Listening

          This past year I received an education in how negative public discourse is affecting my students. I observed students who disagreed politically with other students verbally attack and vilify those students, rather than engage in rational argument with them; I tried to intervene, but ultimately was unable to stop the situation from getting rather ugly. Although I was very unhappy that the students acted in this way, I don’t know that I can blame them, when this sort of non-dialogue is they have seen daily (in the media; online; in person) throughout their lives. I am committed this next year to make the skill of ‘rational discussion’ one of my primary objectives. If students come out of my class more able to engage with ideas rather than attacking people, I will feel like I’ve accomplished a great deal.

          Robert Ennis (2011) names “care to understand and present a position honestly and clearly, theirs as well as others” as a “critical thinking disposition” (p. 6). Two common fallacies I observed this year were “straw man” and “ad hominem” arguments: students made assumptions about what other students really meant, and what they supposedly meant was clearly wrong; they also attributed bad character to their opponents, rather than poor arguments. The disposition that Ennis names is essential to rational discourse, for if we cannot state the other person’s position accurately, we cannot make a case against it. Moreover, we cannot learn anything from them. Ennis talks about “care about every person” as an auxiliary disposition for critical thinking (p. 6). I would add that one should listen to another not simply out of kindness but because they probably have something to teach us. Unless we are entirely walled into our own ivory tower, we can recognize elements of truth in what another is saying, even if we disagree with fundamental aspects of their position. A critical thinker, I believe, looks for truth wherever it can be found, regardless of who states it. And one cannot learn it if they will not listen to someone who approaches things from a different point of view.

          An activity I would like to have my students engage in to help make this point was used by Lois Hetland (2013) for a somewhat different purpose. She had her students sit in one place within the room for 45 minutes, provided with writing utensils, paints, and paper with which to represent a set of objects initially hidden under a sheet. Once the students were situated and Hetland removed the sheet, ingredients and baking equipment for making apple crisp were revealed, but arranged in such a way so that any given student could see only some of the objects. Students’ drawings, therefore, reflected their particular point of view. Later, by comparing their representations, they saw the differences between them, based on their position relative to the objects (p. 65-66). Hetland’s point was to open students’ eyes to the different points of view that authors reflected in writing primary historical texts; my point in using it would be to point out that none of them saw the whole, and that if they were trying to describe the whole set of objects, they would do well to listen to one another. If I keep insisting that I did not see a rolling pin and therefore it was not there, I’m seeing things less truly than if I listen to the other student on the other side who saw it. Reality is very rich and full: we need to listen to one another to keep refining and expanding our view of it.

          In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt discusses the ‘tribalism’ that tends to divide human beings into camps. Talking specifically about the divide into Republicans and Democrats, he notes: “We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects” (2012, p. 364). Haidt’s case hinges on the idea that we act ‘groupishly,’ and that when contrary ideas threaten those ideas that give the group cohesion, we tend to fight back irrationally. But (and this is the point of his book), we don’t have to act this way. We can listen to the other side – and maybe learn something! I want my students to learn that shooting missiles from a bunker never leaves anyone the wiser. Wisdom comes through listening.

Works Cited

Ennis, R. (2011). Critical thinking: reflection and perspective, part II. Inquiry, 46(2), 5-19.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. New York: Random House.

Hetland, L. (2013). Connecting creativity to understanding. Educational Leadership, February, 65-70.