have to out-do each other's outrageous-ness. It is due to us. Why? Because we have worked off the shackles and chains that the parents put on us and now, we must alter our minds with the power and strength of our god-like elixirs. Why am I so extreme? Why so seemingly melodramatic and expressive? First, I'm optimistic. I want the world to change and change big. I believe that real change is impossible until we change the little things. So the seemingly little things must receive all their due drama so that we may know them to be the because hazards that they truly are. And second, I know too many friends who've been specifically hurt by their own alcohol abuses. So we must see alcohol as students have chosen to see it, then we can change the errors in the view as students have chosen to accept it. Author, JF Baldwin explains that a worldview is like a pair of eyeglasses, the smudges on the glasses are unrealized, and then those smudged glasses put us in a greater plight than the blind man. For we think we seen things clearly when in reality our vision is severely distorted. The average college students has some filthy eyeglasses on when it comes to alcohol. And we must recognize that impaired worldview as the culprit for all those impaired drunks.
2. To deal with the situation right now, we can do all that we know to do in order to teach college students (already much too much like "old dogs") how to make wiser decisions ("new tricks" which in the end are much more akin to old tricks, only we've forgotten them and the world has become a place where we think we need to reinvent the old tricks). So we punish, we expel, we deny, we refuse, and we beware. We finds ways to put light into the dark, because only in the dark do cockroaches find refuge. And we all, yes all, make a stand and work ardently to bring the dark to light. Then when need be, we praise, we reward, we congratulate, we welcome, and we celebrate. We make the light a desired place to be. We find ways to make alcohol abuse look wretched compared to life outside of alcohol abuse. We know how these things may be done, but we often fail to implement these charges. Rules, laws, regulations. Punishment, fines, humiliation. And rewards, acclamations, success. This is how we deal with the problems now. And in all these efforts, we do what is possible to teach discernment.
3. To deal with this situation (and others like it as well) for the future, we teach our children discernment. Spurgeon once said that "Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wring; rather it is telling the difference between right and ALMOST right." We must recognize the power of this in all of life and know that this is how we are to form an intelligent and wise worldview for ourselves. In addition to teaching our children about the fears and failures of alcohol, we should teach the the ability to think. It's not just about WHAT we should think, but rather HOW we are to think. At any given moment, we all find cause to deny what we believe to know for we can justify our problems away. My close friend did so, and now she is part of the statistics; she got drunk and slept with a guy, which, in her better judgement, she NEVER would have done. She hates it. She never got an STD or birthed a child; but despite being taught those fears and denying the things she was taught to think, she hates what happened to her. She was able to deny the things she was taught to think. Yet if she was taught how to think, although she might fail at some point, she would have the discernment to make wise choices. We all lack discernment at times. But in this case, we cannot afford to make an error. And since we cannot afford to pay these faults, our college students everywhere are constantly living in debt.
I just hope that this response will be enough for my modern-minded, revolution-loving, truth-despairing teacher.
