This past term I had a rather unpleasant experience in my critical thinking class. I was confronted with a subset of students who walked in the door assured that I had nothing to teach them about critical thinking. I learned this because they vocally resisted absolutely everything with which they did not personally agree. Unfortunately, this wound up being nearly everything in the class–especially when it ran against the notion that everything is a matter of opinion, a matter for an eternal debate in which all views are equally right.
Now, many readers are probably thinking, “cry me a river, that happens to me every term”. I agree. It happens to me almost every term too. What was different this time was how long it lasted (all term, without let-up) and how deep the resistance went. Not even the definition of deductive validity was accepted as offering a legitimate, if technical and limited, usage of the word ‘valid’. The only validity these students recognized was the sense in which a point of view was “valid to me”, full-stop. They didn’t bother learning the technical sense of ‘valid’ well enough to offer even cursory reasons for why they wouldn’t accept it. Nor could they articulate what it was, exactly, that made a point of view “valid to me” when asked. This is just one example. On multiple occasions, I got the distinct impression that my refrain that sometimes it takes more than an affirmative “gut feeling” to make it reasonable to hold a position was being taken as a personal affront by some of the students. “How dare I”, their attitude demanded, “try to teach them that things were not as they believed?”
In this piece in Inside Higher Ed philosopher Peter Boghossian argues that we should be unremitting about trying to change the beliefs of students when those beliefs are based on falsehoods, wishful thinking or an otherwise uncritical attitude. He writes:
“I believe our role as educators should be to teach students not just factual data, but the importance of critically examining beliefs by exposing them to facts, and then revising cherished notions when confronted with reliable but discomforting evidence. […] The primary goal of every academic should be to bring students’ beliefs into lawful alignment with reality.”
While Boghossian sees it as the duty of educators to provide students with the facts and to challenge students to revise their beliefs accordingly when they don’t fit, he thinks that it is out of line for educators to try to change students’ values:
“There is an incommensurable gulf between attempting to change students’ values and attempting to help students align their beliefs with reality. Some values, like matters of taste, have a fundamentally internal, subjective component. Facts relate to the objective status of things. […] With regard to our roles as educators, we should not be seeking to convert students’ moral beliefs, but we should, and we are obligated to, help students lend their beliefs to true propositions and repudiate false ones. A teacher is obligated to use cognitive dissonance to inspire students to shape a more reliable picture of reality that informs their sense of cause and effect.”
I’m partially in sympathy with Boghossian here. After all, in teaching critical thinking I present and encourage a cognitive skill set that is, of necessity, going to be incompatible with an uncritical or a generally unreflective intellectual posture. However, I think he misses an important dimension of the problem.
As I saw in my class this term, that dimension of the problem is that increasingly many students cannot, do not, or will not separate the appraisal of a view that they hold from an
One possible outcome of existentially challenging dialectics.
appraisal of their own intelligence or integrity. “My beliefs define me”, so the reasoning seems to go, “thus any challenge to my beliefs is an existential threat to me”. Notice that there is no separation between fact and value at work here. Students who think this way see their values as facts–facts of a personal sort that no one else has the right to gainsay. There is no way for a professor, confronted with this sort of student, to judiciously steer a course between pointing out facts and attacking values. This muddies the waters considerably for Boghossian’s position.
Those waters are made even muddier in American college classrooms by the pervasive and perennial anti-intellectual climate. Not only are professors an existential threat according to the identity-based reasoning described above, but they seem to wear the cloak of cognitive authority while they do it. This is at least partially the source of the perception that Boghossian is concerned to address in his piece, that challenging student beliefs is abusive. The perception of abusiveness is intrinsically connected to the notion that there’s no such thing as a cognitive authority. Many students, under the influence of a social climate in which political forces duel each other with statistics and stables of for-hire “experts” with academic-sounding backgrounds think exactly that. It never occurs to many of them that they might be wrong about this. After all, most claims of expertise they encounter outside of the political domain are made in advertising contexts. Hence it’s understandable that for many students the very notion of expertise or authoritativeness has an aura of shadiness about it.
One also has to factor in that increasingly many students in college nowadays are not there because they genuinely desire knowledge, but because they feel economically compelled to be. College is seen, more or less, as a speed-bump on the road to prosperity, not as something with intrinsic value. The degree has no meaning for most students apart from the fact that it confers a status of enhanced employability. The classes taken, in turn, have no meaning apart from the fact that they lead to the degree. In short, for many college is seen as a necessary and expensive evil. You have to do it, because the alternative is a life with a much lowered horizon of potential economic achievement.
Put all of this together and it is easy to see how some students think that any challenge to their views in a college class is a flagrant gesture of disrespect. Such students might endure it, but all of us who teach have seen that look in the eyes that says “Who the hell is this guy to tell me that what I think is wrong? Screw him and screw this class!” All it takes is one such instance to make a student (and his or her like-minded friends) impossible to reach.
I agree with Boghossian that challenges to beliefs are necessary to stimulate critical thinking. The question is how to accomplish this in a way that gets the job done but isn’t existentially threatening. Boghossian’s strategy of sticking to facts and avoiding values doesn’t strike me as plausible for the reasons I’ve given here. I’m not even sure it’s desirable. Sometimes it’s precisely the values that we should be questioning, and we should be using the facts to do it. That said, I’m not sure I have a better proposal for getting the job done. It is without question an important job, though. After all, isn’t it the student who will only listen to what validates his beliefs who needs critical thinking the most?
I have never been in a teaching situation like this (I’ve taught only in Canada and the Netherlands, for one), so I don’t know whether the following is helpful to overcome the barrier.
It seems to me that the teaching resistant students’ strategy is similar to some philosophers’ strategy of relying on (their own) intuition when it comes to non-empirical questions (like that of validity). If something goes against their intuition or, in the students’ case, unreflected belief, the intuition / the unreflected belief always wins. With respect to philosophers, Carnap’s notion of explication is one way out: Instead of investigating one’s intuitions about things that cannot be tested, one investigates how fruitful the position is, and whether it does what one intends to do with it (in the case of validity: construct mathematics and use it in science, for example). Thus one can follow the intuition or not; it is a question of which convention is more helpful.
Applying this to the students’ case, it suggests that it might help if one can give an example where the gut feeling leads to error or is inapplicable, while the usual definition of validity leads to the correct result. Thus the definition of validity can be presented as a convention, but a useful one. And the gut feeling can be shown to lead to incorrect results, thus being not just an unhelpful convention, but wrong. Of course, a student dissatisfied with the definition of validity is free to develop her own, but then she has to show that her own definition has advantages over the standard definition.
I recorded a podcast with professor Boghossian about this article that you may find interesting. He goes into more detail on his thesis. You can listen to that here: http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/12/05/Interview-with-Peter-Boghossian.aspx
This is an interesting interview, Paul. Thanks for posting a link to it here. That said, while I find myself in deep sympathy with Boghossian’s commitment to evidence-based reasoning, I’m not at all sure that his way of promoting it is the right one. It seems to me that what’s needed here is a more sophisticated communicative approach than the “kids table/adult table” metaphor presents.
A part of the problem is that students (and typically, persons in general as well) equate (conflate?) the judgment that their beliefs are mistaken with a judgment that they themselves are stupid, or at least careless reasoners. Something like the classical rhetorician’s conceptual distinction between logos and ethos is needed to ensure that the criticism is both directed to the correct target and received in the correct spirit. Good, well-intentioned, and even very smart people can and do get things wrong. There is no shame in that, especially for students coping with what seems to me to be one of the worst cognitive environments in recent history as far as the general culture of the US is concerned. The question is how to get that across.
I’m not sure how well a Lacanian approach would go over with those teaching critical thinking courses, but Marshall Alcorn, in Changing the Subject in English Class, takes up the very problem you identify about the identification of the student with her/his belief such that “any challenge to my beliefs is an existential threat to me.” Alcorn’s argument is that critical pedagogies – and I would dare we can expand that to any pedagogies that expect critical thinking – cannot hope to change students because to challenge their beliefs is to challenge their very subjectivity. Instead of attempting some kind of logical intervention, such as Boghossian’s or Sebastian’s in his comment above, Alcorn claims we have to recognize the affective assumptions about reality that irrationally ground student subjectivity. Thus he says we need to engage affect – which is a slow, uncomfortable, and even traumatic process for both students and instructors alike. Indeed, Alcorn says that any discourse we introduce to students – through our pedagogical practices or the texts we have them read – “will effect a change only if the [student’s] desire can make use of this discourse” (98). The question then remains: when, if ever, will the student desire our discourse and be open to its implications?
After all, what if the affective investment behind the resistance is a complete indifference to learning, knowledge, and intelligence itself? Such indifference marked my fall semester as well, only my students were resisting literacy and the very acquisition of knowledge of any kind. In the two reading classes I taught, students were not just resistant but utterly apathetic, with some not doing any of the work at all (yet strangely still attending regularly). Gaining knowledge, thinking critically, and engaging in any kind of intellectual growth was evidently not what they desired.
My attempt at intervention was to assign Susan Jacoby’s 2008 Washington Post op-ed, “The Dumbing of America” to see if maybe I could push them to make some kind of statement about the value of learning. I thought that by self-consciously turning our attention to the question of intelligence and knowledge that I could get them to understand how reading (or critical thinking, education, etc.) was valuable. Amazingly, they professed the same anti-intellectual and anti-rational behavior Jacoby identifies while simultaneously claiming that she was wrong to call them dumb. For instance, they defended their right not to know certain information (“I don’t need to know what’s going on in Iraq or wherever.”) while also defining a “stupid person” as someone who doesn’t know what they’re expected to know (though who sets those expectations remains unclear to me).
Moreover, they saw no contradiction in holding such dissonant beliefs. It was simply “their choice” not to know but they were not unintelligent. To them, information is a personal commodity, something they can find when they need it and ignore when they don’t think they need it. By extension, knowledge – let alone the critical thinking needed to discern good from bad information in order to build knowledge – only holds value to the extent that it can be used to some end. Thus they shrugged off my statements about how such a contradiction was illogical. (I’ll admit my pedagogical finesse had been depleted by this point in the semester, after a lot of behavioral problems from the students, and so I was not nearly as subtle in my dismay as Socrates might have been.)
As Alcorn suggests, what is happening here is not merely a logical impasse but an emotional one as well. These students simply didn’t care about learning to read effectively for college. They didn’t care about acquiring knowledge, gaining intelligence, or anything else that is not motivated by their own singular self-interests. But understanding this about my students does not make it any clearer how to reach them and help them find value in their own intellectual development. After all, this depth of apathy is harder for me to understand than the anxious anger of students who refuse to back down on their religious or political beliefs. Such beliefs are usually reinforced with other positive messages within their community, whereas being uninformed is not (although it’s certainly becoming less negative in our anti-intellectual culture). So even if I did take up Alcorn’s – or Boghossian’s – pedagogical advice, such indifference to thinking itself makes it almost impossible to appeal to students emotionally or logically in order to help them understand what we’re teaching, get them thinking more critically, and simply make them aware of a world outside of their own heads.
Thus I’m probably not offering any answer to your concerns, Steve. But know that you are certainly not alone in trying to parse out this issue in the classroom. My instinct is to blame the anti-intellectual climate of American culture, but that does not offer me an answer on how to instill my values – about the necessity of critical thinking and the acquisition of knowledge – in students who reject those values and have no desire to change their minds any time soon.
Thanks Kristen, wonderful post. (Great to hear from you too!)
I find it really interesting that you see a kind of simplistic pragmatism at the heart of the problem. I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of that in this particular case. I have seen it more clearly in other, different cases where students shamelessly confess to ignorance about even basic facts about science or history, or even awareness of books or films above the level of “Fast and Furious 3” (or whatever number they’re up to now in that one).
It seems to me that this represents a really profound change coming over the culture that we often miss because we’re distracted by methodological differences (“analytic v. continental”) or political ones (“left v. right) or by even more local struggles in our own particular academic environments (“the chair/Dean/VPAA/president/board is leading us in the wrong direction, doesn’t understand our department, etc.”). While we’re squabbling, norms of intellectual honesty and integrity that we all value, regardless of our various causes, are eroding quicker than a one-bucket sand castle at high-tide.
It is cultural. I definitely agree with you there. Who speaks for knowledge and it’s value in the public sphere? What touchstones of it’s value are left in any kind of accessible cultural symbolism (even Sherlock Holmes now is basically a buff fighter-type with only modest reasoning skills–indeed, if he were represented as any smarter the filmmakers might risk alienating their target demographic–that are immediately forgotten when the action starts).
It is also technological. Students don’t have to know things (they think) because someone else, a mere Google search away, knows them and has had the good graces to put them up on the internet somewhere–probably Wikipedia (cough). It’s the age old dynamic of copying off (whomever seems to be) the smart kid, ramified and blown to epic proportions. (And we wonder why there is a virtual epidemic of plagiarism and cheating.)
Lest this seem overly negative in tone towards students let me be clear that I’m not blaming them. I think their culture generally teaches them poorly, and most K-12 programs–pressed as they are to produce results that don’t really track critical thinking of any sort–don’t do much to correct the fallacies and poor intellectual values learned from popular culture. This puts us in the position of fighting a battle in our classrooms that’s already largely been lost before we’ve had the chance to take the field.
What a nightmare, Steve! I’m heading back to teach critical thinking next Fall, for the first time in several years. I had tried one text after another without ever finding the sort of epistemological orientation that I wanted. I don’t think that until recently I realized how much I really wanted or needed epistemological content in my critical thinking class, but I’m convinced now that it will help. (Wish me luck!)
My hope is to recreate some of my early experiences teaching critical thinking that were moderately successful and rewarding. Later experiences were exercises in frustration for the students and for me, and it was a relief to be away from that course for a few years. That increased difficulty may be due to cultural changes affecting the students, and also my expectations of my own pedagogy increased but ran up against my own ignorance about informal logic and cognitive science (which I have since been remedying).
I’ve begun to involve discussions of relativism in many (all?) of my courses. I think this helps to engage students, and allow them to work through their educational malaise. This happened inadvertently, as a means to draw students in to the material, and I’m beginning to think it’s a good general strategy.
My current experiment with making relativism (ethical/epistemological — they meld nicely there) part of my philosophy instruction is aided by the increasing availability of material in social epistemology, and new philosophy textbooks engaging cognitive science (Kenyon’s “Critical Thinking in a Blurry World”). I’m going to excerpt some material on relativism from Schwarze and Lape’s “Thinking Socratically” too — that was the first text I tried because of it’s explicit epistemology, but it’s otherwise idiosyncratic. I’ve also decided, for instance, to teach Davidson’s “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme” as part of my 4th-year overview of “recent American philosophy.” (Fortunately, Saul’s “Feminism: Issues and Arguments” has a final chapter on reasoning cross-culturally; but the students would like more!)
Frankly, I’ve always wanted to teach issues of scientific culture in philosophy of science, but have felt restricted by the pressure to cover canonical materials. That is the sacrifice, and it may be worthwhile. Having said all this, I’ve now convinced myself!