THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF HIGH EXPECTATIONS
or, battling the insurgents of
self-regard.
When he is surrounded only by his supporters,
sheltered always from substantive criticism, and rarely (if ever) expected to
answer truly tough questions about his politics or his policies, it is no wonder
that President Bush has proven himself incapable of acknowledging mistakes.
Willful ignorance and unwarranted self-regard — call them the
soft biogtry of high expectations — mean never having to say you’re
wrong. Or even believe you’re wrong. So WMDs become ousting a ruthless
dictator becomes liberating Iraqis becomes spreading freedom and democracy.
Sacrificing stem cell life to save lives is bad, but sacrificing war zone life
to save lives is good. And the cotton candy of intelligent design is just as
nutritious for growing young minds as the salad bar of evolution.
While W. fiddles and homefires burn, the lives of American soldiers, the advances of medical research, and the rigorous discipline of hard science are not the only casualties. The face of logic, the body of reason, and the soul of simple truth have all been beaten into retreat by a leader who, living and reigning in a full-color world, sees only his own immutable blacks and whites and rights. Objectivity is as he sees it. Reality is as he wants it. And anyone who tells him differently is labelled a heretic to his cause. All of which does, I suppose, make him the perfect leader for our trying, troubling times. And might also, once he’s finished his second term, make him the perfect teacher for some of our trying, troubled students.
As the start of a new semester draws near, almost every fiber of my being is straining, chafing, champing at the bit of the blackboard, raring and ready again to teach, to lecture, hopefully to inspire my students; if there are greater intellectual pleasures for a college professor, I have yet to find them. Still resisting the classroom call, however, are the few fibers of my being necessary to grade, to correct, inevitably to contradict my students; if there are greater professional pains for a college professor, I don’t want to find them. These are, of course, among the most fundamental requirements of my profession — all the more for a teacher of writing and speech, who must necessarily model effective strategies while exposing and correcting ineffective choices — but they are also among the most onerous. And they grow more so with each passing class, in each passing semester. Sometimes with each passing assignment.
I’ve lately suffered far too many students — no doubt taking their cues from our current President, who can’t be troubled by fuzzy math and iffy evolution, or perhaps from our former President, who couldn’t be sure what the meaning of the word “is” is — who would rather not be told that they’re wrong, even (or perhaps, especially) when they are. Students less troubled by mistakes than by corrections. Students looking not for education, but for affirmation. To some degree, I understand this phenomenon. I don’t like to be wrong, and I’ve never met anyone who does. It takes poise and confidence and intellectual maturity to hear and to accept and truly to learn from criticism. (For the record: that maturity is much more about attitude than it is about age; my sophomores, on the whole, take correction much better than do my MBA students.) And it doesn’t take a genius to know that if you want to be right, you should want to know what is right.
Unless, of course, it’s enough just to believe you’re right. To believe that, because you think you’re a good writer and your roommate tells you you’re a good writer, you are, in fact, a good writer. To think that your work is too hard and your professor is too critical or too capricious or too politically biased truly to appreciate your brilliance. To know that you’re a victim, a martyr, a misunderstood thinker, someone whose command of the course material goes well beyond the arbitrary whims of tests orquizzes or, heaven forbid, essays supported by sound arguments and actual, honest-to-goodness facts.
While doing my grad work and teaching at University of Maryland, College Park, I inherited and taught a cracker-jack Freshman Writing syllabus that included a nefarious little assignment called the Pro-Pro Essays. All semester, students were asked to write on one side — they always chose to write, of course, on the side they believed was right — of a controversial issue. But the second-to-last assignment, the Pro-Pro pair, charged them to write two separate essays, one arguing each side of the issue. Every semester, faced with this seemingly impossible task, the students howled in protest. They hated the idea and bemoaned the assignment. After all, how could they possibly argue for something they did not believe? How could they possible argue for something they therefore knew to be wrong?
But every semester, I howled back, reminding them that the course was all about rhetoric, that rhetoric was situational and so amoral, that a good argument followed from facts and structures and all the available means of persuasion, and that if there are two sides of an issue, there must be two arguments to be made. And so they wrote. And always with the same result. For all their fiery protests, most students fared much better on the essays in which they argued for something they did not claim to believe. Their tones weren’t quite as strong, their language not quite as colorful, but their arguments were always far stronger. Why? Because not having a knee-jerk, a priori certainty of truth upon which to fall back and so lazily assert themselves and their positions, the students actually had to look, to read, to dig, to think, to find the facts and truths and assertions of the opposing side. And, after doing so, they had all the materials they needed to craft a clear, full argument. And so they did. Because they had to. After a semester’s worth of spinning variations on the theme of this is true because I believe it is, they churned out a good, solid little this is true because of reasons a, b, and c case for something they knew — or at least thought they knew — to be false.
This was, you might imagine, a humbling exercise for many of them. Not just for the way it exposed them to new facts and fresh perspectives, but also for the way it exposed the shortcomings, or at least the shakiness, of many of their own assumptions. When they’d written both sides themselves, when the criticism and the counter-points were their own, they were far more willing, and so far more able, to follow the trail of facts and evidence and sometimes even simple truths. It was far more difficult to deny or dismiss or demonize a position they’d assembled themselves — even if they still didn’t agree with it — and it was suddenly, shockingly possible that their own position wasn’t the only one worthy of respect and attention.
I’ve toyed for a while with the notion of resurrecting this assignment, of working it into my classes at Carnegie Mellon, detonating it near the end of the semester, and seeing what sort of perceptual and pedagogical fallout it produced. This summer, after watching our President (and more than a few of our Senators on both sides of the aisle) play Twister with the truth and stretch facts like Silly Putty, I’ve decided it’s time again to drop the Pro-Pro bomb, to launch a little educational shock and awe on the insurgents of collegiate self-regard.
I’m used to intellectual relativism and rampant disregard for the facts on talk radio and internet newsgroups and Fox News Channel. And I’ve come grudgingly to accept them from my President. But I refuse to tolerate, much less to nurture, those qualities in my students — most of whom, I hope, will come to learn that they can be (and quite often are) wrong, that being wrong is never the same as being weak, and that their arguments and opinions, like their political leaders, need always to be right and pure and true because they are, not just because they think they are.
While W. fiddles and homefires burn, the lives of American soldiers, the advances of medical research, and the rigorous discipline of hard science are not the only casualties. The face of logic, the body of reason, and the soul of simple truth have all been beaten into retreat by a leader who, living and reigning in a full-color world, sees only his own immutable blacks and whites and rights. Objectivity is as he sees it. Reality is as he wants it. And anyone who tells him differently is labelled a heretic to his cause. All of which does, I suppose, make him the perfect leader for our trying, troubling times. And might also, once he’s finished his second term, make him the perfect teacher for some of our trying, troubled students.
As the start of a new semester draws near, almost every fiber of my being is straining, chafing, champing at the bit of the blackboard, raring and ready again to teach, to lecture, hopefully to inspire my students; if there are greater intellectual pleasures for a college professor, I have yet to find them. Still resisting the classroom call, however, are the few fibers of my being necessary to grade, to correct, inevitably to contradict my students; if there are greater professional pains for a college professor, I don’t want to find them. These are, of course, among the most fundamental requirements of my profession — all the more for a teacher of writing and speech, who must necessarily model effective strategies while exposing and correcting ineffective choices — but they are also among the most onerous. And they grow more so with each passing class, in each passing semester. Sometimes with each passing assignment.
I’ve lately suffered far too many students — no doubt taking their cues from our current President, who can’t be troubled by fuzzy math and iffy evolution, or perhaps from our former President, who couldn’t be sure what the meaning of the word “is” is — who would rather not be told that they’re wrong, even (or perhaps, especially) when they are. Students less troubled by mistakes than by corrections. Students looking not for education, but for affirmation. To some degree, I understand this phenomenon. I don’t like to be wrong, and I’ve never met anyone who does. It takes poise and confidence and intellectual maturity to hear and to accept and truly to learn from criticism. (For the record: that maturity is much more about attitude than it is about age; my sophomores, on the whole, take correction much better than do my MBA students.) And it doesn’t take a genius to know that if you want to be right, you should want to know what is right.
Unless, of course, it’s enough just to believe you’re right. To believe that, because you think you’re a good writer and your roommate tells you you’re a good writer, you are, in fact, a good writer. To think that your work is too hard and your professor is too critical or too capricious or too politically biased truly to appreciate your brilliance. To know that you’re a victim, a martyr, a misunderstood thinker, someone whose command of the course material goes well beyond the arbitrary whims of tests orquizzes or, heaven forbid, essays supported by sound arguments and actual, honest-to-goodness facts.
While doing my grad work and teaching at University of Maryland, College Park, I inherited and taught a cracker-jack Freshman Writing syllabus that included a nefarious little assignment called the Pro-Pro Essays. All semester, students were asked to write on one side — they always chose to write, of course, on the side they believed was right — of a controversial issue. But the second-to-last assignment, the Pro-Pro pair, charged them to write two separate essays, one arguing each side of the issue. Every semester, faced with this seemingly impossible task, the students howled in protest. They hated the idea and bemoaned the assignment. After all, how could they possibly argue for something they did not believe? How could they possible argue for something they therefore knew to be wrong?
But every semester, I howled back, reminding them that the course was all about rhetoric, that rhetoric was situational and so amoral, that a good argument followed from facts and structures and all the available means of persuasion, and that if there are two sides of an issue, there must be two arguments to be made. And so they wrote. And always with the same result. For all their fiery protests, most students fared much better on the essays in which they argued for something they did not claim to believe. Their tones weren’t quite as strong, their language not quite as colorful, but their arguments were always far stronger. Why? Because not having a knee-jerk, a priori certainty of truth upon which to fall back and so lazily assert themselves and their positions, the students actually had to look, to read, to dig, to think, to find the facts and truths and assertions of the opposing side. And, after doing so, they had all the materials they needed to craft a clear, full argument. And so they did. Because they had to. After a semester’s worth of spinning variations on the theme of this is true because I believe it is, they churned out a good, solid little this is true because of reasons a, b, and c case for something they knew — or at least thought they knew — to be false.
This was, you might imagine, a humbling exercise for many of them. Not just for the way it exposed them to new facts and fresh perspectives, but also for the way it exposed the shortcomings, or at least the shakiness, of many of their own assumptions. When they’d written both sides themselves, when the criticism and the counter-points were their own, they were far more willing, and so far more able, to follow the trail of facts and evidence and sometimes even simple truths. It was far more difficult to deny or dismiss or demonize a position they’d assembled themselves — even if they still didn’t agree with it — and it was suddenly, shockingly possible that their own position wasn’t the only one worthy of respect and attention.
I’ve toyed for a while with the notion of resurrecting this assignment, of working it into my classes at Carnegie Mellon, detonating it near the end of the semester, and seeing what sort of perceptual and pedagogical fallout it produced. This summer, after watching our President (and more than a few of our Senators on both sides of the aisle) play Twister with the truth and stretch facts like Silly Putty, I’ve decided it’s time again to drop the Pro-Pro bomb, to launch a little educational shock and awe on the insurgents of collegiate self-regard.
I’m used to intellectual relativism and rampant disregard for the facts on talk radio and internet newsgroups and Fox News Channel. And I’ve come grudgingly to accept them from my President. But I refuse to tolerate, much less to nurture, those qualities in my students — most of whom, I hope, will come to learn that they can be (and quite often are) wrong, that being wrong is never the same as being weak, and that their arguments and opinions, like their political leaders, need always to be right and pure and true because they are, not just because they think they are.
Posted: Thu - August 18, 2005 at 10:52 PM
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Archives
Terror Alert
Brilliant Satire
Required Reading
Traffic Count
Official Muse
Syndication
Carbolic Wear
Y Chromosomes
Some Perspective
On Tour
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM