by Robert Rue—
“…we’ve got a new generation coming along that’s going to have to punch through a lot of illusions, false teaching—bad ideas—and ultimately find their way to solid ground.”
-Walter Russell Mead, Honestly Podcast
I begin my Theories of Truth and Fairness class by telling students that humans never directly experience more than a tiny fraction of the reality that shapes our lives. To gain some sense of the rest of reality, we too often act like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory, chained down and staring at (media-created) shadows on the wall. Unfortunately, those shadows can be curated to create biases, illusions, half-truths and outright lies.
But we can choose to see and understand more of reality, and it seems to me that, in the humanities especially, schools should help with this unchaining, give students a tour of the world outside the cave and follow up, not with facile or teacher-preferred analyses, but with some well-chosen questions.
For thinking to begin, we have to see more. We have to want to see more.
The problem is, our evolved brains are much more comfortable with narrative, a proxy for thinking, than with thinking itself. We would much rather be presented with a pattern and then pointed to all the examples that confirm it. Finding more of those examples and plugging them into a story of sweeping scope feels like being smart. But this process of narrativizing leads us to ignore, even deny, the aspects of reality that don’t fit the story. This kind of “clarity” feels good, but it quickly leads to unwarranted confidence about how the world works. Inevitably, it spawns bad ideas and “solutions” to problems that make things worse.
Seeing more starts with critical self-examination.
We can and should teach students that human brains, left to their automated devices, will often choose not to see reality but to see instead a version of it that is personally advantageous. Research tells us that we often take moral stances not because they are logical but because of the social bonds we can strengthen by taking them. Simply put, we feel more secure in like-minded groups, and the seeking of such security leads to curated perception and feedback loops. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in The Righteous Mind, “Moral talk serves a variety of strategic purposes such as managing your reputation, building alliances and recruiting bystanders to support your side… We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments” (Haidt, 55).
So, to push against this tendency, we can ask students (and ourselves) to:
- Actively seek the views of those who disagree with you.
- Steel-man (not straw-man) those views.
- Think about what social benefits you’re gaining by taking the stance you’ve chosen and if those benefits—not an interest in truth—are driving your conclusions.
- Think not just about the direct consequences of implementing a favored idea but the consequences of the consequences (second-order thinking).
- Question the sacred. Know and name the things it rules out of bounds and ask why.
- Re-see. Go through a process of looking, walking away, and then looking again at relevant information.
- In that process of re-seeing, acknowledge doubts and contradictions. Add caveats to your original thinking or revise it entirely.
- Value changing your mind at least as much as much as defending your beliefs.
Unfortunately, I think many trends in education are pushing students and educators in the opposite direction of these eight habits of mind. With good but misguided intentions, we are sanctifying first reactions, sensitivities, “personal truths” and ideological (narrative) visions. All of these things are human and worth respecting for what they are, but they need not be sanctified.
So maybe you think that this way of teaching critical thinking is pure pie-in-the-sky. It’s too complicated for students. Too high-minded. It will just activate the students’ ideological defenses. Someone is going to get canceled in this process.
And yet here’s what the students say in anonymous surveys:
“I noticed how my opinions changed, got nuanced, and how I was digging deeper to support my opinions and prove my points. I also noticed that I would seriously consider why I disagreed with a certain person’s view because this helped me further understand my own views.”
“This course made me realize that when it comes to media, I am a passive consumer. I take what is given to me, and I don’t always question what I have been handed. I engage with the media to be removed from the present… With the tools I have gained from this course, I want to push myself to examine media from a different perspective. I don’t want to take what is handed to me anymore, I want to question everything!!!”
“This [course] pushed me to come to class, and outside of the classroom, with an open mind and focus on what other people are saying. Instead of thinking that I am right and getting defensive, take in what they are saying and don’t be embarrassed to then change your mind.”
“I think this course gave me the opportunity to ask myself so many more questions about the things I see. I can try to find more evidence for multiple sides now, better than I used to before. I think this allows me to see multiple points of view and understand how people I disagree with think.”
“I found myself actually trying to wrap my head around every single possible outcome of any action taken in my solution, and even every inaction.”
“[Because of this course], I will try to find more information before coming to conclusions and try to see if my human nature is trying to let me take easy answers.”
“This class helped me get closer to the answer of my question in general, which is, ‘Why do people do the things they do?’”
“This course was very eye-opening.”
Teaching students how to think ought to be a school’s most urgent priority. But so many people, from Ron DeSantis to the leaders of at least some big-city private schools, seem to have decided on nearly the opposite. It’s better, their actions suggest, to curate what students see so that it is nearly impossible for them to come to undesired conclusions.
’Twas ever thus? We’ve always survived ideological entrenchment, you say?
I say this is different. More than ever before, a failure to see reality risks extinction. The tech-powered, interdependent, trigger-ready world we live in, in which faulty thinking anywhere can become disaster everywhere, makes ideological war the most dangerous game we’ve ever played.
Reality is not a friendly dog. And if we don’t see it lurking, it bites.
