students and new ideas

In "Teachers as Students," Douglas Hesse argues that new students have trouble dealing with information that creates intellectual or moral dissonance. Rather than engage unfamiliar and potentially offensive writing, students usually dismiss the material as “stupid” or “poorly written.” This often has little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the work, but rather with the students’ lack of “prior knowledge” of the material presented. Hesse believes that in order for students to be able to enter into the academic "discourse community" to which they aspire, they must be able to process and respond intelligently to theories with which they might initially (or finally) disagree.

Hesse's article is fairly old (it was published in 1993), but his main point remains well accepted and is, indeed, commonsensical. College ought to be a place where students are asked to grapple with things unfamiliar or things that may contradict their assumptions. We are all aware of the human tendency to seek out and consume information that supports our own positions and to ignore or reject things that complicate or contradict them. College ought to help break that habit. But the issue is more complicated than simply that students reject ideas that are contrary from their own preconceived ones without engaging them.

As an example, Hesse quotes a Compostion teacher who laments that when she gave her students an article called "Gods, Goddesses, and Bibles," a "sophisticated argument explaining the transition from pre-Biblical matriarchal cultures to ones which promoted Paul's misogynistic epistles," the students rejected it as "blasphemous" without appearing to have read it. This example reminds me of an experience I had my first year as a university student. In my introduction to philosophy class, the professor discussed how to test a position or argument by reductio ad absurdum. He used the pro-life position as his example, saying, “If abortion is murder because it destroys a potential human life, then masturbation is murder because it kills sperm.” This professor probably thought of himself as challenging deeply rooted prejudices and forcing us to think critically. Indeed, he might have said that even if we remained pro-life after thinking critically about the subject, at least we had been forced to base our positions on more solid evidence than blind faith. What several of us in the class realized, however, was that this professor either didn’t understand the pro-life argument, or that he had deliberately misrepresented it in order to belittle those of us who were opposed to the legality of abortion. No thoughtful pro-lifer argues that abortion destroys a “potential human life.” [1]

The point of this story is that soon after they enter college, those students whose beliefs might be challenged by "Gods, Goddesses, and Bible" will probably begin to expect their professors to only give them one-sided information chosen specifically to rid students of their convictions and values. Whether or not those students are justified in their suspicions, the belief is often there and it certainly complicates Hesse’s argument. Getting students to think critically is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, but if students don’t trust their professors to be fair-minded, no amount of exhortation to critical thinking and engagement is going to have the desired effect.

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[1] In the case of the class which had to read “Gods, Godesses, and Bibles,” I would ask the teacher why, if she was prepared to offer students an article which questions the traditional reading of the Bible, was she not also prepared to offer them at least a summary explanation of counter-arguments put forth by Biblical scholars (I am too cynical to believe that she actually did). It is unlikely that any of her students were trained in textual criticism or Biblical scholarship, so she could reasonably expect one of two outcomes: either the students who were religious would reject the article as blasphemous, or they would accept it and reject their beliefs (or at least, reject traditional understandings of them). This is hardly conducive to “critical thinking.”