by Robert Rue —
Of course, there is much beyond our control—arguably an ever-increasing amount—that shapes the minds of our students. Educators cannot cull the best and block the worst of pop culture, globalism, family dynamics, the internet or the chemical makeup of individual brains. But after 28 years of teaching high school students and sending thousands of them into the world, I’m in a reflective mood, and I think it’s right to ask how I, the institutions I’ve worked for—and ones like them—have impacted the way our students have influenced the world.
What is most disturbing to me—as an educator and as a citizen—is the viral spread of the post-truth mindset. By now, you may be bored with all the lamenting and the predictions of doom. Yeah. People have different views, and now they have a place to express them—the internet. C’est la vie.
But as an educator, I simply cannot accept that. The rise of anti-logic is the greatest condemnation of our education system that I can even imagine, and so I intend to think seriously about how teaching at the high school level has contributed to the problem and to propose some ways to overcome it.
With my generalizations about the post-truth phenomenon as a lens, I will (you might think, at first, absurdly) connect the post-truth dynamic to one of the foundational aspects of the education that most high school students have experienced in the last century—the five-paragraph essay.
First, a definition (mine):
Post-truth adj. Relating to the advancement or endorsement of any view that will realize or placate one’s own desires, preferences and whims, regardless of their basis in fact or their impact upon others
I don’t pretend that foggy, self-serving, non-thinking is a new character in the world story. It has always existed—especially within the people with whom we most vehemently disagree!
But what I think makes the current environment genuinely new in the United States is the extent to which illogical ideas and outright falsehoods are now unassailable. Claims that in the past would have been blown apart as patently false now seem to have developed a Kevlar shell. Nothing can penetrate them. And false belief is not the only thing driving the post-truth dynamic. I have been in the presence of people who have told me, confidentially, that even when they know they (or their surrogates) are wrong, they will not admit it, lest they give ammunition to “the other side.”
What seems to be embraced here is the sanctity of a primitive “I” that is convinced it will either dominate or be dominated. Because life is a zero-sum game, even the nastiest means of getting what the “I” wants are morally justified. It’s not that we are too ignorant to recognize the piles of falsehoods and half-truths being dumped upon us. It’s that, to an unprecedented degree, we are willing to embrace falsehood as a means for getting what we want.
If we educators can’t shoulder all the blame for the ills of society, American schools can nonetheless ask what we have done to contribute to I-think and what we can do to mitigate it.
But for decades now, independent schools and a growing number of public schools have been emphasizing a set of tenets that, if not carefully calibrated, map rather seamlessly onto Post-truth “I” values. Student voice, student-centered learning, student choice, the journey of the individual toward satisfaction and fulfillment—of course, all of these things belong in a great school. But when we’re not careful, the student-centered movement starts to look like a religion of the “I.” “I have a voice” starts to look like “I can’t be wrong.” “I get to choose” starts to look like “you can’t tell me anything.” And the journey of the individual starts to starts to look like “I’m not doing anything that doesn’t help me get into college.”
I understand that the five-paragraph essay doesn’t seem a likely point of reference in this philosophizing about the nation and our schools, but bear with me.
The five-paragraph essay consists of an introduction that begins with a general notion and then descends the page with greater and greater specificity until it reaches the single sentence that expresses the writer’s thesis. This is followed by three paragraphs, each of which begins with a topic sentence and each of which analyzes a piece of evidence that supports the thesis. The essay is then concluded with a paragraph that restates the original claim.
There already exist plenty of intelligent critiques of this teaching tool: It stifles creativity; it puts form before voice and audience and content; it is often taught in the name of discipline and order, but its real lure for teachers is that it’s easier to grade. So the critiques go.
But what concerns me even more than the form itself is one of the maxims that seems to go hand-in-glove with the five-paragraph essay:
“It doesn’t matter what your thesis is as long as you provide evidence for it.”
“What!?” I’ve screamed inside—and occasionally out loud in recent years—as I’ve heard students make this claim.
“Wrong!” I tell them now.
I usually put the lesson of the day on pause at that point and do one of my infamous straw polls.
“How many of you,” I ask, “have ever begun writing an English paper with a thesis that you believed in—that you thought was logically correct—only to find that the text you were writing about didn’t really support your claim?”
Invariably, all the hands in the room go up.
Then I ask, “So what do you do next? How many of you have told yourselves that there’s no need to change your thesis because the point of an essay is just to make a claim and find evidence for it? How many of you just cherry-pick the evidence that works and ignore the rest?”
Again, all the hands go up.
In other words, what they’ve learned is that essay writing is a purely formal exercise—that introductions and thesis statements and topic sentences and quotations are the things we want as opposed to the truthful content that those things are supposed to help deliver.
And notice in the scenario described above that the it-doesn’t-matter-what-your-thesis-is maxim actually encourages students to eschew the thorniness of truth-seeking. That would be too difficult. Just say something and back it up!
This kind of word-Sophistry appeals to some young people at the level of game-playing, but how meaningless, even perverse, it must seem to the vast majority of students!
And what’s half a step away from this thesis-doesn’t-matter logic is the conclusion that I can craft a thesis with nothing more than my preferences. In other words, students fill the vacuum of meaningless formality that the five-paragraph essay seems to stand for with something that at least matters to them. If I’d like to believe that Hamlet thinks about his mother just the way I think about mine—voila!—I’ve found my thesis, and now I proceed to find the “evidence.” If I’d like to believe that the great works of literature prove that nature determines everything about one’s identity—or that society does!—voila!—I can seek the “evidence” and ignore all the inconvenient facts because writing an essay is not about seeking truth. It’s about finding “evidence” for a claim—for most students, a claim that flatters their current world-view and sanctifies their “I.”
I want to be clear here. In my twenty-eight years of teaching, I have worked at two wonderful schools with superb teaching colleagues. I don’t believe that my fellow teachers are telling students that what they claim doesn’t matter as long as they back it up. But this idea, this crabgrass of high school English curricula, is ever-present.
The false English class maxim that says your thesis doesn’t matter as long as you back it up has been around a lot longer than the post-truth era, so clearly the murky thinking inspired by the five-paragraph essay didn’t cause all this. But whatever you think of the current political climate, you cannot deny that we are presented each day with people who make false statements generated by their preferences and backed up by “evidence,” and that they often deny facts as if they are a matter of opinion. Well, I take seriously the fact that we have, wittingly or not, trained generations of high school students to do the very same thing.
So what do we do about all of this when teaching essay-writing?
I want to advocate the following:
- We should begin by telling our students that essays about literature are meant to say something true—and not obvious—about the text. That means that when a student realizes part way through his process that his thesis is wrong, he should feel responsible for revising it.
- We should tell them that there is a difference between opinion and analysis. “I like the color red” fits my definition of opinion. I’m not going to critique that statement. But your interpretation of a passage from The Bluest Eye? This requires analysis, which means that it is dependent on evidence and logic. That’s up for critique. And while multiple interpretations might be valid, it is still possible to be wrong.
- We should take young students through a process of writing rather than just serially assigning and grading products. One of the paramount injunctions for this process should be to never write your thesis first. Writing a thesis first just begs the writer to engage in the soulless process of cherry-picking “evidence”—and ignoring counter-evidence—that this entire article stands against.
- Don’t assume because you’ve never stated, or believed in, the false maxim of thesis writing that your students aren’t being guided by it as they write their essays. Ask them my poll question, and you’ll see.
Carl Sagan once said, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” We should conceive of teaching essay-writing—of all education, actually—in the same way. Schools must teach not just facts and structures and rote procedures, but the value and practice of truth-seeking, which requires some mitigation of the “I”—and a deep interrogation of convenient, comforting ideologies. And if we don’t, we should expect the ever-tightening grip of the post-truth era and its attendant chaos.
If we had to choose—this should not be an either-or proposition, but if it were—much better that our students’ essays were formless and self-contradictory and complicated as they pursued something true than neatly paragraphed as they pursued something reflexively self-indulgent and untethered to reality.
